Fired #1

I got fired from my first job. Dairy Queen. It was the year the daughter-in-law took over. My next door neighbor. A former stay-at-home mom. She invited me to work weekends during the day. She said I could ride with her. We set up together and then she left for a few hours. I don't know where she went. Occasionally some guy waited for her on the bench in the back. They sat together outside for a few hours while I ran the place. Sometimes they left. She told me I could eat whatever I wanted. At first, it was exciting to eat my favorite items: The Peanut Buster Parfait or a vanilla chocolate twist covered with crunchies. But that got boring. I tried some of the stuff I never bought at Dairy Queen. Like the Dilly Bars or the malts. I had never in my life had malt. It was weird. By the middle of the summer, I moved onto serious experimentation. What happens when you make a chocolate milkshake but use half soda water? (Not good) And more experimentation with malt. (More not good) This was the year they introduced The Blizzard, so you can imagine my free-for-all. It rained a lot that summer so I had plenty of quiet moments to have fun with ice cream and candy. Then one day the mother-in-law showed up. Told me my services were no longer needed. Told me every time she dropped by, she noticed I was always eating something. This was true. I had no defense. I literally got fired from Dairy Queen for eating too much. A few days later, the daughter-in-law called me and said I could have my job back. When we drove in together, she explained that SHE was supposed to be in charge this summer and the-mother-in-law had no right to fire me, that they discussed it, and that part of the agreement of her taking over the family business was she got to have some free time for herself. (I don't remember who was taking care of the baby at this point.) She asked me to keep a look out for the mother-in-law and call her if she appeared. Oh, and maybe try not eating anything when I saw her pull up. It quit raining all the time so I got really busy and didn't have so much time to experiment anymore. A few years later, when I was at college, my mom called to tell me the next door neighbors are getting a divorce and that the wife just up and left for another man and what a huge surprise it was to everyone. I wasn't surprised.