If you have to take the first job that comes along in a town you’ve never been to, you could do a lot worse than a counter job at Simmons Cell Repair. I like the people I work with, though they find each other difficult.
One of the college students my boss mentioned in my interview is really a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Cleta who’s trying to get a business degree. She loves changing the radio station in the store to fifties music, to which she dances and shakes her hips as she moves around the store.
The other one, Rachel, really is of college age—twenty or so—and she marches to a different drum. She sits at the counter today, deeply engrossed in drawing on the inside of her forearm with a gel pen. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“Giving myself a tattoo,” she mutters, distracted.
“You already have one.”
“It’s not real,” Cleta says from the other side of the store. “At least not all of it.”
I’m not sure I understand. I step over to Rachel and study the paisley design on her left arm. “Just some of it’s real?”
“Yeah,” Rachel says, carefully tracing over the faded ink. “I went for a real tattoo, but it hurt. I hate pain. Wound up with part of the design before I got sick and had to quit.”
“So do you draw the rest in every day?”
“Yeah. If I don’t, it just looks like I’ve been writing on myself.”
“You have been writing on yourself.”
“Yeah, but when I do this, it’s art.”
I smile, glad I’ve never gotten a tat. “I have a friend who got a Chinese saying tattooed on her calf. She didn’t even know what it said.”
Rachel looks up. “Did she find out?”
“Yeah, a while later. It said, ‘Exit to the right.’ ”
“What? Why would she have that?”
“Probably someone’s joke,” I say. “But what if it had said something profound, but something she profoundly disagreed with? Like, what if she quoted the Qur’an, then became a Christian? Or what if she quoted the Beatles, then decided she hated their music? My dad was like that. He’d loved the Grateful Dead since he was a teenager, but then when he started playing their stuff for me, he didn’t like them anymore. What if he’d had Deadhead etched on his skin, only to find that he wasn’t one at all?”
Rachel looks up at me, amused. “You think too much,” she says.
“Yeah, I’ve been told that before.”
We laugh a lot together, and it feels good to have new friends. The work isn’t hard. The learning curve has been easy, since I read the manuals of all the phones and practiced how to work them in the store my first day. I’ve picked up enough to wait on customers and check in their phones.
“Do you think the person who dropped this phone in the toilet cleaned it off before he brought it to us?” Cleta asks, putting a damaged device into a Ziploc bag.
“Doubtful,” Rachel says. “It’s not like swabbing it with alcohol would be the first thing on their mind.”
“Gross,” I say. “Do we have alcohol wipes?”
“No, but we should so get some,” Rachel says, looking up from her tattoo. “Do you know how many different kinds of bacteria are on people’s cell phones? E. coli, staph, botulism . . .”
“I thought botulism was food poisoning,” I say.
“Still . . . you name it, it’s on those phones. Once I got a boil on my finger that swelled up like a basketball. I swear it was because of the germs on somebody’s phone.”
I grin. “Like a basketball? Really?”
“Well, maybe like a melon.”
“It was a golf ball,” Cleta corrects. “More like a ping-pong ball.”
“That’s still pretty big,” I say.
“We should wear gloves,” Rachel adds. “Seriously, it should be a requirement of this job.”
“We could if we wanted, right?”
“Yeah, but I never do things I don’t have to do.”
I can’t help laughing. They both crack me up.