Page 4 of The Reluctant Reaper
She did, first stopping by the bathroom to wash up and brush her teeth; about a third of the items in the medicine cabinet and the cupboard beneath were hers. The owner, Mr. Lowe, had come up not long ago to fix the leaky faucet, and observed that Gray and Amara were practically roommates. “You can have the lower unit if you want. I’ll give ya a deal.”
“You’re wasting your breath, Lowe. Amara’s infatuated with her shithole studio.”
“Infatuated’s a strong word,” she’d muttered.
Mr. Lowe was correct; theywerepractically roommates. It was the rare month when one of them didn’t crash at the other’s apartment for a night or two. And sure, she’d love to share a mansion with Gray. But that was the problem:love.
Living with him... too much. For so many reasons. She’d keep her shithole, thanks; the gross carpet, cracked sink, lack of counter/closet space, fourth-hand furniture, and view of the 35E overpass suited her well. Just like her used Ford Fusion with stained seats (on rainy days, she could smell the banana from a long-ago spilled smoothie) and a cracked windshield suited her.
The kitchen boasted the usual breakfast suspects: a plethora of Pop-Tarts, half a loaf of artisan bread, not-quite-expired coconut yogurt, two cases of LaCroix in passionfruit (passable) and apricot (vomit-inducing), half a dozen eggs.
She scored a strawberry Pop-Tart, found her purse, grabbed her keys. “Job interview, gotta run!”
He heard her; she’d caught him between stopping and starting the depo recording. “Why don’t you take a break from the temp jobs? It’s not like your trust fund’s gonna run out anytime soon.”
“I like to keep busy.”
He chuckled, and she heard the click as he rewound some tape. “You wanna grab a movie this weekend?”
“Sounds good.” But then, so did everything with him. She would have had the same response to “You want to help me organize my graphic novels by year of publication?”
* * *
Amara switched her phone back to Bluetooth and was startled to see she had 429 voicemails. As she’d been studiously ignoring calls from Minot, she was more than a little surprised at the total.So low.The last two times her folks tried to lure her home for a family reunion and a fictitious garage sale (“If you want your things, best come home”), she had eight hundred voicemails in seven hours. And that was just on day one.
She shook her head and glared at her phone.C’mon, guys. You gotta want it! Me. Whatever.Since she abhorred a vacuum as much as nature did, she shut off her phone. It would be fine. It wasn’t like she needed directions. How hard would it be to find a fifty-acre park?
Fifty-two minutes later, she was apologizing for being late because she had, in fact, needed directions. Parks are hard to find!
“No biggie,” her next boss said. “There’s all kindsa stuff going on right now, I didn’t even notice you were late. Lots to do, y’know?”
“I gathered from the posting.”Help help HELP WANTED ASAP, must be able to read and write and other stuff as needed!!!She’d never seen such a shrill demand for help, and she’d been reading online job postings every week for over a decade.
“So watcha see is watcha get,” the boss du jour continued with a vague gesture that encompassed the Angry Beaver RV Park. It likely would have looked a bit depressing even in high summer, which this was not. Frush (parking lot slush hardened overnight in the shape of tire treads, which made for treacherous walking) was everywhere, the tree branches were bowed down with ice that would sullenly drip only to refreeze that night, and overhead the sky was a blinding blue.
There were about a dozen RVs that Amara could see, as well as an empty playground off to the left. The miniature red barn to the right contained the manager’s office and a small grocery store. A six-foot-high stack of wood ran the length of the barn, all neatly cut and shielded with a snow-covered tarp. “Off-season right now, o’course. Chance t’get a handle on the job before we get real busy.”
“Sounds fine.”
Her next boss, a petite woman with short, graying blond hair who would be dead in thirty-four months, was a recent widow who had scammed her stepchildren out of their inheritance. “A lot of the job is basically bein’ a landlord... if they’re here long-term, you’ll have to run their card every thirty days, and if it don’t go through, you gotta knock on their door. You’re also gonna knock on their door if they break any of the rules. And they’re gonna, because these people are?—”
“Hi, Mrs. Bennett!” A chubby brunette in her thirties popped out of the nearest RV. “Wanna come over for lunch? I made too much hot dish again.”
“No thanks, Miz Dooley, already had lunch.” To Amara: “Jackasses. What’s with the Mrs. Bennett shit? I been divorced for a decade. Dooley knows that.”
Amara had been unaware that RV parks were hotbeds of jackassery, but it explained why her new boss was lying about eating lunch at nine forty-five a.m. She’d stolen the Angry Beaver from her husband’s children, though perhaps that was a blessing.
“And see? See?” The former Mrs. Bennett pointed to overflowing garbage bins, beside which were a dozen or so pizza boxes, neatly stacked. “Not even in the cans!”
“Maybe because the cans are full?”
“Yeah, that reminds me, you’ll also be in charge of accounts payable. First check you cut you gotta send to Tennis Sanitation.”
“Can the second check go to the porta-potty people? I can’t see them, but I can smell them.”
“West side, behind the office,” was the absent reply. “That reminds me, keep an eye on the toilet paper situation.”
“The jackasses get testy when they can’t wipe their bottoms? Or is it a one-ply vs. two-ply situation?”
