9 OPTIMISM FOR BEGINNERS
Cori read the letter from the Saratoga County Department of Health and handed it back. “We’ll look back on this one day and laugh,” she said, knowing we wouldn’t be doing either. I’d been exonerated, the complaints against me “unfounded and spurious.” Commissioner Tavasi had signed it, along with a handwritten postscript: My kids love Loony Scoops!
I whited out the Tavasi children’s endorsement and forwarded the letter to Lenora-Jo Coffey. I also uploaded scans to the platforms that had gone after me, but the scummers were too busy trashing other lives to notice. No retractions. No apologies. No likes. No retweets.
Three months after the call from Stupid Charlotte’s husband, it was as if the whole thing never happened. Freddo had been right. As long as it tastes good, nobody cares what shit is in it, even if it’s shit. By August my sales surpassed the year before.
The regulars who had bailed on me were replaced by new regulars. And, of course, the know-nothing tourists kept coming. The bogus claims would come up now and then, and an occasional fan would drop by to shake my hand or stare or have me sign an encyclopedia, but the mudslinging had run its course. So had I. I’d refined the art of going through the motions.
“Sell it,” Cori said, one late summer morning as I headed out to work. “You can’t go on like this. Find something else.”
“If I could, I would.”
“You’re biding your time, on standby for the next bad thing. Stop. Just stop.” She turned my head with both hands and planted her lips on my mouth. “Make sure you’re home early. If that hurricane blows through the way they say it will . . . ”
“Don’t worry.”
“I just want you to be happy. It’s not like I can’t afford to carry us.” Beckman had upped her salary, commensurate with her skills, popularity with patients, and reputed mad dog of a partner. The fact she’d inherited major bucks from her aunt to go along with the long-invested payout from her parents’ life insurance policies didn’t hurt either.
“No way you’ll carry me unless I’m in a casket.”
“Jesus, Rob! Sometimes, your sense of optimism . . . ”