Member-only story
The Twenty-five Cent Man
The true story of a cheapskate
Many, many years ago when my wife and I opened a bookstore we needed to sink all the money the bookstore made during the first two years back into the bookstore in order to grow it. So we needed another source of income.
While I ran and grew the bookstore my wife got a job waiting tables at the cafe down the block from the bookstore. She had waited tables before and was extremely good at it despite the fact that she hated waiting tables with every fiber of her being.
She was an actress not a waitress! Just like I was a writer not a retailer! But we both put our art on the back burner for a couple of years in order to build a business that was a fantasy of mine and which hopefully someday would provide us the financial resources to enable us to return to our art.
So for the bookstore’s first couple of years she waited tables down the block. It was nice because she sent a lot of the cafe’s customers down to the bookstore after they finished their meals. My wife was better than an ad in the local newspaper. It was a fairly good temporary set up despite the fact that she came home every day and bitched and complained about waiting tables.
Actually she didn’t bitch too much but there was one particular customer that she complained about a lot. All the…
