Cooper was tramping through the mud again. In nine hours, he would be seated at Miss Porter’s Thursday night Bingo Ball next to Audrey Marks, who wore only black turtlenecks and did not understand the game. Gleefully, he would place translucent red chips on numbers like B-3 and N-42, watching Audrey’s board closely all the while so that she did not miss a piece, so that she would not forget to call out "Bingo!" She would turn to him, sweetly southern under the droning florescent lighting of the church choir room, and say something like, "Well Cooper Barnes, are you cheating off of me? Eyes on your own board, if you don’t mind!"

Until then, however, he would knock on the door of each and every home in Flowery Branch, wipe his muddy, olive-colored rain boots on their foreign welcome mats, and attempt to sell the innocent homeowners discounted vouchers for an overpriced local carwash.

Cooper was a hell of a salesman. Standing on the porch of a potential client’s home, he was a young Willy Loman or Dustin Hoffman or the most debonair combination of the two. He could share an anecdote with a lower-middle class family in a way that would convince them to let him into their lives. He could be the strapping young son they never had while their own biological children lazed just out of reach in front of the television in the den. From the moment he stepped onto their properties, Cooper could improve their qualities of life just by offering them a more economical option for buying carwashes or pizza or trips to the neighborhood mini golf course.

Today, the gate of the first house was rusted shut and bent at the lock. Cooper kicked it lightly with a rain boot until it budged. The slew of early fall storms had left the front yard swampy and the petals of the purple pansies by the gate lay beaten into the earth by overzealous raindrops. An orange cat scowled at Cooper as he pressed the cream colored doorbell twice.

"Nancy? You here already?" a raspy voice called out from inside the house.

"No sir, not Nancy," Cooper said, his mouth pressed close to the glass pane on the door. "My name is Cooper Barnes, and I’ve got some good news for you."

"Good news? Can’t hear you. Why are you standing outside then? What is it, is Nancy going to be late or something? Hah!"

"I’m not sure about Nancy, sir," Cooper said. He opened the door and stepped into the living room. Under the light of the one small lamp, an old man in flannel pajamas and brown leather slippers was reading TV Guide. Thick patches of white hair covered parts of his scalp. He sat in a reclining chair, hooked up to an oxygen tank. Cooper walked over to him and extended his hand. "But you can call me Cooper. How are you doing today?"

"Just dandy, as you can tell. I’m Oscar. What’s this about good news? You know you can’t keep an old man waiting so long, you may never get to tell him."

"Well, sir, it concerns your car. You look like the kind of man who values his possessions." The old man nodded at Cooper. "Tell me, do you like to keep your car clean?"

"Nancy’s the one who drives the car. She comes over to run errands for me."

"She sounds like a nice lady, a good friend. Is she coming over here now?" Cooper asked, ready to change his sale pitch to cater to Nancy’s needs.

"Who knows where she is. Anyway, she wouldn’t know clean if it smacked her in the face."

"I can tell that this bothers you," Cooper said.

"Well, hell yeah it bothers me. It’s my car, you know, had it since ’87. And when folks see her driving it around town all mudded up, who do you think they look down on?"

"I understand completely. She should respect your possessions, you’re the one who’s letting her use your car."

"That’s what I always tell her."

"What if I told you that I’ve got an easy and affordable way for you to keep that car looking as clean as if you were driving it yourself."

Oscar grunted.

"Do you think you could get Nancy to agree to something like that?"

"I don’t see why not. It’s the least she can do for me."

"Exactly," Cooper said. He brought out his clipboard and went over the details of the carwash coupons with Oscar. Minutes later, he was walking down the hall to the bedroom to find the old man’s checkbook.

It did not matter to Cooper that Oscar might not live long enough to use the twenty five carwash coupons that he had just been sold. Nor did it matter that the carwashes themselves would be nothing more than fetid water mixed with Palmolive on an oversized mustard-colored sponge. Despite what his boss said at interoffice meetings and award ceremonies, Cooper was not all heart. Mostly, he was all looks.

Cooper had acquired these good looks from immigrant parents who had moved to the States from Russia in the sixties. His mother was slight with yellow eyes and coarse hair and she did her grocery shopping in mass quantities, making the trip to the Pick N’Save only once a month. His father had spent the first fifteen years of his life in a small town just outside the Black Forest in the Russian-occupied section of Germany. His skin was spotted with age and he carried the weight of a man raised on sausages and thick soups. He brought his new bride from Russia with him to America when they were both just nineteen years old, changed his name from Barnikova to Barnes, and somehow fathered a blond-haired, blue-eyed Arian prototype of a son. They named him Cooper and signed him up for football and cotillion classes so that their all-American son would understand the importance not only of athletic prowess but also of a finely tuned Southern hospitality.

Today, the newly retired couple could sit together and relax in their apartment in the Marietta, proud of their only son’s success, loving that his occupation dealt not only with the American Dream of independently acquired prosperity, but also with bulk sales. Because you never know, his mother would say, you just never know.

Growing up, Cooper remembered watching his parents sit together in front of the television just before dinner. His mother liked to watch a German cooking show that came on basic cable’s one international channel every night at five-thirty. She would sit on the couch with a pad of paper while her husband translated for her the German directions that she would not have otherwise been able to understand.

Cooper realized now that this was love. He tried to see himself in a dimly lit and musty living room, patient enough to translate flour measurements from milligrams to cups, oven temperatures from centigrade to Fahrenheit. Patient enough to help the hazy image of a girl make German dumplings on a small gas stove.

Now, imagining Audrey Marks waiting outside of the bingo parlor, Cooper decided that she didn’t look like much of a chef anyway.

Besides, he knew only one word of German.