Jennifer Jazz

Two Short Stories

Notes on life in a no man’s land run by thugs and liars

A decent job in business-to-business sales to replace the one I’d lost was what I needed but was unlikely in March of 2008 with the number of jobless Americans at a 16-year high. The odds were against me: A middle-aged black woman in a field where the ideal candidate was more often than not, a young white guy, but my share of the bills collecting on the kitchen table in the suburban house I shared with my teenage son and mother had to be paid, so I accepted a bullshit job offer from Telecom X.

Orientation was disorienting. Numbing PowerPoint slides about the company’s facilities and locations went on and on. We role played. My coworkers were mostly twenty something “gadget heads” who’d been sales associates at retail chains that specialized in electronics or fielded calls for other mobile networks. None had made it to college so had modest expectations of work, but there were others who anxiously speed thumbed bored messages to friends, griped about not being able to get out on the floor right away to make money, the scarcity of new apps. They would play Sonic the Hedgehog and Brickbreaker on their phones to control their frustration at how long it was taking trainees like me to understand what technical processes such as “provisioning” and “flip-flopping” involved. The only other real adult was an older man with shoulder length silver hair who had also apparently decided to accept a salary that was a pittance above minimum wage for lack of a better option. Every time the phone in his pocket vibrated though, he’d lunge into the hall to talk with recruiters and was off to bigger and better within a few days lucky for him.

Three weeks after training, unfortunately, I was still around, wishing they’d fire me since I’d only make a just small amount less collecting unemployment, but Telecom X had high turnover. Each time they let someone go, they lost the money they had invested in them during their paid training or some such game theory, so they kept sending me back to this windowless beige room to do mock calls and watch the same slides until being told I could leave. Wearing a headset was not me, and when I’d clamp mine on, Freedom, a young supervisor with a Lion King mane of natural oil scented dreadlocks, would have to visit my cubicle much more than the others, but Freedom, a bunker of Zen tranquility who would simply twist and stroke his thick ropes of hair while sipping containers of muscle milk through a straw with his humongous arms fanned out like a toy superhero would politely correct my mistakes while firmly refusing to let my trauma become his.

“A mostly black force has never been a good sign,” is what my 77-year old aunt sighed when I told her how demeaning my latest place of employment was. No one could ever have ever taken Telecom X to court on grounds of discrimination. They probably gloated about their commitment to diversity, but diversity meant little when I needed advice on who to transfer calls to. My co-workers tended to be rude, at times even pompous as if it were a step down for them to engage with me.

Angel, a former customer service agent, was our trainer. His hobby was customizing cars. The ringtone on his mobile was an R. Kelly song that would elicit snickers. After telling him I realized I probably wouldn’t graduate at the rate that I was going, during an aside in a small conference room and asked if he knew what my unemployment status would be if I were fired, Angel asked what type of work I’d done before. Assuming when I answered ‘sales’ that I worked for one of Telecom X’s competitors, I went on to explain that it wasn’t inbound, how I’d had clients who I sometimes met at large events, the more I opened up about myself, the more I could see a joke lighting up his face that he would entertain the other trainers with later.

After doing yet another training, I still had only a minimal understanding of the two customer management programs we used once I was back in the lab of partitioned work spaces they sometimes referred to as the “bay.” Most of my calls were from customers threatening to cancel their accounts.  My job was to ‘save’ them. My performance was measured by how many saves I achieved each day. The techniques I was advised to use to retain them were anywhere from offering a better than advertised discount on the latest Blackberry, to reminding them that starting over with a new wireless provider would not only involve purchasing expensive new equipment but paying activation fees all over again. If they still insisted on canceling their account after I’d made my best effort at talking them out of it, I had no choice but to do what they asked. One day while trying not to anger my co-workers any more than I already had, yet still determined to be fired, I asked a kid with shiny cornrows neatly pulled into an elastic band, whose name I’d see on the construction paper and crayon decorated announcements of employees who had recently earned bonuses that they taped to the wall near the concession machines, to tell me what the secret to his success was.

“I don’t let nobody out their contract,’ Dimples admitted, looking as amused as he was ashamed. The two of us laughing like how you do when you refuse to let a bad situation get the best of you.

After more faux mentoring, I still didn’t get what the hell I was supposed to do sitting in that damned cubicle and when the father of a freshman at a college in a rural area of Maryland patched into my line, asking to be let out of his two-year contract without having to pay a $200 early termination fee since the reception at his son’s campus was poor, I immediately empathized, knowing the only thing that needed to be done was free him of his contract. Raising my hand to indicate that I had an escalation, but being considered a cry baby by everyone by now, I was ignored, keeping my hand in the air though until an expressionless loaf of a man lumbered towards me like a reluctant boxing opponent, only jumping on the call when it was clear to him that I was unwilling to resolve the issue with the prescribed fast talk. Cracking his knuckles first and straddling a chair he grabbed from the vacant cubicle next to me, he informed the father that his son would be roaming off the same towers wherever he went, that a signal problem was probably not the issue, then talked him into buying a new phone.

Irate yelling customers frazzled me to the point that a few times a day I’d rip my headset from my ears and put my phone on standby without authorization. During these moments, whoever was “assisting,” as they’d say, would walk over and remind me that the country was in a recession, that jobs were few and far in between and that I should be glad I was working. One, a young trainer with a pierced tongue accused me of being softer with the customers than I could possibly be with ‘any of my kids,’ a confrontation that could have spiraled if I had thought it would culminate in me being terminated, but by that point, I was starting to believe, I’d dug a grave for myself.

Sometimes I couldn’t do anything but sit with my face in my hands and block out the drone of voices or just stand with my arms folded, ignoring incoming calls, trying to clear my head, which other recent hires in the room also began to do, one complaining to me about how insane doing such tasking work with such little preparation was until Angel stormed over flailing a spreadsheet at me one afternoon. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it caught me off guard.

“You’re trying to fail on purpose, aren’t you? He accused, bringing up the day I’d asked about my eligibility to collect unemployment. Finally, lacking the confidence to look me in the face, Angel said “if you do not want to work here, the only way will be for you to leave,” and that’s when it dawned on me that he needed a certain percentage of the recent hires he trained to meet graduation standards to meet a quota of his own so was mad I wasn’t another head he could make money on, but I still didn’t get why he expected me to forfeit my own well-being for a shit company that paid so little. I ended up alone in the elevator with Angel later that same day, waiting for him to acknowledge that all the cloak and daggers suspense between management and I was unnecessary when they knew the odds of me quickly finding decent work in a New York where the commuter buses to and from Manhattan only carried ghosts, was as likely as Christ’s second coming, but he just rattled his car keys, avoiding looking at me as if I were a demon who might put him under a spell if he did.

Having to deal with outsourced customer service agents ticked off most of the Telecom X customers who got transferred to call centers in India, but dealing with a hoodsourced labor force of minimum wage workers from across the five boroughs didn’t exactly fulfill their deepest desires either. It was common for customers to call reps they didn’t like “ghetto” or demand to speak to a “white person.” A few of the reps avoided hostile confrontations by using phone voices that were Salvador Dali surreal. Fitzroy, a Jamaican who spoke Patois with the woman in the cubicle next to him during breaks, assumed a Walter Cronkite persona that was part crunk professional, part performance art. Myesha, a young woman who’d finish the final call of the night with a soul drained suck of her teeth, had a bubbly Valley girl alter ego Chrissy. Talking pissed off people down from a high ledge, then selling them something once you had won their trust was what really comprised most of the job. You had to be friendly. You had to be firm. It was tricky.

Three months in, a top dog from a corporate office in Kansas, obviously using the element of surprise to terrorize everyone, called an emergency meeting for recent hires, then I was in another isolation tank type environment without a single window and not so much as a plant or bottle of spring water for me to drink. We sat in the dark. They wanted us to watch another presentation. The man giving it was named Rick. Rick was a higher up from the corporate office in Texas. The future of the company in such a weak economy was in upselling Rick informed us while pacing back and forth in front of a pulldown screen of Telecom X locations.

“What’s the difference between the map of our call centers in the U.S. and the one overseas?” asked Rick during his wrap-up.

“Well, it looks like the number of call centers outside the U.S. is growing,” a voice in the back responded.

“That’s right,” Rick agreed with a creepy cool. “And if we don’t retain more customers, this call center will go next,” he politely notified everyone before murmuring under his breath that we could leave.

But management spread fear all kinds of ways, most notably with the point system.  Each employee started out with around 60, the more you lost, the closer you were to being fired. You lost points for logging into your shift late, or logging out early. Points were taken off for calling in sick – or what they call ‘unscheduled days off.’ I never quite figured out all the ways you could lose points, but the other retention specialists never failed to remind me.

“You’re losing points for that.’ I’d hear each day or even worse, I’d get told that I was going to be ‘written up’ which was apparently even worse.  The very worst thing that could happen though was being ‘walked out’ which happened to be my fantasy much to the irritation of my teammates. No surprise, I soon developed the same disdain for Courtney with her voluptuous cheekbones and glamorous lashes, that she showed towards me whenever she’d ask “you alright today?” with a doubtful brow raised and ridicule in her tone since I was crazy by her logic to not be trying to make the monthly bonus Telecom X paid anyone who maintained a certain save rate.  An in-house super star, Courtney strut back and forth to the snack machine as if it were hers personally. If someone from management were suddenly present, however, she became an obsequious Goody Two Shoes, smiling so ceremoniously I was always shocked she didn’t roll her eyes in the air as they walked away. Eva, the bell ringer of the cathedral, lingering in her cubicle to mull over her daily performance measurements out loud, didn’t think much of me either. “Yes, perfect score again on my average call handling time,” She’d congratulate herself each night before logging out, followed by an angry silence when she observed how low our team’s save score was dropping. The bottom line was I was messing with her paycheck. Freedom had made me ‘double jack’ with her once to further expose me to the art of stopping customers from canceling their contracts. When I showed no sign of having changed my ways, Jarvis, a former used car salesman who fancied himself the smoothest of talkers was sent in. He was decked out in a red satin tie, black shirt and polyester suit the day he joined me in my cubicle with high enthusiasm. The rest was a fight though.

“You’re not supposed to let people out of their contracts,” Jarvis beefed. It felt personal, but I didn’t let it get to me.

“It’s their money. What they do with it isn’t my decision,” I reasoned until he stood up, whispered that “I needed Jesus in my life,” in my ear and left.

The word that I was too soft on my customers, that I let them tell me what to do and not the other way around, kept spreading, so it came as no great shock when I was pulled off the phones and sent to ‘customer advocacy’ indocrination. There, I spent an hour listening to a pony tailed smart aleck in skinny jeans and throwback gazelles glasses expound on the importance of customers being educated on the great rates and services Telecom X offered.

“This morning,” the kid in the gazelles went on to share, “I was speaking to a man who would not listen to all the features and benefits of staying with us no matter how much time I spent educating him. He just kept telling me to cancel his service, so I said to him, ok, sir. I am happy to do that for you, but first let me get one thing straight. You are not interested in saving a thousand dollars. Is that right?”

I suffered through coaching session after coaching session for reps with low save rates, but mine remained at zero per cent. Zero per cent a symbol of my struggle to not cooperate with Telecom X’s wack agenda, and when a woman whose brother was in a coma called to see if I could waive bills he was incurring while hospitalized, I put her on hold to find out if there was anything I could do to help her, not caring how many of my team mates sneered and whispered in each other’s ears as I ran around the floor seeking assistance from guys who were supposed to help resolve calls that retention specialists couldn’t, but went out of their way to avoid anyone they saw heading their way. “Unless her brother’s dead and she has the certificate, he has to make payments,” one finally informed me before I got back on the call and expressed my sympathies, not forcing her into an extended contract or passing her onto someone else, apologizing whenever she began crying that there was nothing I could do that would be nearly enough. And when a young man in a rural part of Texas appeared on my line, huffing and puffing about his smart phone track ball being stuck and the nearest Telecom X repair center being fifty miles from his house, I did multiple searches through a directory of national outlets, discovering there was one only two miles across the border from him in Oklahoma, happy I was able to help him out even if had not technically threatened to terminate his contract, so my efforts wouldn’t be recorded as ‘a save.’ And when a woman wanted to cancel her and her husband’s cell phone service because they’ve both been laid off, once she established that they still had a land line phone to use, I didn’t try to talk her into keeping her account active.

I took the elevator down to a lobby that was almost always vacant one late afternoon, unconsciously passing the directory of smaller companies with suspiciously generic names and logos listed on it that Telecom X supposedly shared the building with but whose employees I never once saw. I needed some air. I was working the dreaded 1:00 to 10:00 at night shift. When I stepped outside, the usual creepy feeling that aliens had replaced the Earth I knew with a decoy Earth washing over me.

My save rate of zero per cent remained unchanged when a team meeting was called that I was the only one not invited to. My team had the worst numbers on the floor. It was all my fault. As they streamed back to their cubicles a short while later, Freedom appeared and marched me into an empty office to let me know that if I didn’t improve my performance, I would be terminated within a few weeks. Some team leader behind him playing the part of a witness, but coming across more like his bodyguard instantly thrusting a document at me they told me to sign that proved I’d been informed of my ‘corrective action’ status. I was sure I’d soon be let go so felt so much better later and when a business called in requesting that I deactivate 20 downsized employee’s lines, I actually tried to do ‘a save’ just for the hell of it, recommending they keep the lines active in a suspended mode for a low monthly cost so when they brought in new people, they wouldn’t have to start from scratch, but they explained they didn’t anticipate onboarding new staff for a long time to come. It was such an irreverent conversation. We took turns cracking jokes about a future without jobs. I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long while, so it felt good. Then, Freedom was over my shoulder, asking me to follow him to into a conference room where a kid with the precision haircut and pierced ear who had hired me but I hadn’t seen since then sat at his desk. “What can I do to help you meet your monthly goal?” the HR kid demanded to know when Freedom and I were seated.

“My concern is that I need more time to get better at my job than the company’s most likely able to give,” I replied deadpanning both of them.

“Would returning to training help?” the HR kid drilled while Freedom sat upright, clutching a corrective action status paper higher ups had given him to intimidate me.

“I won’t learn as much in training as I can on the floor.” I sang, showing them I was willing to engage in the psyops and melodrama as long as they were.

“Well, do you think you can actually improve your performance?” the HR kid pressed.

“I only have until the end of the month. But I’m going to try,” I sang with the same insincerity, hoping they finally understood that I wasn’t budging unless I was fired.

“Well, do you really want to work here? Because we can wrap this whole thing up right away. You can just leave, you know,” The HR kid bullied, pointing towards the door, naively hoping I’d cave in suddenly and leave, which of course didn’t work. Minutes later, I was back at my desk after signing a paper telling me that I had one month to improve my performance. The next morning waking up completely drained by the predicament I was in, I called in sick. Just hid in bed all day without even the strength to get up and shut off the business news about the decline of the dollar and the rising value of currencies I‘d barely heard of droning on the ‘effin TV in the den.

Customers trying to cancel their accounts had been lured back in with retention offers for so long that they prowled the phone queues all day and night for more. Those too greedy to be satisfied had become Telecom X’s worst nightmare. Management cringed in their offices in remote parts of the building as retention staff held them off and while there were times when the overall beating back without chasing away effort was a success, the next afternoon was not one of them. In every cubicle, specialists and customers who wanted the latest bells and whistle phone for absolutely nothing -- or just a dollar -- or without a contract, argued on and on without end. The mood was that of a packed hospital emergency room. Telling a woman in North Carolina that I could not reduce her bill without there being actual accounting errors on it, wasn’t enough to get rid of her but instead of hitting the red release button that would drop her entirely, I was trying to be patient and small talk with her for a while when Freedom approached my work station and asked me to follow him towards The HR Kid’s office again. The form I had signed had stated I had until the end of the month to reform my evil ways, but not even a full week later, they were bullying me again.

“Have you given our last discussion any thought?” The HR Kid asked.

“I’m not going to keep coming in this room.” I warned.

“You’re aware that you’re on corrective action.” He shot back, doing a sad sack impression of a prosecutor from one of those shows about lawyers everybody likes.

“According to what I understand, I’m being given until the end of the month to turn things around,” I said to Freedom, ready for him to stop hiding behind his Bob Marley t-shirt, hair and idealistic name and back it up with something under than customer service BS, but he took the practical way out and kept his mouth shut. Mister Haircut broke the silence after rushing to push the open door closed. “We don’t mean to beat up on you. We just need to know what you want to do…” he elaborated in a more polite tone.

“Oh, so I’m part of managerial decision making. Okay,” I said, sick of waiting for them to crap or get off the pot.

“I guess I’m going to have to separate you from the company then.” The HR Kid finally announced almost under his breath, uneasily eyeing Freedom, only when he asked if I needed to get anything from my desk before I left, was it clear to me that my Telecom X nightmare was finally over. Worried there was nothing stopping the HR kid and Freedom and from saying I quit, I resisted rushing out into the open air when I reached the customarily vacant lobby, picked up the phone on a wall, relieved when someone answered, and announced I’d just been fired,” then asked to speak to Human Resources, expecting emergency management goons to rush out and manhandle me out the door, but within just a few minutes, Brenda Dowling, the department director was stepping up to introduce herself in a soft denim shirt, belted denim skirt and pumps with sensible heels. I had no reason to doubt anything she said with her eyes so thoughtfully roaming mine as she described this conglomerate based in Oklahoma City that would mail an exit envelope detailing everything in a few weeks. She invited me to sit with her on a couch where she mentioned medical benefits, paystubs and whatever other information I might need that she could think of until I was back out on the American street running from company to company, each one setting the bar for compensation only as high as necessary to distinguish itself from thieves.

Licorice

 

Marquita sneaks the peephole shutter aside so as not to be heard, spies Tony hoisting a spray can and opens the door bouncing Jayco in her arms.

“Wasn’t expecting anyone. Sorry,” she says, face to face with another adult for the first time in many days.

“Not a problem,” shrugs Tony. The pasty odor in the air telling him to spray the baseboards first.

“They’re everywhere. Please do something,” Marquita pleads in a voice so sweet, Tony almost pleads back when he says, “I’m ‘gonna spray extra hard for ‘ya. Don’t worry, Miss.”

Last night, she’d reached for her toothbrush but let go fast when something nervous and bright she shook from her hand hemorrhaged into a hole behind the hot water faucet above the tub. She’d find them upside down with the hideous architecture of their bodies in plain view, would see them on the stove. They’d skid across the wall and ceilings, were taking over.

Before her father was shot on Kingsbridge and the Concourse for the last few bucks in his wallet – may he rest in peace Rex because he was a good man who ran a bookstore in a community that hasn’t had one since – Marquita would visit her paternal grandparent’s house in the ‘burbs of Boston. Graduates of this university and that with a last name that spoke of generations of success, they’d learned to tolerate Rex’s bohemian tendencies, but his wife chain smoking out the side of her mouth and cussing every other word -- pretty as she was, had never been a good look for the family. Rex’s parents doing what they could to tear them apart -- though the night he let a kid with a hood over his head take his wallet but wouldn’t give him the watch Goosie had given him for his birthday, only a bullet would.

Facing her kitchen window now while Tony sprays, Marquita remembers another overcast afternoon that she sat on a swing in her grand-parent’s yard while her father relaxed on the one next to her reading a newspaper. Unsure if it’s just the chemicals or she’s missing him again, a tear streaks down her face. Placing Jayco on the sofa, she coughs into her fist and follows Joe into the bedroom.

“Hot, huh?” she asks, glad to not be alone for a change.

“Breeding season.” Says Tony trying not to stare by not looking at her all together.

“My mother swears by boric acid.”

“First wave very effective. Second wave, no.” answers Tony, flustered that Marquita’s not the usual shadow he can work around and ignore. In a walk-up on 196th and Bainbridge once a woman pointed under her sink to show him where the infestation was with such alarm in her face, he’d gotten on all fours and poked his head into the cabinet to look for openings they were entering through, ending up with a mask of frantic roaches spiraling his face. Spit one off his tongue and blew another from his nose into a napkin, the woman cursing him the whole while for making the problem worse. As if the agitated state Joe’s normal customer was in when he arrived wasn’t enough reason to just spray and rush out the door, there were his dad’s constant warnings to distance himself from the neighborhoods their business served.

“Don’t want to end up like Timmy Purin,” his father still gripes and shakes his head in disbelief about a former altar boy at St. Agnes who ended up schmoozing with ghetto drug dealers on a first name basis. What Tony’s dad never conceded was how stoned Timmy had to be to level open clam shells and scrape fish scales from dawn to dusk. Timmy had dreamt of seeing the world, would’ve joined the Navy if his folks hadn’t been so adamant about him helping run their damned fish market. Forgetting his usual rule to get in and out of the apartments he sprayed fast, “You o.k.?” Tony pauses to ask Marquita when he observes her sitting in the living room in an armchair with her eyes all warm and wet, unable to believe how angelic she is when she simply nods with a faraway smile.

She’d never not been a challenge. Goosie considering her even more of a puzzle than her video game addicted son Brody. “Earth to Marquita,” she’d call when she’d find her daughter gazing off at absolutely nothing on the porch. Why didn’t she have any friends? Ever go anywhere? What was wrong with her?

“Seen Space Cadet?” Brody would ask until much to his and his mother’s relief, Marquita would appear sucking on a root beer barrel or jawbreaker, holding a brown bag of loose candy in her fist that she’d sulk off to sort through among the childhood toys she’d never replaced with more mature things. At twenty-one, Marquita was in many ways still a ten-year old. That’s why Goosie couldn’t figure out how the hell she was pregnant once her stomach started to swell. When a stern middle-aged man with a beard and mustache so meticulous, they looked as if they’d been airbrushed on showed up one night to take Marquita out, it occurred to Goosie and Brody later that he was a cabdriver who drove for a nearby car service. Why Marquita decided to live with him was harder to figure out.

“Damned perv.”

“Must not earn much money. See how he lives?”

“See where he lives? Not a week goes by someone over there doesn’t get shot.”

The eyesore of a house on Villa Avenue where Goosie, Marquita and Brody resided was only one stop north on the D train from Marquita and Lou’s, but Goosie considered her daughter’s new address such a step down that when she wanted to see her grandson, she’d send Brody to get him, once phoning Marquita after she’d had Jayco all day to announce she wasn’t returning him for his own good. Withdrawn and pouty as Marquita was, she’d put up a fight when pushed.

“You send Jayco back or I’ll flatten your tires.”

“You would do that to your own mother?”

“What are you doing to me?”

“I’m protecting my grandson.”

“You don’t have to protect him from me anymore than anybody protected me from you.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Bring back my son, mommy or you’ll find out.”

“You can open a window or two if you like,” offers Tony now, swiping his bangs from his eyes to check Marquita out more thoroughly as she rises to let in some fresh air. She had inherited her curves from Goosey, was even curvier in fact, which might have been a good source of Goosie’s antagonism towards her daughter, jealous witch that she was. Pushing aside Jayco’s crib now, “this stuff’s basically harmless, but hey, the smell gets to you sometimes,” says Tony, with his attention decidedly downcast. Just as a roofer avoids falling by not thinking past his own feet, Tony had learned to ignore the smell of insecticide as well as the fact that it was gradually giving him the same nerve damage it gave the cockroaches he sprayed. Lugging his poison door to door since his junior year of high school, he had never ceased to be surprised at the desperation with which he was received. The world was porous, anarchy leaking in in the form of bugs. Unfortunately, he couldn’t permanently stop them, only chase them back into their evil portals for a month or two.

“That’s better,” says Marquita, letting her mutual interest in Tony show when she sits fascinated by his prismatic complexion and slick skin tawny that bring to mind a supercockroach in a comic. But all men have a monstrous veneer, then when you least expect it, become affectionate. Case in point, two months ago – so early in the morning even Jayco was still asleep, some man who said he’d found Lou’s cell phone called. It was a Saturday and she hadn’t seen Lou since Friday afternoon, which was typical for a summer weekend when the streets were hopping with fares. Marquita lay asleep on the sofa with the TV still on when Lou finally showed up that Monday. She felt him lightly stroke her face, opening her eyes to look into his as he scrutinized her like something hidden he wanted to be sure was still there, then she lay there hoping he’d doze off in his chair in the corner and not make her join him in bed once he came out of the shower when the front door exploded off the hinge and more men than she could count streamed in with guns pointed at her and Jayco. Lou, dripping wet and naked in handcuffs within minutes. Gladiator breasted men in heavy boots reporting into walkie-talkies without saying a word to her. Marquita not fully understanding until the next day when Brody and her mom shoved page four of the Daily News at her to show her that Lou was a serial creep who trawled the streets near bars and clubs in the wee hours looking for female passengers wasted enough for him to have his way with, his last victim snatching his phone before she fled from his cab.

It still came as a surprise to Marquita that she was a mom, never mind a single one. First she was playing with dolls, the next Jayco – only Jayco wasn’t plastic. She bathed, fed, dressed him, pushing him in the stroller to the pediatric clinic while under a trance. On one such occasion, Marquita sadly realizing how easy it would be to leave him any old where without him knowing where to find her, but she was too good a kid to follow through with the crazy ideas that crossed her mind.

“I’ve seen a few of the big ones…” Marquita hesitates before confiding.

“What, palmettos?” asks Tony, baring a grill of bad teeth. “Oh, don’t worry about them,” he elaborates raking his fingernails across his chest to illustrate how the poison circulates through them, “They die right away ‘cause they eat so much insecticide. See?” he says, adding, “Of course, this building’s so poorly maintained, you’ve got a lot of them not to worry about.” Folding his arms, Tony leans into the wall with his ankles crossed. Marquita, the poster girl for someone too young to have given up on life, dropping her chin in the palm of her hand and sighing, which makes him want to console her in some way that chemicals can’t. He wonders now if she’d let him, but instead gestures towards a pair of white leather sneakers with velcro straps and asks, “Yours?”

“My husband’s…ex-husband’s, I guess.” she stammers, wiping away a tear.

“For better or for worse, right?” Tony asks under his breath. The piles of clean baby laundry and diapers he surveys offering him a dreamlike reprieve. It had to happen that one day he’d enter a door he didn’t want to exit. Hell. It was the very moment his old man was always trying to stop from happening. Biting her bottom lip, Marquita tightens the knot on her robe, trying to control the cleavage Tony pretends not to see. He could do her right there and then and still make the rest of his appointments, but loves the pure unknown in which he’s floating too much to want to interrupt it.

“You like ice cream?” he tries. “Want to get some? Bring your kid? We can sit on a bench in the playground or take a ride in my truck,” Tony suggests. Marquita only kind of smiling as she realizes his eyes remind her of licorice jelly beans, which she’d never liked, but was always tasting again, to see if her mind had changed.