Macaroni

Chapter 5

Bebe was up and running. She loved the antique store, bustling from 9-12 with window shoppers, Scottie's friends stopping by to say hello, and Rush Limbaugh playing the entire time. She wasn't so sure about the Rush Limbaugh, but she was open to it, and going with the flow. She was a self-pronounced socialist politically, which was a major source of contention between her and her husband, and she voted to raise taxes whenever there was a proposition to raise gas taxes, or park taxes, or monitor water usage.

She thought the government was a good thing, there to protect the people, make life better, control the money makers from taking over the world. She marched with the vagina hat wearers in women's marches and brought her children. She was proud to be a woman, proud to be a mother, and against anyone who was against those things.

But what she was finding between Scottie and his friends, and the ongoing radio chatter, was that Rush Limbaugh and conservatives were not against those things. They were pro-woman, definitely pro-family, and pro-keeping money to the people that knew what to do with it. Bebe had never considered becoming a business owner, but as she saw the ordeal that Scottie went through to deal with the business side of the antique store, she started to see that she'd been missing something along the way in her progressive socialist ways. Business was exciting to her, and the government dipping its hands into so many parts of it started to annoy her. She began to be annoyed with paying taxes with her tiny paycheck, and handing cash to her babysitter. She was definitely in the negative in her whole getting a job thing, and she began to dream about ways to make her paycheck bigger.

Bebe introduced these ideas to Scottie one day, explained how his conservative politics were influencing her, and how she wanted to make more money. Scottie was ecstatic. There was a booth waning in sales, and Scottie encouraged Bebe to consider that her booth on a trial period and see if she could get the sales up over the next month. Bebe took the kids to garage sales the next Saturday and got a bunch of new clothes for them, and some decorations for the booth.

When she unveiled the resdesigned booth to Scottie the next week, he grinned. "Thata girl!" She'd added vintage tea towels to the shelves, hung paper lanterns from the ceiling, and miniature white lights across the shelves with the collections. It brightened the place up. It drew customers to it immediately. Customers commented on how great it looked. And for whatever reason, more stuff sold from that booth over the next month, 50% more sales than the previous month. People even tried to buy the paper lanterns.