Shir woke to an avalanche of sunlight pouring through her bedroom curtains and Celine Dion caterwauling across the hall. Blearily, she opened one eye, then closed it again. The day, she thought, poking around the grunge inside her head. What is the day? Oh yeah, Saturday. That had to be the reason Stella was running her stereo at top volume. Burying her head under her pillow, Shir let out a groan. Her brain felt like a throbbing, over-soaked sponge. Why, oh why, she thought miserably, didn’t someone invent a beer that you could drink without getting hung over? It would sell like hotcakes; people would be lining up to buy it.
She had drunk seven … maybe eight beers after getting off work last night, somewhere in a back alley, she couldn’t remember exactly where. One after another she had poured them down her throat, so steadily that her gut had been sloshing like a washing machine as she had come staggering up the alley behind the apartment building, holding onto the Black to keep herself upright. Yeah, the Black, sighed Shir. No question about it—the Black was her trusted buddy, the one who had stood by silent and sympathetic as everything had gone suddenly vertigo one block from home, and she had heaved the entire contents of her stomach onto the pavement. Wasted it! she thought, cringing at the memory of all that good beer running smelly and acidic across the ground.
At least her stomach had waited to dump its contents until after she had seen the gang of kids tearing up and down an alley three blocks north, spray-painting graffiti onto the black garbage bins the city had placed behind each house. She had stopped to watch, standing inside a copse of trees to avoid being noticed, and had been impressed with the boys’ efficiency. Swift and quiet, they had spray-painted their gang logo onto each bin, then gathered around one halfway down the alley and poured something into it. Next, they had tossed in several lit matches, watched as the bin’s contents exploded into flames, and taken off at top speed.
Shir had taken off, too, in the opposite direction. Knocking on someone’s door hadn’t even occurred to her, past experience having repeatedly revealed that simply being in the vicinity of trouble meant getting blamed. A face that resembled a dog’s hind end looked guilty to most people; it was that simple. God, she thought, touching her temples, am I hung over! Dark and heavy, her brain throbbed like a fresh bruise. Slowly, ever so slowly, she rolled over and peered at her clock radio. “Nine-forty,” she moaned. That was early, way too early to have to listen to something as rage-inducing as Celine Dion. There should be a law against playing high-up screechers before noon. A person should be free to wake up in her own home without having her rage induced before lunch.
Centimeter by centimeter, Shir worked herself into a sitting position. Then she sat for a while, head in hands, as she stared at the floor. She had to pee like a racehorse, her bladder in a massive emergency state, but for some reason, she couldn’t seem to get herself up and moving. Something—the part of her responsible for flicking the switch that got her legs going—wasn’t flicking the switch. Eyes dull and unblinking, her brain in deep sludge, Shir continued to sit and stare at the floor. A minute ticked by, then another and another. The pain in her bladder worsened, the black throb in her brain deepened, and still she didn’t move. Still nothing flicked the necessary switch.
With a rumbling belch, Shir glanced again at her clock. This time it stood at 9:56, which left approximately three hours until she was due at work. I have to get moving, she thought weakly. A lot of coffee was going to have to make its way down her throat before she cleared today’s hangover. But though she repeated this to herself several times, the inner switch didn’t flick. Slowly, soundlessly, her head sank back into her hands, and she returned to staring at the immense, vast nothingness of the floor.
A knock sounded at the door. “Yeah?” mumbled Shir.
The door opened and Stella peeked in. “Good morning,” she said, smiling brightly. “How are you?”
Shir stiffened. Experience had taught her that the statistical odds on the possibility of her sister actually caring about how she felt ran at about one hundred to one. Stella wanted something. “Fine,” she said shortly.
“Great!” Stella said cheerily. “Well, today’s my walk-a-thon for cancer, remember? It starts at twelve. So, can I borrow your new runners? Y’know, your Nikes—the ones you bought a month ago.”
“Nope,” said Shir, without lifting her head.
“Why not?” demanded Stella, her voice rising a notch. “Our feet are the same size, and you’ll just be standing around the store all day. I have to walk a long way. It’ll take me hours. Your shoes are better than mine.”
“Just can’t, that’s all,” mumbled Shir. No way was she going to explain to Miss Saturday-morning-walk-a-thon that she had lost her runners last weekend because she had been too shit-drunk to find them in Dana Lowe’s back hallway. Stella was just going to have to suffer through her walk-a-thon wearing her own runners—cute little pink ones with daisies appliquéd across the tips. You would never have trouble finding them in a back hallway.
“You can wear my runners to work if you want,” wheedled Stella, taking a step into the room. “They’d look nice on you with my pink sweater. I’ll let you wear that, too.”
Of all the colors in the spectrum, pink was the one best designed to accentuate the limp, carroty-red shade of Shir’s hair—especially with cute little daisies appliquéd across it. “Get out!” she roared, the rage erupting in her without warning so that she was suddenly lunging for her pillow and flinging it at her sister. With a squeak, Stella backed out of the room and slammed the door, and Shir sank back onto the bed where she lay clutching at her pounding head. Unfortunately, an imaginary monster happened to choose that particular moment to show up and begin kicking the left side of her head with steel-toed boots. Steel-toed boots, Shir realized incredulously, with pink daisies appliquéd across the toes. And now the imaginary monster was pulling out a sledgehammer and pulverizing her brain with it. A pink sledgehammer, of course, and it was repeatedly slamming her brain in the same spot. The exact same spot, she thought, dozing off. The exact …
When she woke again, it was 11:30. Except for the sound of the TV, the apartment was quiet—Stella had obviously left for her walk-a-thon. As soon as her eyes opened, Shir realized that she had to pee like three racehorses. No, she thought, groaning, three brontosauruses. Brontosauruses that were about to go extinct if they didn’t let loose soon.
Taking the utmost care not to jar her bladder, she eased herself off the bed and started toward the door. Easy now, she thought soothingly. Easy does it. One heavy step, she knew from experience—one that was made too quickly or came down not exactly right—and her bladder would erupt, bursting at the seams. Cautiously, she opened the door and stepped into the hall. Ten steps to the can, she thought, projecting ahead. Nine, eight. From the living room came a surge of melodramatic music, then a scream and some half-shouted dialogue, but Shir kept herself frantically focused on the bathroom door. Three steps to go, she moaned silently, two, one. Fortunately, the door was open. Once inside, she didn’t bother to flick on the light, nor did she check to ensure the door had latched behind her. Her legs simply bolted for the toilet, her hands jerked down her pj bottoms, and she let ’er rip.
It took Rambo-like determination not to howl with pain, but after the first blast of urine, Shir floated in relief. Yeah, she thought dizzily, this is ecstasy, this is bliss. And not bad for eight beers—holding them all without a single trip to the can until 11:30 am, even if the three or four she had upchucked were subtracted from the total. No matter what her mother said, she, Shirley Jane Rutz, could hold her own with any guy when it came to handling the bottle. Yeah, Shirley Jane Rutz really had things under control. She was managing fine, she was laughing.
When the steady stream of urine had finally trickled to an end, Shir flushed the toilet and stood up. Then she flicked on the light and peered hesitantly into the mirror. A low moan followed as she assessed the pouchy, bloodshot eyes gazing balefully back at her. She looked, she realized in dismay, like death warmed over. On second thought, forget the warmed-over bit. She was death in deep-freeze.
Popping a few Tylenol for her headache, Shir opened the bathroom door and started down the hall. The next thirty seconds, as she well knew, were the important ones—if her mother didn’t start nagging right away, she wouldn’t bother. Cautiously, Shir edged forward, wide-eyed with apprehension as the living room couch came into view, revealing a pair of fuzzy blue slippers, the plump rise of her mother’s hip, then her face. Eyes closed, her mouth sagged dully open, Janice Rutz was lying flat-out comatose as the TV buzzed aimlessly on the other side of the room. Collapsing against the nearest wall, Shir stood staring at the scene. So, she hadn’t been the only one hitting the sauce last night, she thought wryly. And with the way her mother looked, she wouldn’t be coming out of this one for hours. Which gave Shir enough time—more than enough—to pour several cups of coffee down her throat and get herself out the door. By the time she returned from work, she would have recovered enough to look somewhere near normal, and Janice Rutz would never have the slightest inkling about her elder daughter’s latest binge.
An opened package of English muffins sat on the kitchen counter, but Shir’s stomach lurched at the sight. Plugging in the kettle, she boiled some water and made herself a cup of coffee. Then, sitting down at the table, she sipped it slowly, yawning as her body’s sluggishness began to recede. With a sigh, she glanced at the clock above the sink. Eleven-fifty-five, she thought. That left forty-five minutes before she had to leave for work, a full hour before she had to walk in the door of Bill’s Grocer. Sixty minutes before she had to smile at Mr. Anderson and—
Shir’s eyes shot wide open and she remembered: the unlabeled package in the Fox and Brier order, the taped-over boxes, Eunie Jahenny’s Coke. Drugs! she thought in a wash of fear. Mr. Anderson, the mob, organized crime.
Stop it! she shouted angrily inside her head. Jumping to conclusions like that—it wasn’t fair. After all, she hadn’t actually opened the unlabeled package. And just because one taped-over delivery box had contained a package like that didn’t mean they all did. It wasn’t right to assume bad things about someone, especially someone who had treated her decent. Yeah, Shir thought fiercely, Mr. Anderson treated her decent. Out of this whole goddam city, he was practically the only person who treated her okay. He wasn’t a drug dealer; he couldn’t be.
Savagely she brushed away a tear. She wasn’t crying, she told herself firmly. No, she wasn’t. She was just … tired, that was all—tired because she had drunk one too many. Well, okay—maybe three or four. But Mr. Anderson would understand that. Just last month during a quiet spell in the store, he had told her that he had been a wild kid way back when—sowed his own reckless oats. “It doesn’t pay, Shirley,” he had said sadly, gazing out the front window. “All that craziness—it catches up to you in the end.”
Had it caught up to him? she wondered, staring out the kitchen window. Was that why he was sending her across town to deliver unlabeled packages in taped-over boxes to hotels, pubs, and rec centers? Lifting her mug, she drank steadily, then set it down empty. “Time to get up now,” she told herself in a bright, peppy, Stella-type voice. “Time to get up and moving. Time to head off for work. Yeah, time to go to work.”
Still nothing flicked the switch.
When she walked into the store fifty minutes later, Mr. Anderson was waiting for her—not in an obvious way, and not in a manner anyone else would have identified as waiting, simply standing beside Cathy at the till nearest the door and chatting up a customer as he bagged her purchase. Normally, Shir wouldn’t have thought anything of it; normally, she would have felt only a rush of pride as her boss turned to her with his customary smile and said, “There you are, Shirley. Early as usual, I see.”
But today, as Mr. Anderson handed the customer her bagged purchase and turned to face Shir, she was hit with a gut-surge of panic. Taking a frightened step backward, she bumped into a small display table of oranges and had to grab at the stack of fruit to keep it from toppling over. Instantly, Mr. Anderson was at her side, breathing quickly as he helped steady the wobbly produce. For five, ten seconds they stood side by side, clutching at the orange pyramid, and the stack of fruit held.
“That was close,” said Mr. Anderson, straightening. “Lucky you’re fast on your feet, Shirley.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled Shir, lowering her eyes. This was more difficult than she had thought it would be. Last night hadn’t been too bad—the store had been continually busy after she had returned from her round of deliveries, and her only direct interaction with her boss had been at quitting time when she had been paid. Besides, last night he hadn’t known about her accident with the Fox and Brier delivery box. Today he did. It was obvious; no one had to come out and say it in so many words—the evidence was written all over the way he had stiffened the moment he had laid eyes on her. Mr. Anderson knew about her and the box, that it had come open and that she had seen. And now he was going to fire her, banish her from the store for knowing something she wasn’t supposed to know.
“I need to talk to you,” said Mr. Anderson, catching one last orange that was escaping down the side of the stack. “Come to the back room with me.”
Dread oozed coldly up Shir’s spine. “Yes, sir,” she whispered. Ducking her head, she trailed along the produce aisle after her boss, even when he slowed his pace to match hers.
“How are you, Ned?” Mr. Anderson nodded at a man with two young children. “Find everything you’re looking for?”
“So far,” Ned smiled back. “If I need help, I’ll holler.”
“You do that,” said Mr. Anderson, then continued down the aisle and pushed through the Employees Only door. On his heels, Shir made a beeline to the opposite side of the storage room, where she stood with her head lowered and her back to the outer door. A short silence followed. Motionless, Shir stared at her feet and counted heartbeats.
“How are you today, Shirley?” Mr. Anderson asked finally.
“Fine,” mumbled Shir.
“Really?” asked Mr. Anderson. “You look a little … tired.”
Panic leapt through Shir. Here it was, she thought frantically—a reason he could fix on to fire her. The problem was, she couldn’t lie about being tired. She looked like a dog’s breakfast.
“I am a little, I guess,” she admitted reluctantly, keeping her eyes fixed on the floor. “But I can still do my job. I’m not sick or anything.”
“Oh, sure,” Mr. Anderson said easily. “We all have our tired days. I’ll try not to run you off your feet. How’s that?”
Startled, Shir shot her boss a glance and found him studying her intently. Dropping her gaze again, she mumbled, “That’s … fine, sir. I’m sorry I’m tired, sir.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Mr. Anderson. “That’s not why I asked you to come back here. What I need to talk to you about is the Fox and Brier delivery you made yesterday.”
Shir’s stomach plummeted like a lead weight. Here it is, she thought. It’s coming.
“Yes, sir?” she whispered.
“The customer called me about it,” Mr. Anderson said slowly. “Said the bottom came open when he picked up the box. Nothing was damaged, he was able to catch it on time, but a corner of the box was torn. Did it fall off the seat while you were driving?”
Shir took a shaky breath. “Not off the seat, sir,” she said, thinking rapidly. “But it did flip over when I moved another box. The bottom came open a bit, but I fixed it up right away. It wasn’t …”
She faltered, her eyes darting across Mr. Anderson’s face. He was watching her so closely, he was practically breathing in every word. “Well,” she continued nervously, “it wasn’t a major flip, sir. Nothing fell out, or anything. I didn’t think anything was broken, so I didn’t look inside.”
The relief that crossed Mr. Anderson’s face was unmistakable. “Ah,” he said, louder than necessary. “No need to worry then. Nothing was broken, nothing damaged. Like I said, the customer caught it on time. So you didn’t …” He hesitated, then added, “… open the box?”
“No no no,” gushed Shir, desperate to reassure him. “I didn’t open it, sir, because it just tilted over a bit. Just a bit, sir. Y’see?”
Mr. Anderson’s eyes shifted to the wall above her head. “Well,” he said quietly, “that’s good then. No problem, no problem at all.”
“No, sir!” Shir said emphatically. “No problem at all!”
“Okay,” Mr. Anderson nodded. “That’s okay then.” He sighed noticeably, then beamed at her. “The next time something like that happens,” he said, “make sure you let the customer know so he won’t get caught by surprise. And here,” he added, pulling something out of his shirt pocket. “I want you to carry this cell phone with you from now on when you’re in the van. If a box gets damaged again, or you get caught in traffic, call and let me know. The store number is on the back.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shir, accepting the phone as if it was a grenade about to go off.
“Have you ever used a cell?” asked Mr. Anderson.
“Yes, sir,” said Shir. “I used to own one.” She had, in fact, purchased a cell soon after starting work, but not having anyone to call, had ended up trading it away for a few Pilsners.
“Well,” said Mr. Anderson. “Fine! Now, how about I let you take off your jacket and get organized. I’ve got five deliveries for you today, but they can’t go out until after two. Until then, I’d like you to check the shelves and make a list of what needs restocking.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shir, nodding so enthusiastically her neck cracked. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”
“All right, then,” said Mr. Anderson, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “But Shirley, you don’t need to call me ‘sir’ every three words.”
“Yes, sir,” Shir said quickly, then flushed and added, “I mean, yes, Mr. Anderson.”
For a moment, her boss just looked at her, his eyes warm, the smile still on his lips. He liked her, it was obvious. For some inexplicable reason, this man really liked her.
“You take your time taking off your jacket,” he said gently. “And when you’re ready, I’ll see you out on the floor.”
“Yes s—” Shir started to say, but managed to catch herself. “I’ll be right out,” she added carefully, then stood motionless as the door swung shut behind her boss, watching it whisper back and forth until it settled silently closed.