Page 9 of The Inmate
“I was just wondering why this charity is so close to your heart.”
“Well…” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I always get choked up during this part, but at least it takes my mind off the mystery phone call. “My best friend growing up had cerebral palsy. She struggled with it a lot. Unfortunately, she’s no longer with us. So this is in Amelia’s honor.”
“Oh my. I can hear how much you must miss her. I’m sure she’s looking down on you and grateful for what a good friend you were and still continue to be.”
“Yes. I… I hope so.”
I take another deep breath, struggling to get my composure back. It’s hard to talk about Amelia, but she’s the reason I’m doing this. That always needs to be said.
We spend the next fifteen minutes talking more about the charity itself and the details of the run. This Saturday is promising to be a beautiful day, and we’re going to have a great showing at Florian Hall, which is the start and the end point of the run.
I expect it will go off without a hitch.
ChapterFive
One thingI love about my job is that I’m not stuck in the office all day. I would lose my mind if I had to spend nine to five in that cubicle Monday through Friday. But fortunately, Seth allows me to travel to vitamin and health stores in the greater Boston area, because he knows that the personal touch can help to make sales.
Soon after a quick sandwich in the office, I travel to a sales call at a nutritional store in Quincy. Quincy is a commuter town on the transit system’s Red Line, largely made up of an eclectic mix of people who want to live near the city, but can’t afford to pay the steep Boston housing prices. And it has an amazing Chinatown, where I could seriously eat dinner every single night.
There are also a large number of vitamin stores, and by now I have sold products to nearly every single one of them. I like to think of myself as Quincy’s Official Vixed Girl. Today I visited one of the stores I’ve never made a sale with in the past, but I managed to leave with an order for three boxes of our products. And the owner informed me that if they sold well, he would be requesting more.
As I climb back into my car with the paperwork for the new orders, I check my phone. There’s a text message waiting for me from my mother:
Coming to dinner Sunday night?
My mother invites me to Sunday night dinner well in advance nearly every weekend. It’s a bit of a tradition in our family. She told me once that she (not so) secretly hopes one day I will show up with a serious boyfriend, but unfortunately, I have not yet dated a guy who is worthy of the Sunday night dinner. After all, whoever I bring is going to get grilled all night long.
But for the first time, I consider inviting a guest this Sunday: Caleb. I really feel like he could be the guy. At the very least, he could withstand my mother’s incessant questioning. And if I invited him, he would say yes.
I type into the phone:
I’m bringing…
Before I can type the rest of that sentence, I rethink it. What Caleb and I have is great, but it’s still very early. I don’t know if I want to subject him to my mother yet. And if things don’t work out, I’ll never hear the end of it.What happened to that nice Caleb? Why wasn’tthis onegood enough for you?So I revise my text:
I’m bringing salad.
Bringing salad is a much smarter choice than bringing Caleb. After all, my mother only cooks greasy, fatty meals.
I scroll through the messages on my phone. I checked my voicemails right after my podcast, but the blocked caller didn’t leave a message. And now it’s nearly three and there has still been no word from Dawn. She is the kind of person who always responds to text messages within five seconds, so no response the entire day is extremely strange. I shoot off a quick message to Seth:
Did Dawn show up for your meeting at 2?
Immediately, those little bubbles appear on the screen. A second later, his response pops up:
No. I guess she forgot
Dawn—forget a meeting? That seems highly unlikely. Although now that I think about it, there were a few meetings a bit ago where she showed up just when the meeting was ending and seemed confused when she realized she was an hour late. But that problem resolved itself, and lately, Dawn has been back to her almost scarily prompt self. In fact, if Dawn appeared even a millisecond after the scheduled start time for a meeting, I would faint dead away from shock.
And of course, there was her request to meet with me as well, about that “matter of great importance.” And in a very uncharacteristic fashion, she left early and blew me off. And then that phone call this morning…
Help me.
This is not like her at all. Something is wrong. Iknowit. Maybe everyone else at the office blew it off, but they didn’t hear the way Dawn sounded on that phone call. She’s in trouble.
It hits me that Dawn lives in Quincy. Not so far from here, if I recall correctly. I picked her up once when her car was being repaired. She was going on and on about how she didn’t know how she was going to get to work, so I volunteered to chauffeur her back-and-forth, thinking we might get to know each other better, although it didn’t work out that way. She mostly talked about turtles the whole time, even when I tried to press her for details about her life.
In any case, the address is still stored somewhere in my brain. She lives at…
