Two

 

Chandra stared blankly at the computer screen. Her head pounded. She put her head in her hands, her elbows resting on the desk next to the keyboard. It was only Tuesday. The week had just started, but it already seemed to be lasting forever.

"You okay?" a voice asked.

Chandra spun around in her chair to see Renee standing at the entrance to her cubicle. "Just tired," Chandra responded.

"It's best not to party too hard on weeknights," Renee chuckled.

"Thanks for the advice." Chandra turned back around to face her computer. She didn't want to talk to anyone; she just wanted to go home.

"Anytime." Renee ran her fingers along the side of the cubicle as she walked away. Her fingernails made a zipping sound on the rough fabric wall.

Chandra didn't expect her life to end up like this. As a girl, she'd imagined a life full of adventure and possibilities. She'd pictured herself having traveled the world by now, not sitting in some office doing work she didn't care about. In these tired moments at work, it really sank in.

When she'd taken the job, she never thought it would last this long. She'd been working in this same cubicle, sitting at this same desk for roughly five years now. She placed her aching head down on the desk to rest for just a few minutes.

A thud on Chandra's cubicle wall jolted her awake. "Quitting time!" Renee called out as she passed. She didn't even bother to look in at Chandra this time. Chandra sat bolt upright in her chair. At first, her surroundings seemed unfamiliar. Then she realized she was at work. She looked at her slim watch--the oval white face attached to a gold chain. It was already five minutes past five. How could she have slept for over an hour at work without anyone noticing? She rubbed her eyes, smearing her eyeliner up from the corner of her right eye all the way to her temple.

"I'm leaving for the day," she announced to Sharon, the receptionist.

Sharon was on the phone, but she nodded and acknowledged her with a wave.

Chandra pushed the glass door open and stepped out into the heat. She slipped out of her gray suit jacket as she walked across the parking lot to her car. Her white silk blouse was already starting to stick to her skin in the humidity.

Barney, the security guard, rolled up next to her in his sky-blue golf cart with the word "Security" written on it in black block letters on the side. "Quittin' time?" he asked.

"Yep."

He pulled his cart up in front of her blocking her path. Chandra stopped walking abruptly and sneered at him.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

He took off his hat and rubbed his hand over the bald spot in the middle of his head. He looked at his hand for a moment, as if checking to see if he had rubbed something off on it. "So where you headed now?" His mouth was barely visible under his overgrown mustache. Chandra often wondered how he ate, but didn't have the nerve to ask. She didn't want to talk to him any more than she had to.

Usually, she'd peer out of the glass doors of the building to make sure Barney's golf cart was out sight before heading for her car. Today she hadn't done that, and now she was regretting it. She found Barney to be presumptuous, pushy and just plain gross. "Home."

"Really? You don't have a night out planned?"

"It's Tuesday." Chandra draped her jacket over her forearm and folded her arms across her chest.

"People go out on Tuesdays too."

"Not me." Chandra walked around the back of his cart.

"What happened to your eye?" Barney asked.

Chandra turned back around to face him, "What?" She touched her face.

Barney pointed to his own eye. "You have black stuff on your face. You should probably take care of that before you hit the town tonight," he winked and pulled off. The loose stones on the blacktop crunched under the golf cart's tires. He waved his hat over his head triumphantly as he drove away.

 

**

Chandra didn't like driving with the windows down, but the air conditioner in her car had stopped getting cold two weeks earlier. Sometimes she could drive in the heat with her windows up and not even notice until she felt the sweat slipping down the back of her neck. Today wasn't one of those days. Today, she regretted not getting the air conditioner recharged last week like she had originally planned. Somehow, the week had gotten away from her and before she knew it, it was Monday again. She turned on the air-conditioning just in case it had started working again. Lukewarm air blew out through the vents, just adding to her discomfort. She turned it off and rolled down the windows.

Traffic crept along the southbound lanes of the Howard Franklin Causeway. It always did at this time. Her daily commute between Tampa and St. Pete always took almost twice as long as it should've. Chandra watched the cars on the opposite side of the bridge whiz by. She wondered who lived in Tampa and worked in St. Pete. She could tell from the traffic that not very many people did.

Country twang blared from the giant silver pickup truck next to her. A straggly, blonde woman in narrow, black sunglasses tapped her steering wheel in time to the music. Chandra sighed loudly and rolled her window back up.

She kept her eyes fixed on the yellow SUV in front of her. It was a color that she thought should only exist on toys. During the past several months, she had seen four SUV's turned over on the side of the highway and they were all this same shade of toy-dump-truck yellow.

Last Thursday she passed one. It was turned over on the median just after the causeway. She had stayed at work late that day missing the rush hour traffic, which was good. The sun was setting and a misty darkness was starting to fill up the places where light used to be. Just before she rounded the curve after the bridge, she saw the SUV's black tires stuck up in the air like legs. It lay upside down on its giant yellow back. A woman stumbled through the grass toward the shoulder of the road. Chandra was driving too fast to stop or even really see her, but she thought the woman had blood streaming down her face. She regretted not stopping to help the woman, but as she played the scene over again and again, she didn't see how she could've. She was nearly a quarter of a mile down the road before the scene even registered.

She saw that woman stumbling out onto the shoulder of the road in her mind now. She eased back off of the SUV, leaving a gap big enough for another car to fill. A dinged-up black sedan slipped into the space in no time.

The sun glinted off the roofs of the cars inching forward. Chandra didn't notice the clear blue water of the bay, the cloudless blue sky, the sun positioning itself to set, the pelicans gliding just above the water's surface. She noticed the cars, the noise, the pollution, and the slightly spongy feeling of her steering wheel.