by Pamela Morsi
“He wants us out of here,” she answered.
“Nothing new about that,” Ellen pointed out. “He was ready to put your clothes on the curb the day of the funeral.”
“He left an envelope—it’s on my vanity table,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll get it,” Ellen said.
She went inside and found the letter easily enough and carried it into the light of the kitchen.
It was from Pressman, Yaffe and Escudero, a prestigious local law firm. Ellen read it. A strange sound emerged from her throat and she leaned heavily against the counter. She began again and read it through a second time. Her heart was pounding, her chest felt tight. Her brow furrowed. She kept shaking her head.
With a sense of dread, she returned to Wilma and Amber, still sitting on the front porch.
“I don’t understand this,” she said, holding out the letter. “This can’t be true. I don’t think this can happen. What in the world could it mean?”
Wilma shrugged fatalistically. “I think that last line pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?” She quoted from memory. “‘You will vacate the premises immediately or be served with a court order.’”
It was later that same afternoon that Amber, already fifteen minutes late, got off the 9 bus at the stop nearest the downtown mall. She didn’t mind the fact that the bus stop was on the other side of Houston Street. She was happy to walk the half-dozen blocks. Not just because she could walk through the heart of town, over the quaint bridges and past the Alamo, but truthfully, it was embarrassing to be seen without a car. Of course, everyone she knew was already aware that she had no personal wheels. That was bad enough. But she hated for strangers to see her, maybe judge her, maybe think that mass transportation was her only option.
It was her image thing again, she thought. She had a love/hate relationship with her own image. There was a part of her that just said, Screw you! I’ll be whoever I want. That was the part that dropped out of high school three months before graduation. The part that gave birth to Jet instead of getting an abortion. And the part that partied hardy whenever the opportunity presented itself.
She had another side, however, a side she kept hidden. She was loathe to admit it, but she wanted people to admire her, to envy her. She wanted the whole world to see her as smart, sexy, successful. And she was pretty sure that they rarely did.
She’d also come to the very cynical conclusion that people are only what they appeared to be. She wanted to appear to be hip, in-the-know, and to-die-for hot. Pretty lofty ambitions for a bleached blonde with a GED and a three-year-old.
Arriving at the mall, she rounded the corner near the fountain and waved to Mildred in the cookie shop. A macadamia and white chocolate chip with a cup of coffee would have helped her day a lot. But she was already late and she had to be out on the floor as soon as she clocked in anyway. She was just glad it was Saturday and she was not opening the store. If she was five minutes past with the doors, the entire human race got their panties in a wad. And that kind of thing was always found out. Her boss, Carly, was best buddies with the witch who ran the Gap next door. She was convinced she was being spied upon almost constantly. Just because she was paranoid, didn’t mean that they weren’t out to get her.
Amber had been working at the mall since she was sixteen. Her very first job was at Salad Czar in the Food Court. She was exactly the kind of girl they wanted at their expensive lettuce boutique. She’d been a fresh-faced honor student; in the school symphony band and a member of the student council. She hadn’t worked for the money. Back then there had still been plenty of money. Her dad was already sick, already dying. And her mother’s endlessly upbeat reassurances were wearing. She’d gone to work to get away from her—to get away from them.
Now here she was, five years later, still living with her mother, and now they were all living in her grandmother’s house. Mom had had to sell the place in Elm Creek to pay creditors. Amber might be of legal age and Jet’s mother, but she felt no closer to being on her own than she had at sixteen. Amber had no illusions—her mother was the boss of everything.
She rounded the corner to the open gallery where sunlight spilled in from the pitched glass roof three floors up. Cesar was demonstrating his boomerang helicopters for a small crowd of wide-eyed children as their parents looked on uncomfortably, hoping not to be cornered into a purchase.
Kyle was at his cart, coaxing a smile out of a fat baby in a jogging stroller who was going to have his photo emblazoned upon a coffee mug or a T-shirt.
Amber heard her name called and she waved to Warren, the handicapped guy. With his broom and dustpan, he was a permanent fixture at the mall, endlessly sweeping.
Deliberately Amber slowed her pace as she approached the entrance to her current place of employment. If she didn’t act late, there was always a chance that nobody would notice that she was.
Almost casually she walked into the pink-and-burgundy home of Frou-Frou Lingerie. The abundance of frothy decor and the scent of musky perfume was meant to lure as many males inside as females. The truth was, the company made very high quality bras and panties. But pointing that out was like insisting guys read Playboy for the articles. This store was in the business of selling sex.
Amber could sell that. In fact, Amber was pretty sure she could sell just about anything. And getting middle-aged businessmen to buy their flabby wives black lace teddies was not particularly difficult.
With a quick glance around, Amber assessed the place wasn’t particularly busy, and both Metsy and Diedre were working. Amber nodded to the latter but before she had a chance to speak, Diedre gave her a warning look and gestured toward the register. Amber glanced over to see Carly occupied behind the counter. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to change the paper roll in the cash register. And she was looking particularly sour.
Deliberately Amber did not make eye contact. She tried to walk right past her boss with the unconcern of the guiltless.
It didn’t work.
“Good afternoon, Amber,” Carly said, glancing pointedly at her watch. “You’re running pretty late today.”
“A little,” Amber admitted. “Let me put my purse up and I’ll help you get that paper in the roller.”
“Hmm,” Carly commented noncommittally. She didn’t appear to be mollified. “Shall we step into the back for a little girl-to-girl?”
Carly was smiling broadly. Amber smiled right back. Underneath that smile Amber was moaning and cursing. Girl-to-girl was Carly’s euphemism for a verbal butt-chewing.
Who needs this today? she mentally complained. But a smiling “Sure thing” was what she answered aloud.
Amber led the way to the stockroom and she stashed her purse in the locker, before turning to face Carly.
“The bus was late,” she lied. “And the traffic around this place is terrible on Saturday.”
Carly was still smiling. She shut the door and spoke only a little above a whisper.
“Let’s keep this between us, shall we?” she said. “I don’t want to embarrass you in front of Metsy and Diedre.”
Amber wasn’t fooled by that suggestion one bit. The other girls would know immediately why they went into the stockroom together. And they both undoubtedly realized she was late. Carly’s motivation for keeping their little tête-à-tête private was personal insurance. The rules about what a manager could and could not say were very strict. There were guys in corporate HR that lived in constant fear of lawsuits. If Carly crossed over into catty and unprofessional, as she sometimes did, she wouldn’t want anyone to overhear it. It was safer for it to be her word over the disgruntled employee.
“You just cannot let this happen,” Carly began. “You can’t just show up when it’s convenient for you. We have a schedule to maintain.”
Amber kept her face purposefully blank. She’d been through this with Carly half a dozen times over the last two years—and with other supervisors before her. They were all damn sticklers for their jobs and their schedules.
As far as Amber was concerned, if you were routinely where you were supposed to be, at exactly the time you were supposed to be there, then you obviously didn’t have a very interesting life. Which, coincidentally, people like Carly—people over thirty—usually didn’t have.
Maybe her life wasn’t as interesting as it could be, but she wasn’t about to advertise that fact to the world.
“This is the fourth time you’ve been late this month, Amber,” Carly pointed out.
It probably would have been more accurate to say it was the fourth time she’d been caught.
“I have absolutely no problem with your performance when you’re here,” Carly continued. “But you’ve got to be here to work. Showing up, on time, is absolutely basic to being a good employee. It’s the minimum we expect.”
Amber tuned the woman out. She focused instead upon her current Saturday night dilemma. Should she go out with some new guy who was a buddy of Diedre’s live-in, or just go to the clubs and meet up with somebody there?
“As assistant manager you have to set the standard,” Carly told her. It was all Amber could do not to roll her eyes.
In the world of mall retail, assistant manager was a job description in the twilight zone. It was a position that had no power, made no money and was the fast track to nowhere. It was a way to shoehorn dependable, hourly employees into a salaried position where they could be worked longer without incurring overtime.
Amber understood this. She had no illusions about the grandeur of management. She also knew she was extremely valuable to this store, and to Carly in particular. Except for interfacing with corporate mucky-mucks, Amber handled everything involved in the store’s operation. She did the buying, kept the accounts, made the schedule, and put the payroll together for processing. The store’s average $5,000 in daily sales was due in large part to Amber’s efforts.
But Amber would never be the manager of this store or, for that matter, of any other. Managers were college graduates. Amber was not ever going to go to college.
But if I had gone, she assured herself confidently, I’d be working in a much better job than managing this crappy little store.
“You act as if the rules don’t apply to you,” Carly continued. “But they apply to you more than anyone else.”
It was the usual speech. Carly didn’t even seem particularly angry or interested. They had done this so often that they both found it pretty boring. Carly was never going to fire Amber. The woman was more likely to set her hair ablaze and run naked down to Spencer’s Gifts and back. But she did have to come in and demonstrate her authority from time to time. This was merely one of those times.
As Carly began to wind down and turn her complaints elsewhere, Amber relaxed.
“That Metsy is too dumb to live,” Carly told her with only a hint of confidentiality. “I asked her for a store improvement suggestion and she told me we should stop charging sales tax, because it’s so hard for people to figure out if they have enough money to buy something.”
Carly was looking to Amber for agreement and complicity. They’d have a good laugh together at their co-worker’s expense and that would smooth over everything between them.
Amber wasn’t willing to give it to her. She smiled, very slightly. Not enough to really commit herself to agreement, but enough that her boss would think she had.
Metsy was, to some degree at least, a friend. Of course she was a certifiable idiot, especially with numbers—Amber would never argue that. But she liked clothes and knew what looked good on people. Qualities that were always in demand in women’s wear. Amber knew that. If Carly didn’t, it wasn’t Amber’s responsibility to wise her up.
“We’d better get back to the floor,” Carly suggested. “If we don’t those two will spend the rest of the afternoon gossiping about what might have been said here.”
They had actually been missed. A minirush had ensued and Diedre was holding up everything trying to fix the register tape which Carly had apparently screwed up. Customers were lined up. Amber and Carly had to immediately jump in and help.
It was more than an hour later before the next real lull ensued. Amber began to straighten and restock. Carly took the opportunity to leave.
There were smiles all around as she left.
“Have a great weekend!” Metsy told her cheerfully.
Carly was hardly around the corner when all three women were huddled for a confab.
“What’s the deal with her?” Metsy asked.
“I was a couple of minutes late,” Amber answered.
“Really? Who’d even notice?”
“Obviously Carly did,” Diedre pointed out. “Is it serious?”
Amber shook her head. “She’s just talking smack, as per.”
“Why does she do that?” Metsy said.
“She’s the boss,” Diedre explained. “So she can.”
“But Amber does everything for her,” Metsy said. “It’s like she doesn’t even notice.”
“I think it’s some kind of unwritten rule in mall retail,” Amber told her. “You’re supposed to disrespect workers under twenty-five. You’ve got to marginalize their successes and exaggerate their failures. It’s meant to get back at us for still being young enough to have options.”
The three of them had a great laugh. It felt good putting Carly down. It gave the three a sense of superiority about who they were and what they were doing with their lives.
Amber’s cheerfulness was short-lived. One of the great disadvantages of being bright was the inability to fool yourself for very long.
2
Bright and early Monday morning Ellen headed south in her aging Chrysler Concorde—the last vestige of a life she used to take for granted. Avoiding all expressways, she headed through downtown, past La Villita, the little village that was once San Antonio, and past the Tower of Americas, a vestige of the city’s HemisFair in 1968.
She had gone to HemisFair. It seemed very long ago now. Much like her own past with Paul. Sometimes it seemed just like yesterday, all fresh and familiar. Other times it was like a lifetime ago, or maybe even another person’s lifetime, or perhaps the faded relic of a dream. Whatever it was, it was not her life today.
Downsizing was the term that business people used. Ellen liked the sound of that. She had down-sized her life. Or maybe she was just on the downside of life. Sometimes she thought that death was the next big thing for her. Her husband was dead. Her daughter was grown. Her career was gone. Retirement was impossible. Death was what she had to look forward to.
However, with that cheery thought aside, she realized that she was unlikely to die before the week was out or the year was out, or even before a decade or few were passed and gone. She was very likely to live, so she really needed to get a job.
Putting on her signal blinker a full block ahead of her street, she slowed down appreciably, giving every possible notice to drivers around her that she intended to turn. She had always tried to be fair, to be kind, to be good and to play by the rules. Driving, accounting, life, they all had their own sets of rules to go by. Unfortunately, following the rules didn’t preclude catastrophe. But still, she did manage to make the turn without being slammed into by a three-ton SUV, or by a rusting pickup truck with three illegal laborers in the back. It wasn’t as if everything was wrong.
She drove underneath the railroad overpass, a throwback to an earlier era and skirted some road repair. The area was rough and seedy. Second-rate businesses, pawnshops, furniture rental and tamale factories—a low-rent entrepreneurial district.
Horns honked at her as she slowed to try to see the address numbers. It was a hopeless cause, nothing seemed to be marked. Fortunately, in the middle of the next block she saw the sign she was looking for.
The background was the shape of Texas, and within it stood a neon trimmed cowboy with a lariat circling above his head. In medium-sized letters it read: Roper’s Accounting and then beneath that, and quite a bit larger, The Cowboys of Taxes.
There was an open spot right in front of the building, shaded and with time still on the meter. Ellen passed it right by. It made no sense to waste her luck taking a small gift when she was so much in need of a larger one. She drove around the corner by a little grocery store, the sales ads in its windows obscured by security bars. Stoically and with great sacrifice, Ellen pulled into a hot sunny spot and rummaged through the bottom of her purse for change.
“See, God,” she said aloud. “I left that place in front for someone who might need it more than me. I’m a generous person. I’m not asking for a life of luxury, just a way to pay the bills.”
It was evident, even to Ellen herself, that over time her prayers had become less of a reverent supplication and more of a continual harangue.
“Come on, God,” she said. “I deserve a break today.”
She turned off the car, flipped down the visor, and checked her hair and makeup. Smiling broadly she assured herself that there was nothing untoward stuck in her teeth.
“I deserve a break today,” she repeated as she stepped out of the car. “Sheesh! I sound like a TV commercial.”
The threat of Wilma losing her house had come as a tremendous blow. Ellen had made the move in with her mother only as a last resort. The next stop was the homeless shelter—a prospect that must be avoided at all cost.
The hot, south Texas sun was glaring down upon her as she walked along the sidewalk. It was ten o’clock in the morning and only May, but it was still too hot to be comfortable in her silk suit and hose. But she needed to be at her businesslike best. She’d been assuring herself all morning that she was up to the task.
A job interview was nothing compared to the challenges of the last five years—the last eight years really—if the truth were known. Since the day that the strained muscle in her husband’s back had proved to be cancer, Ellen’s whole world had turned upside down. And most of it had come to rest squarely upon her own shoulders.
She faced the door, nervous but determined. The building was old and smelly. She swallowed hard and reminded herself of the facts. There was no house, no business, no retirement nest egg, and nothing left in her checking account. Her mother was sick. Her daughter was irresponsible and, along with her little granddaughter, they were all counting on her. Gamely she pasted a confident smile on her face and went inside.
