Free The Bikini Car Wash by Pamela Morsi Page A

wasn’t interested a relationship with any of the women at church. What he hadn’t said was that he was not interested in having a relationship.

Chapter 5
    ANDI HAD SPENT the entire weekend perfecting her business plan presentation for city council. And she hadn’t skimped on the details. She put it together in a PowerPoint including current photos of the car wash building and an overlay that she drew herself of how the new business would look. She called it Corner Coffee Stop. And she was even keeping the retro lettering of the current car wash sign. It was a perfect use of the historic building, she decided. She really got into the excitement of it as she put all the figures together and speculated with growth charts and impact data. She loved doing this. She missed doing it. In the last months of job hunting she’d been so focused on her financial needs and her obligations she’d forgotten just how much personal satisfaction she got from doing something that both challenged her and allowed her to utilize her natural gifts and acquired knowledge. Just the sheer pleasure of the task had her excitement in overdrive. Presentations to the council were limitedto three minutes. She came up with enough talking points to give a day-long seminar!
    She boiled it all down on Monday morning, making it direct, fact-filled and to the point. From there she began practicing her delivery.
    She went over it twice in the silence of the house while Pop and Jelly were out doing the rounds of meals on wheels. By the time they came home, she was ready to try her words out on living, breathing human beings.
    Andi set up her laptop in the living room and had her father and sister pretend to be the city council. Jelly really got into the pretending part. She hurried upstairs to her room to retrieve a top hat that she’d worn once on a Halloween long past. Why she thought the aldermen might wear top hats, Andi didn’t know, but her sister certainly looked cute in it. And maybe it helped. Andi was not one of those speakers who imagined her audience naked, but imagining the council wearing ill-fitting top hats really cut down the intimidation factor.
    She went through her presentation, presented her argument. The drive-through coffee business should be exempted from the traditional regulations governing restaurants because it is not, in any sense, a restaurant. Corner Coffee Stop would not serve any person inside the building. The average length of time a customer would occupy the bay would be less than five minutes.
    “This business would be an appropriate and revenue generating use of a currently vacant building. And it offers safe and convenient access to goods and services for the elderly, physically handicapped, families with small children in the vehicle or anyone on the go in downtown Plainview.”
    Andi ended her spiel with a “thank you” and Jelly rewarded her with cheers and applause. While she appreciated the enthusiasm, she looked for keener insight from her father.
    “What do you think?” she asked her dad.
    He smiled. “I think all the scholarship money for that expensive graduate school wasn’t wasted.”
    Andi blushed. “It’s not exactly what I thought I’d be doing at this stage of my life.”
    “You were thinking CEO of a Fortune 500?”
    She chuckled and shrugged. “Closer to that than to becoming a Plainview barista.”
    “Well, Andi, I’ve always believed it’s more important to like what you do than do what you like,” Pop said. “You need to make enough cash to get by, but beyond that, it won’t make you any more or less happy.”
    “When I start making enough to get by,” she told him. “Then I’ll try wondering about the happy part.”
    The council meeting was held at City Hall in an ornate and cavernous room, obviously designed a century earlier for what had been anticipated to be a much larger community. Ten rows of folding chairs sat at a distance from the curved dark wood dias. A half dozen