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Billups Hardware is of the Ace variety, in a low-slung, glass-fronted building with wood stacked beneath four pole barns out back. I walk in to the main building, and the scents of motor oil, metal, paint thinner, and cardboard hit my nose even before the bell on the door is finished dinging. It’s a very Mitch smell, and I feel a little awkward walking into the building. It feels like a very man place, and I stand frozen for a second, thinking that maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Then I see Rob, a friendly smile on his face as he holds up a small bag and keys an item number into the register. A woman stands opposite him, and my panic wanes. Not just a man place, then. He glances up, making polite small talk with the dark-haired woman he is helping, her hair teased up like a little halo around her head. He sees me, nods, and beckons me over. The woman pays. Rob puts her two paintbrushes, package of X-acto knives, and two pints of paint into a paper bag.
I scan the aisles until I hear him thank his customer and the ding above the door as she goes out. He greets me with a warm, open smile, and I feel my own mouth spreading. “Thanks for the phone call last night,” I say. He nods, as if to say it was nothing.
“When Billups said he wanted to hire a high schooler, I knew you’d be great.” He steps out from behind the counter, and I follow him. “Let’s go meet the man.”
Mr. Billups looks like Santa Claus. White-haired and bearded with overalls and a t-shirt covering his paunch. I have a split second fear that he will sit me across his lap and ask me “What do you want, Little Girl?” He does not. Thank God. He greets me with a handshake, large calloused hands that completely fold over my own, and invites me into his office. I sit across from him, and he asks, “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.” He nods. Damn. “I mean sixteen, I just turned.”
“You’re folks okay with you getting a job.”
My “folk” could give a shit less and isn’t going to know, but I don’t say anything of the kind. Instead I say, “Yes, Sir,” maybe too quickly. “They are very supportive.” Did I really just say that?
“Do you have transportation?”
“I have a bike.” He smiles, and I half expect a jolly Ho Ho Ho. My answers are okay; I’ve passed, so far. He rustles over his desk and peels an application from a pad, sliding it across to me. I smile and look through the application.
“You can fill that out and bring it back. You can have the job if you want it.”
“That was easy.” I smile and give just a little laugh.
“Rob told me good things.”
Bless Rob, who certainly shouldn’t have had anything good to say about me. I was nothing if not rude at his house.
Mr. Billups offers me a tour of the store, and I follow him with my application in my hand. He motions to plumbing fixtures and piping, then tools, paints, woodworking. Finally we are at the back of the store, and he goes toward a dark stairwell, and my throat begins to close with that old familiar lump. I hesitate at the bottom until he reaches the top and flips on the light. I swallow around my lump. He has already moved past the steps and is waiting for me in the file room, a loft that overhangs that back quarter of the store. He doesn’t seem to have noticed my hesitation, and I am grateful. I would have said I was just a little scared of the dark. Even as embarrassing as that is, it is better than saying I was afraid for a minute that he was leading me into a dark place so he could grope me, which would probably make him change his mind about hiring me.
He talks me through the filing system, which is simple but also overwhelming. I feel my pulse pumping up, and I wonder if I am ready for this, for a job. What if I screw it all up?
“So, what do you think?” Mr. Billups asks, his arms spreading wide to display his files and, beyond the windows, his store. He is proud. He has built this.
“I think I’d love to work for you, Mr. Billups.” Seriously, who wouldn’t want to be an elf? I promise to fill out the application and get it back the next day.
And I did. I am grateful that I don’t have to worry about a waiver, since there is no sober parental unit able to sign anything. The next afternoon when I show up with the application, Mr. Billups neatly places it in a “to be filed” box without so much as looking at it and turns me over to Rob to start teaching me the register. I finish my shift at eight and ride my bike home, grateful that it is staying light a little later, but even so, the sun has dropped low to the horizon as I ride. I hope not to get run over by my own mother on her way home from wherever she goes these days. Mr. Billups said we’d start with four hours a night for three nights a week until school is out, and then we’d plan for the summer.
I’m a little worried about what my mother will say when I get home late. Will she be angry that she didn’t know where I was, worried, thinking something bad had happened? I pedal a little faster, hoping to make it “less bad,” but when the trailer comes into view at full dusk, I am relieved because it is dark and neither Mitch nor my mother’s car is parked in the yard.
***
Throughout the rest of the school year, all of two and a half weeks and into the summer, I work at my little job without anybody being the wiser. My mother never once asks where I have been or what I was doing, and it may even be accurate to say that she hasn’t noticed anything different in my routine. I have thought for a long time that she doesn’t really notice me in her life except the inconvenience of me being there, needing stuff. I ride my bike most days to get to the store and home again, and it feels like the best thing in the world to have a little stash of money growing and to have someplace to be where people act like people are supposed to.
I’m so busy that I don’t even have to try to force Dylan out of my mind. I’m so busy that I almost don’t think of him at all. It feels good to be busy, to be the one who doesn’t have time, the one who has something better to do. I stop going past his house on any pretext with the hope of catching sight of him. He hasn’t given a second thought to my sudden absence—he doesn’t really care, except when it strokes his ego to be doing something good for the poor kid, his charity kid. I close the door as the beggar in our friendship and focus, very intently, on doing a good job for Mr. Billups so someday I can get out of the trailer, away from my mother, and out of this damn town. Someday I am going to have something, and if I want that, then I’m going to have to do it myself. There are no knights coming to the rescue. I don’t want charity.