1. Alba #3
I crumpled the bill in my fist, scowling. That asshole was rubbing my face in it! He knew I was broke, and this was a message. I was the dirt under his shoe. I was the uppity waitress who would take his money because I needed it more than he did.
Damn him! Damn his arrogance! Damn him for being right !
An image flashed through my mind: me, rushing out of the restaurant, catching him before he disappeared. I’d put a hand on his arm and make him turn, and then I’d stuff his filthy money down his throat and make him choke on it.
God, that would feel so good.
Unfortunately, it would also mean I couldn’t pay my overdue power bill.
Apparently, when you didn’t pay it, the power company shut your electricity off.
This was something I’d learned when I first moved into my own apartment after my life fell apart.
I hadn’t realized I needed to open an account in the first place, let alone pay for electricity myself.
I know. I know . I felt as out of touch and pathetic as I should’ve. Real life sucked .
Swallowing past the constriction in my throat, I stuffed the money in my belt and ignored Elena’s questioning look.
I painted my best smile on my face and went to greet the four new customers at table seventeen.
By the end of my shift, I was a tiny bit richer and a whole lot achier. My lower back pulsed as I slid on my jacket, and all I wanted to do was head home, collapse on my couch, and get real intimate with both Ben and Jerry.
Unfortunately, rent was due in a few days and even with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket, I was still short. So I couldn’t crash out and gorge on ice cream. I had to go to my second job.
The hundred-dollar bill burned in my pocket.
A year and a half ago, a hundred dollars would’ve been nothing to me.
I hadn’t even carried cash; I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to pick the money up if I’d walked by it on the street.
I’d swiped my credit card and bought whatever I’d wanted, and someone else had handled the bills.
Now the money was necessary. And the man in the cheap suit had known it, and that galled me down to the tips of my toes.
I’d changed into my cleaner’s uniform in the staff room at the restaurant, so all I had to do was head a couple of blocks over to the familiar, glass-encrusted tower where I worked in the evenings.
Even though it was after hours, the automatic doors slid open at a swipe of my card, and I nodded to the security guard behind the front desk.
Then I made my way to the forty-second floor, where I opened the cleaner’s closet and strapped the vacuum to my back.
“This is temporary,” I promised myself, same as I did every evening. Just until I could find a better-paying job. Until I figured out what I could do with two years of a liberal arts college education, no degree, no useful training, no money, and no contacts.
Until I decided to grovel, to debase myself and go back into the family fold. If they’d have me.
As I checked the levels in the spray bottles of cleaner, I wondered what it would take for my parents to take me back.
Would they have someone else lined up for me to marry?
Someone appropriate? Would I have to endure endless humiliation?
What lies would they have told their friends and acquaintances about my absence in order to save face?
I was irrationally angry at my parents for not preparing me for the world. But I was thirty years old, so a lot of that blame rested on my own shoulders. Besides, they had prepared me for the world—just not this one.
They’d shown me how to smile and how to sit.
They’d taught me which forks to use at a formal dinner.
They’d explained the politics of society, told me to keep track of who was cheating on whom and who would stab whom in the back.
I knew how to dance and how to smile so a man would pay attention.
I knew how to use clothing and hair and makeup and accessories to make a statement.
I knew who was on the cusp of a big business deal, and who to turn to if I wanted to stop it.
Fat load of good that did me now.
Tightening the straps on my vacuum, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
My hip ached. After the car accident that had kicked off the worst week of my life, my body hadn’t quite been the same.
My back ached all the time, and my hips clicked when I got really tired.
And my feet—forget it. They just throbbed all the time now, but maybe that was because I was on them for thirteen hours a day.
Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe I was lying in a hospital bed, in a coma, and I’d wake up to see my parents beside me.
They would still love me even if I didn’t marry Cole.
They would support me even though I refused to keep up appearances by sacrificing the rest of my life for a sham marriage.
My father wouldn’t have said those awful things to me, and my mother wouldn’t have stood by and let him.
And James—James would still be in love with me, even if I was dirt-poor.
But when I opened my eyes again, I was still in a dusty closet, surrounded by cleaning supplies.
I found the outlet at the close end of the hallway, plugged in my backpack vacuum, and got to work.
When I entered the corner office at the far end of the hall, my shoulders dropped. Once again, the big shot who inhabited the space had tossed his work boots in the corner of the room, where all the dirt and grime and slush and salt from outside leaked into the carpet and caked itself there.
Grumbling to myself, I knocked the dried dirt off the boots and vacuumed up what I could, scowling at the tan footwear. Then I scowled at the desk, where heaps of paperwork threatened to topple over every time the HVAC system turned on.
Typical, wasn’t it? There was always someone to clean up after him, so he didn’t bother to do it himself. He probably didn’t think about me for even a second, so he had no idea he made my life more difficult every single night.
Guilt squirmed through me. How many times had I made a cleaner’s job harder in my lifetime? I’d never even thought about the army of people that cleaned my family’s properties, the people who landscaped our lawns, made our food…
I was ashamed of my former self. I wished I could go back in time and change the way I’d acted.
But I couldn’t—and I still had to clean the carpet.
I vacuumed and scrubbed and vacuumed some more, but the salt from the road must have damaged the carpet fibers. A patch of discoloration remained. Would it be enough to get me fired? I stared at the salt stain as pressure and heat built up in the middle of my chest.
In the fourteen months since my fall from grace—if grace was what you could call the life of privilege I’d been ousted from—I’d been fired from a total of nine jobs and rejected from even attempting to work at countless others.
All those people had looked at me and found me lacking.
Nine people had asked me to do the most basic tasks, and I’d failed. I couldn’t scrub dishes, or serve coffee, or mop floors. I couldn’t file paperwork or keep up with the speed required of a cashier.
Elena had given me a shot. The cleaning company had given me a shot. But mostly, people had told me I wasn’t good enough.
The stain on the carpet stared at me, and I could almost hear it laughing.
Without connections and money, I was nothing.
I could hardly take care of myself. I was a terrible cook and a worse cleaner.
Navigating insurance and utilities and leases had almost made my head explode.
Without the insulation of my parents’ wealth, it was plainly obvious how useless a human I really was.
I couldn’t even get a stain out of a carpet.
Would this be my tenth firing? Would whatever bigwig who kept the messy desk walk in and decide to call the cleaning company to get rid of the faceless cleaner that he’d never interacted with because of a stain he’d made?
I’d have to save every penny from the restaurant if I wanted to cover rent and bills and hope that I could steal a few fries from the expo line to feed myself during my shifts.
The heat built up in my chest, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
When I opened them again, I stared out the tinted windows at the silent winter beyond.
This far up, the snowflakes whirled and danced, caught up in the various wind currents swirling between high-rise buildings.
Night blanketed the city, lights dotting the skyline like glittering jewels.
I thought of the men at lunch today, and I gritted my teeth. They found it so easy to speak down to me. One of them enjoyed watching me squirm in the face of his advances, and the other took every opportunity to remind me how small and pathetic I really was.
How dare they.
Anger sizzled through me, chasing away the chill of desperation. When my eyes landed on the stained carpet again, I couldn’t help the hiss that slipped through my clenched teeth.
What did I care if I got fired? I’d pick up more shifts at the restaurant. I’d find a way.
I would not go back to my parents. Not after what they’d said to me. After how they’d treated me. And I would not let yet another man make me feel worthless and small and useless.
Sheer, pathological stubbornness was the only thing that had gotten me through this past year. It would see me through whatever came.
Marching to the mess on the desk, I glanced at the single framed photo of a little girl, and I huffed. I bet he loved looking like a family man, but how often did he see his kid? Was she growing up like I had, with all the privilege in the world and not an ounce of real affection?
If I lost my job for this, it would be worth it. I snatched one of the papers from the stack on the leftmost edge of his desk, flipped it over, and grabbed the first pen I found.