back in my old home town there was this place called bill’s fixit store. it had a sign outside that said
“we fix anything”. i t was understood to mean that “anything” referred to things that a customer could bring in and leave at the store, not submarines or nuclear reactors. it was also understood that “fix” meant that bill would give it his best shot at fixing whatever, but there were no guarantees or warranties. it was that kind of place - what you might call a vestige of a vanished age.
bill did not come into the store much, and did most of his fixing work in the basement of his house half a mile away. on summer days bill would leave the basement windows open and passersby could hear his radio blasting old 1950’s pop hits into the warm air.
sometimes old mrs jones, who liked to sit on her porch across the street, would complain to bill about the music, but bill just ignored her and kept on playing his tunes as loud as he liked.
bill had two guys working for him at the store, eddie and roger. eddie worked in the front, dealing with customers, and roger in the back, taking care of the paperwork and accounts, and also doing some of the simplest fixit work.
neither eddie or roger could afford a place of their own on what bill paid them. eddie lived with his old grandfather, and roger with his mother and older sister.
eddie spent most of his pay at chuck’s bar. he was not a heavy drinker, but nursed his drinks trying to pick up women - at which occupation, by his account, he was a great success. he also bought a little weed, and sometimes bet on football games.
roger gave half of his pay to his mother for his room and board and the other half went to one thing - the lottery.
eddie thought that roger’s putting half of his earnings into the lottery was hilarious, and let roger know it.
eddie was the kind of person who said the same things over and over, and when things were slow at the store, he would ride roger endlessly about two things - roger’s lack of interest in women and roger’s chances of winning the lottery.
“you don’t know what you are missing, man. you should get out, live a little, while you can, instead of waiting to win the lottery when you’re ninety years old and your dick is all shriveled up. i can introduce you to some of the ladies at chuck’s - i mean, they’re dogs, but you might like them.” and so forth and so on.
eddie had a sister named edie. she would sometimes come into the store and give eddie news about their parents, who were divorced from each other and both now living with new partners in florida. edie was divorced herself, and therefore, in eddie’s mind, must be desperately looking for a new husband.
a running joke of eddie’s was that edie and roger should get married. he thought this was the funniest idea in the history of the world, and kept returning to it.
things went on in this way, with eddie trying to pick up women, roger playing the lottery, and edie occasionally dropping into the store, when one day the unthinkable happened.
roger won the lottery! he didn’t win “the” lottery, the “big game” worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but he won a smaller prize of three million dollars.
roger seemed to take it in stride - as if he had expected it all along - but eddie was astounded. in his mind, three million dollars was the same as three hundred billion dollars - infinite wealth.
but if eddie was amazed at roger’s winning the money, he was completely flabbergasted by what roger did with it. almost nothing!
roger bought himself and his mother snd sister a new, bigger house, put the rest of the money in a savings account, and kept coming to work at bill’s!
eddie began to seriously plot the proposed marriage of roger and edie. he assumed that when this took place, he, eddie, would then have access to roger’s bottomless ocean of cash.
when edie and roger both laughed at him, eddie became enraged. one night, slightly drunk, he went from chuck’s bar over to edie’s apartment.
edie was entertaining her new boy friend, pete, and when eddie started up again about edie marrying roger, pete was not amused.
“come on, man, a joke is a joke the first time, but this is getting old. why don’t you go home and stop bothering people?”
the conversation heated up, and eddie punched pete in the mouth. pete happened to have a gun in the pocket of his coat, which was hanging in edie’s closet. he went and got it and shot and killed eddie.
represented by a public defender, pete was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole in twenty-five years.
bill decided he no longer needed two people in the store, as he could now do himself on his laptop many of the things roger had been doing on paper for years. roger continued working at the fixit store by himself, attending to customers as eddie had done previously.
the years went by. roger’s mother died, and roger married an old friend of hers, from the local church, a woman twenty-three years older than himself.
bill retired, closed the store, and moved to arizona.
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