12
I hate my job.
I didn’t know what the work would be when I spotted the ‘HELP WANTED’ sign in the window a few weeks ago.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into the general store that day—a shop that also moonlights as a liquor store and the town’s only post office.
Wish I didn’t have to get a job at all.
The pawning of the Jacob & Co watch brought us a little more than a hundred thousand dollars, and if I don’t work, then Sofía’s fees will eat through our funds too quickly.
So I unpack and cut and fold boxes.
Box after box after box.
The razor thin blade cringes my bones with every swipe through the cardboard. How easily it cuts, like it’s gliding through warm butter.
Once all the cardboard is cut up, I start sorting the stock on the tall, caged trolley to be rolled out front.
This is servant work.
I just can’t get used to it, not even after three years of living as a krum.
A weight sinks in my chest.
Three years and… three months.
I’m softly startled as I work out the maths.
It feels like a long time, but a short time.
It feels like forever, but no time at all.
And still, my old life niggles into my thoughts.
The pout pulls down the corners of my mouth. The unwillingness furrows my brow.
And I hit the stock down on the trolley harder.
Moodier.
Because this—
This is not the life I imagined for myself.
Not ever.
I’m just a servant now. A low-paid one, too. Not Mr Younge, Mrs Younge, or Abigail.
I’m the woman in the backroom who stocks trolleys and cuts boxes. Then I leave, pick up a kid from daycare, and go home to bad food in a small, crammed apartment.
I grab the blade from the workshop bench, then start hacking up the last of the boxes into smaller pieces that can fit into the bin.
My hands work monotonously. Instinctively.
I’ve done this so many times now that, even as I fight off the memories of home and comfort and wealth, my hands move without thought.
Like they do over the piano keys at home.
Home…
Home will never be these towns we stop in.
Home is Elcott Abbey.
A sprawling green estate of lush gardens and quaint cottages.
A surge of longing guts me.
Then the door groans open, and the manager’s thin face pops out from behind it. “Wrap it up. Shift’s over.”
I slide an unenthused glance to the white plastic clock on the wall.
A second should tick by, but it doesn’t.
Batteries have died.
I slice the final box, following the glued edges for a smoother cut.
I say, “I still have to take this out back and stock the shelves—”
“Well I’m not paying you overtime,” he snaps, and it’s like glass breaking, the hitch of his naturally whiny voice. “This ain’t a union town, darlin’.”
The sigh deflates my chest like a balloon.
It’s not that I’m chasing overtime.
It’s that I don’t want the second shift supervisor who works evenings to chew me out tomorrow for not finishing up.
This guy will fuck up somehow. He always does.
And I get shafted for it.
Shafted.
A word I picked up from our travels.
Krum slang used to be one of my biggest challenges. That, and learning monetary value. But slang especially.
Back in Regina, someone called Sal ‘the goat’, and I thought they were calling him a goat.
Serena’s better at communicating than I am.
My theory is that, because she had a smartphone back home and I didn’t, she understands the slang better.
She had access to the culture of the krums.
I didn’t.
“I’ll take this out to the bin first, then I’ll go.”
“No overtime.”
That’s all the manager says before his thin, pock-marked face disappears, and the door shuts.
No acknowledgement, no thanks, no nothing.
He doesn’t like me much.
Not since I rejected his offer to show me around town… all ten streets of it.
Happens in every town we go to.
The shiny new woman looking for a job.
Losers like him flock.
And it’s been an adjustment.
The attention.
Serena is used to it.
But in our world, I wasn’t exactly fawned over.
So it’s new.
I don’t love it. Not from losers like him.
Still, I need this job for as long as we’re in town, so I do what I said I would do.
I stuff all the cardboard scraps into the bin out back, then find the manager at the till for my pay.
Monday is payday, and he pays in cash.
I head to my car parked on the street.
It’s a small enough town that I don’t need to drive back and forth from the crummy apartment and the general store, but I was running late this morning after a night of tossing and turning.
The drive is quick.
It’s just a few minutes before I’m pulling into my parking space behind the building.
As I wrangle out the old rusty key and kick open the creaky door, I arch my neck—and look all the way up the fire escape.
Sometimes Serena’s head is bobbing around the kitchen window. But the late afternoon glare catches on the glass, and I can’t see a thing.
I tug my lumpy, flaking bag out the car, then boot the door shut.
If Serena’s up there, awake, there’s no doubt she heard the car door groaning. It’s loud enough to cringe me before I start up the fire escape.
I think there was a goldrush here at some point in time. There are a lot of these old buildings, apartments above shops, but most of them are taken.
It was by luck we got this one.
Pulled over to eat at the diner after too long on the road and saw a sign for the rental tacked to the window.
Apartment is a generous word for a place that’s really a studio. A kitchen, a lounge, a bedroom—all in one.
The only thing that’s separate is the bathroom, but that’s through the front door, then down the corridor.
No bathtub, but a lot of mould.
I avoid the front entrance as much as I can.
The little antique store downstairs is too dusty, and I get stuck with the owner every time I try to pass by. She’s one of those people that will hold someone up for an hour.
The fire escape leads me all the way up to the long window that opens into the bedroom area.
I stumble in, my sneaker snagging on the windowsill.
With a flushed glance at the double bed that we all cram into at night, I notice Serena hasn’t gotten around to refitting the sheets.
Sal had another accident in the middle of the night.
The mattress is bare, stripped of the sheets, but the fresh set are nowhere to be seen as I step over empty laundry baskets.
I move around the partition and find that the kitchen is empty.
Serena is nowhere to be seen.
But she has at least cleaned a bit.
The two-seater couch that faces the old bulky television has been brushed free of crumbs, and the ugly wooden dining table that can only fit two chairs has been wiped down.
I toss my bag onto the scratched surface of the dining table, then drop onto a wobbly chair and tug my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans.
The screen lights up.
No texts, no missed calls.
I set it down, then fish out the cash I stuffed into my front pocket.
I only just start to count it when I hear the familiar slap of slippers coming up the corridor.
I don’t look up at the door as it opens directly opposite me, but out the corner of my eye I can make out the basket perched on her hip.
It’s a generous hip. Both of them.
Serena never lost the birthing curves.
She doesn’t say anything before she shuts the door behind her.
Neither do I.
No need to ask where she’s been, since she carries the basket to the bed and starts fitting the sheets. The laundry room is downstairs at the back of the shop. Maybe she got stuck with the owner for an hour or two.
That’s my kind of hell.
Maybe more than this life…
I shove out the thoughts.
Save them for bedtime, like I always do, so I can toss and turn the night away, then work a shift with sleep deprivation, then come back to the apartment where Serena and I hardly speak outside of the things we need to say.
I finish counting the cash.
Her terse voice comes from the bedroom area, “How much is it?”
“Three hundred and ninety-three.”
A pause before she says, “That’s more than last week.”
I secure the stack with a rubber band. “Because last week,” I retort, and there’s undeniable snark in my tone, “I worked the weekend shifts.”
The silence that comes is predictable. Serena grasping as scraps of patience. Then, “Add it to the small treasure.”
Sal’s mind comprehends the stash of cash under the mattress as our small treasure box. It’s an envelope, but that doesn’t stop his imagination from running wild.
He has to be watched like a hawk most of the time, otherwise he’ll find a way into it.
Not a risk either of us wants to take.
The big treasure is in the car, tucked away with the spare tyre. That’s a lot of envelopes, slotted in where it can fit, and we move the bulk of the cash to the car when we find moments to.
Learned our lesson when we lost all that money a couple of months back, and our only saving grace was Oliver giving me that watch.
The mere thought of him hurts.
It pangs my chest, and I distract myself quickly.
“Any word from Sofía?” I ask.
For a beat, there’s no answer.
Just the billowing of a quilt, the fluffing of flat pillows that never fluff because they are filled with cotton and not feathers, then the creak of the bedframe.
I shift in the chair.
Serena finishes making the bed before she crouches down and lifts the corner of the mattress up. She reaches into the gap and lures out a yellow envelope, then turns on me, illusioned auburn hair falling into her flushed face, and flings the envelope my way.
I catch it with ease.
“I haven’t,” she says.
It takes me a second too long to realise she’s answering my question. She hasn’t heard from Sofía.
I stash the cash into the envelope, then throw it back her way. “She’s due the next payment this week.”
Normally she’s called us by now. Either to increase her fee or tell us of her new bank account details.
Maybe she isn’t calling because she’s been caught by the Videralli, and the shields are all coming down, and I get to go home—
That’s not a safe thought.
I can’t let anything happen to Sal.
It’s just the exhaustion getting to me.