“All words, easily found in the dictionary.”
Easy my ass. My face lit up. “Wordbop of the day. Five letters.”
“Okay.” He fixed his brown eyes on me and we shared a happy smile.
“I’ll give you a hint, it’s another word for mall.”
“Plaza?”
“Seriously?” I threw my hands in the air.
“I told you it’s not a hard game.”
“You cheated,” I said, noodling him in the arm.
“How when you made up the word?” He laughed. You’d think the finger I was pressing into his strong bicep was more of a tickle.
“Next time it’s gonna be hard, like head scratcher difficult.”
“I look forward to it.”
I made a mental note to Google little-known words I could stump him with in the future. “Why’d you sell it? People love that game.”
“I mean it wasTheNew York Times, kind of the definition of an offer you can’t refuse.”
“And so you took amicro retirementto be a mall Santa?”
“To be a mall Santa, to parasail in Brazil. To run with the bulls, which I chickened out of.”
“That sounds nice.” I’d been working since I was thirteen. The longest vacation I’d ever taken was when I took my sister,Celeste, to Disney World four years ago. I wasn’t a workaholic, but the thought of taking that much time for myself was unsettling. My mother died when I was ten and my father often worked twelve-hour days. I was forced to grow up and look after my sister. Adulthood was just as complicated but now I was expected to pay my own way.
“It is. One day I had an epiphany. Most people who work can’t wait to retire because they believe they’ll have all this time to do exactly what they want when they want.”
“I know people who have retirement countdown clocks even though the big day is years away.”
“A colleague of mine worked all his life right out of high school. He was a brilliant man who finally decided to retire. There was a party, we had cake, people wished him well on his future endeavors and three week later he was dead.”
My eyes grew wide. “I’m so sorry. I’d imagine something like that would shake you up.”
“It woke me up. And I knew I no longer wanted to just be a cog in the wheel. So the micro retirement was born out of necessity to actually start living my life.”
“That makes sense. But I have to be real with you if I could take extended time off, I don’t think I’d spend it dressed as a make-believe character.”
“You should, you would make a beautiful fairy, ghost, or princess. If you dropped your shoe at a dance, I would definitely come looking for you.”
A warmth flushed my face as I absentmindedly fidgeted with my necklace. “Thank you.”
I could sense myself doing that thing I always did. A cute guy shows me attention and I start smiling uncontrollably and mentally imagining us in hypothetical make-believe situations. While Kris spoke about the massive Lego installation on the West end of the mall, I imagined his big strong hands rippingmy seafoam green flower embroidered cardigan from my bodice while he reprimanded me for being naughty and threatened to punish me. I was just at the part where he was about to spank my bare ass when I was yanked out of my daydream by a voice yelling, “Free samples.”
Turning to the young man in front of the shop, I swiped a piece, popping it into my mouth. Who doesn’t love a sweet treat?
“Oh Belen no,” Kris yelled, a horrified look on his face.
Followed by the store clerks pained exclaim. “Ma’am?”
I rolled the item in my mouth a few times before gagging. “What is this?” I murmured.
The store clerk cringed. “It’s soap, ma’am. You just ate soap.”
