Torsade Literary Space Bad Counsel (part four)
Short Stories
Bad Counsel
(part four)
Saturday, Karen had asked if she had anything to wash, so Andrée scooped up everything from the foot of the bed, the chair back, the bathroom rug. Sunday, Karen had taken a carload of boxes to the new place.
So I was like, you want me to help, and she was like slo-o-o-w pause… And no, I can do this. That’s how she answered…
On the phone with Buel, Andrée riffled the basket of folded things. Tuning him out, she rummaged again. It was all jeans…one black sweater, navy towels, her black work pants.
She called Karen.
“What do you want when I’m driving?”
“Mom! Where is my shirt?”
Her mother muttered something. Andrée heard a squeal, the revving of an engine, then: “I am not washing a white shirt with a bunch of jeans. If you needed it, you should have got those sheets off your bed and run a load yourself.”
“Oh, who cares.”
Who cares, Andrée meant, about separating whites, Jesus. Besides, the shirt already has a couple of stains.
“Listen.”
“All I mean is,” Andrée talked right past her mother, “if you told me, I could have done it. No problem. But you didn’t tell me!”
She is beginning to hate this job too.
“Y’absolutely. The girl’ll get you.”
Buel, talking to a customer. He roots in his pocket after the electronic lozenge Andrée saw him stuff there, playing with it, a second ago. He wrinkles his brow, purses his lips, moves his jaw sideways. Where did that key get to? When he’s finished kidding the customer, he will fake handing the key to Andrée, snatch his hand up over her head when she reaches for it. Wearing her unwashed polo, she has just got to the lot…but tries saying to the customer, “Blue Ford?”
“No.” He scratches his nose. “White.”
So…not a bad guess. Almost prescient. Which white Ford doesn’t matter; this type is easy to find. Some of the customers still use actual keys.
7
Her mother tells her: “So win the lottery! When you work, you have to do things you don’t like.” Karen can, and does, deal aphorisms with fluency and conviction. But Andrée’s mother spends her days in an office by herself.
“I hardly make enough to live on.”
So she says. She has taken a bedroom in a friend’s apartment, and told her daughter—like a warning—that she has to invest every dime from the house sale in her IRA.
Andrée, if Leo would have hired her when she’d asked, would do her mother’s job for half the pay. “Learning on the job, Leo.”
“Yeah, great. Who’s supposed to have time to teach you?”
She would almost work for half minimum wage, only to be alone and unharried, at times there was nothing to do.
Last job, she had to suck it up and go begging, to Hayden the head cashier. Hayden could be friendly in low gear, but on a dime shift to hyperreactive and vengeful… As when Andrée got her register locked, when a customer got shitty, wanting to pay for groceries with returned merchandise.
“You stand around like that, Andrée, I have to think I’m giving you too many hours.”
“Jonas!” Since the ass-manager had smacked her with her own name, she smacked back with his. “What do you want me to do?”
“When you run out of stuff, you need to ask someone.” Side nod to Hayden.
This was good. Jonas got paid more than the cashiers. What was up with this popping out of corners, hinting he was going to fire you…why not manage, then, if that was his job?
She could spend ten minutes dickering around with the Windex and the paper towels, cleaning the belt; she could go to her locker and say, “I’m just looking for my medication.” It was a good lie one of the other girls had taught her. No one wants to know what’s wrong with you.
Andrée thinks her mother would like her to embrace an ethic never really exercised by Karen herself. Karen’s career has been the result of her special relationship with Leo. Not that, as Andrée guesses, sticking to a sucking job, the way her mother would like her to, won’t in time gain you something to show for it. Maybe a raise, twenty more cents an hour. Andrée, helped by a gift card someone dropped on the floor, just bought herself a suede jacket, property she didn’t have last year. That’s getting ahead. She might get a house one day. (Though she doesn’t understand what good owning a house has done her mother.) She might even get an education.
A year ago, giving school the third go-around since leaving twelfth grade, she took out a student loan, and signed up for a certificate program in Office Administration. She did it for Leo, so next time she asked him for a job he couldn’t say: “Sure, when you get some experience. I don’t need a check-out girl.”
8
Bad Counsel
Bad Counsel (part five)
(2017, Stephanie Foster)