Chapter 2 #2
“I’m not organized,” I told her. “You should ask my siblings about that.” They would have plenty to say, which I knew because they were always saying those things.
“Well, if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine.” She turned to look at her monitor.
I didn’t mean that, not exactly. I needed money because I’d just had to fork over a ton of rent to get myself current with my landlady, and that had made severe depletions into the cash I’d earned today.
Even with a lot of PB and J at my mom’s house, there wasn’t much left over to last me for the next few weeks if I didn’t want to dip into my secret stash.
“I’m not saying I don’t want to do it,” I told her. “I was trying to be cautious.”
“Like when you stuck your hand in the fish tank filter, that kind of cautious?” She chuckled. “You would work with Pinar. She’s great and she would show you what to do, if you’re interested.”
I decided that I was. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Good.” I would have to talk to Dr. Winter, she told me, so I should probably wait for a few more moments because he would return here from the hospital before he headed home.
In the meantime, she asked me more questions but I was used to people trying to figure out my life.
I had all my sisters who were interested in the same thing, and I never gave them too much.
Eventually, Regina got tired of my answers and I went back to looking at the fish while we waited. Theo Winter came in after a while, and as the door opened, I heard him sigh.
“Tough day,” she said.
“Not good,” he agreed, and then saw me. “Hi, Grace. How are the fish?”
“Much improved,” I told him. He looked tired and distracted, and the aquarium probably wasn’t much of a concern for him.
Regina had a few messages to give him and they talked quietly, and then I heard her say in a louder voice that I was available for temp work. I turned to watch his reaction to that.
“Uh…” He stared at his nurse. “Really?”
She nodded. “Really,” she said. “I always believed in serendipity. I told Grace that you would need to interview her, of course.”
“Of course.” He was still staring at her. “Really?”
“If you don’t have time now, she could come back tomorrow morning.” She checked her computer. “Clinic hours begin at eight-thirty. Should I put her down for eight? Grace, does that work for you?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. I would try my best to find my phone so I would be on time, because internal alarm clocks weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
He nodded slowly as well. “Wonderful. Let’s go over what you’ll need to bring,” she told me briskly. “Doctor, you can go ahead to your office while Grace and I talk for a moment.” He walked away, looking back over his shoulder a few times.
I was familiar with filling out an application because I had applied for many jobs before, which I told her. I’d worked at more than twenty places, in fact.
“Why so many?” she wondered.
“There are different reasons. A few times, the position disappeared.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, as an example, I worked at a carnival and I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that it was leaving town. The job was suddenly in Dayton while I was here in Detroit,” I explained. “But mostly, the issue was that I was a bad employee, so I got fired.”
“Why were you a bad employee?” Regina asked.
I thought for a moment. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said, which was a phrase that my sister Addie had taught me to use when I’d interviewed for a different job at a bank.
She said that whenever I couldn’t think of a good response to something, I should tell the interviewer, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.
” I hoped that it worked better now than it had then, because the bank lady hadn’t liked it much.
“Grace, when she asked you if you considered yourself to be an honest person, you said, ‘I’ll have to get back to you on that?’ Why?
” Addie had demanded afterwards, when she’d called me to see how the meeting had gone.
Obviously, I’d used her phrase because I’d wanted to think about my answer more, but my sister hadn’t been pleased.
“You are honest!” she’d insisted, but I still wasn’t sure.
Regina didn’t seem overly pleased with that response now, either. “You don’t know if you were a bad employee?”
“I’d have to say that I was, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten canned so often.
But the reasons were varied. A few times, it was because I forgot to come, but I lost the job in Kentucky after the cave collapsed.
And I got fired from my position as a magician’s assistant because Jadis the Great went up in smoke. ”
Her eyes narrowed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Yes, he left his family and ran off with another woman. Poof, he was gone. It happens more than you’d think with men you’d never suspect,” I assured her. In fact, I had up close and personal knowledge of that, and it was always a good idea to keep a close eye on your husband and his activities.
She was suddenly looking concerned, but that was when Theo Winter came back to join us. “I’m going for a walk. Grace, do you want to talk about the job now?”
“We do the hiring here with a checklist,” Regina told him, and he nodded.
“We can go through the checklist tomorrow morning at the appointment you just set up,” he said.
“It’s raining,” she said next, and I wondered how she knew. This office didn’t have any windows that I could see. In here, it was more like being in a little capsule and I kind of liked that.
“I’ll wear my coat and I remembered my umbrella today,” he replied.
She clearly disliked his responses, just like she hadn’t cared for mine. But the two of us did leave together and Regina stayed behind at her desk. “She’s probably not a believer in serendipity anymore,” I remarked.
“What?”
“I think she’s wishing that she never said anything to me about the job,” I told him as we waited for the elevator. “At least I got a little further along in the process this time. At the last place I interviewed, I didn’t even get to sit down before they told me that it wasn’t going to work.”
“That was fast.” He stood to the side and let me walk into the little cab first. “Why did it end so quickly?”
“I think it was because the interviewer got thrown off by the bird I was carrying. Not literally,” I added. “A bird couldn’t have thrown someone his size, not even a cassowary and we don’t have those in Detroit.”
“Did you bring a pet to a job interview?”
“No, I found it on the sidewalk,” I explained. “Then it pooped all over his office and he said that he wasn’t going to hire anyone who brought a sick animal into a restaurant, because it was unsanitary and said a lot about my judgement. Things are good now, though.”
“You cleaned up the mess?”
“He made me leave with the bird before I could, but he forgave me and we’re friends again. That was lucky because Granger is my brother-in-law, my sister Addie’s husband. And the bird recovered.”
Theo was quiet and seemed to be thinking until the descent stopped. “Why don’t you tell me more about yourself?” he suggested as we entered the lobby.
“Is that question from the checklist? Ok,” I agreed. “Well, I have long arms, as you may have noticed by how far I could reach into your aquarium.”
“I meant things like your education.” We exited the building and I saw that Regina had been right, and it was raining. Now that I thought about it, it had also been coming down on my way here. “Are you ok to go outside? Do you have a coat?” he asked me as we stood under the awning.
I looked at what I was wearing, which was the scrub top that I’d gotten from their office.
I had offered to return it but Regina had said no, not to worry, and it was very comfortable.
“I should be fine,” I said. “I didn’t notice before that it was cold.
” I did, however, notice the cold now. “You were asking about my education. I graduated from high school and then I started at Zina Pitcher Community College, but that didn’t last. I stopped going to class after a while. ”
He held his umbrella over both of our heads as we started our walk.
This was a big medical complex that included a fake lake, and there was a path encircling that with several benches where you could sit and enjoy being outside.
Those were empty, since no one would enjoy being outside today except for snails.
“Next, I left Detroit because I got into a four-year school in Kentucky and I went there for about…” I thought. “It could have been at least a month, but I left after the cave collapse.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t because of me. I wasn’t even in the cave at the time,” I reassured him.
But I had lost my job and I was ready to go, anyway.
I continued recounting my college experience, through the next one that I’d dropped out of, and up to the present day.
I still didn’t have any kind of degree but had stopped trying for one. “Now you.”
Theo was watching me. “Are you sure that you’re not cold? We can go inside.”
I looked at him and saw that he had more color than before, and that he also looked more awake and less sad. “No, I want to stay out here and walk more,” I answered. “It’s your turn to tell me about your education.”
“That’s not how interviews work.” But then he smiled. “Ok, sure. I’m originally from Indiana and I went to high school there, and then to Indiana University.”
“And also medical school,” I added. “I hope you graduated from that, too.”
“I did,” he assured me. “I had always wanted to be a doctor but I didn’t think that it was going to work out.”
“What made it work?” I asked.
He paused and then told me, “I had a change in fortune.”
“Are you talking about crystal balls or something else?”