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“No problem, Ay, we got you covered,” J.R. offered. Jeff shot him a nasty glare.
Ayla clocked out and ran across the parking lot to her old red Toyota, saying a silent prayer that it would start. It had been making a weird knocking sound the past few days and been hesitant to start at times.
This morning, however, it fired right up, and she left the parking lot and joined the other morning commuters on the congested roads of Las Vegas.
With most of the traffic heading out of the suburbs and toward the freeways, Ayla made record time, pulling into her driveway just twelve minutes after clocking out. Desiree was standing next to her own car, waiting, while Preston kicked and chased a soccer ball around the front lawn.
“So sorry, Desiree. I’ll make it up to you, I promise!”
“Whatever,” Desiree replied, making no effort to mask her annoyance. “I have to go.”
Ayla’s roommate got in her car and sped out of the driveway, trying to make up for lost time.
Ayla immediately felt terrible. She tried to shake it off and pay attention to what really mattered for a moment.
“Hey, monkey,” Ayla called out to Preston, who picked up his soccer ball with both hands and punted it over Ayla’s car and into the neighbor’s yard.
“Go get that right now! And then let’s go have some breakfast. Mommy’s hungry,” Ayla said.
Preston half-skipped around the back of Ayla’s car, giving her a high five in passing, eschewing her offered hug. “Can you stay home with me today?” he asked as he disappeared to fetch his ball.
“No, buddy, I’m sorry, I have to work,” Ayla said. “Though I wish more than anything I could.”
“You’re always working,” Preston complained, trudging back toward the house. “I don’t want to go to stupid daycare. The only two boys my age just speak Spanish and I don’t want to play with the girls.”
Ayla was exasperated. Leaving work hadn’t gone well, Desiree was pissed at her, and Preston hated his daycare. Truth be told, she hated having to send him. She’d love nothing more than spending an early summer day with him at the splash pad at the park down the street or hanging out at the pool eating popsicles.
Unfortunately, however, none of those activities helped to pay the bills. To make matters worse, her day job— the one that just barely kept her from drowning in that ocean of bills— was mind-numbing drudgery.
She sat in a cubicle farm, answering calls for a bank from customers disgruntled with their credit cards. They needed a balance increase, despite being two months behind, or they wanted to dispute that six-dollar fast food meal from three weeks ago, even though it was charged at the same “restaurant” where they ate lunch five days a week, and always for the same amount. Or, in some cases, it seemed like they just wanted somebody to yell at and empty their entire arsenal of creative profanity upon.
One particularly memorable caller, a man whose name contained an incomprehensible, unpronounceable series of consonants with vowels added seemingly just for comic relief, became so agitated with Ayla for not waiving his annual fee that he stammered and sputtered before he settled on calling her a “cuntcock.” Ayla had been so taken aback that she politely asked him to repeat the insult, which got her a verbal warning from her supervisor. The customer screamed “I said cuntcock!” so loudly at her that when she held her headset up in the air above the cubicle dividers, co-workers three deep all around her could hear him.
Mostly, however, it was an interminable series of the same questions, over and over again, the monotony of which was broken only by customers telling her how “stupid” and “worthless” she must be to work in a call center.
This was not the life she envisioned for herself while getting straight A’s in high school and scoring near the top of her high school class on the SATs. That girl— the one she used to be— would be ashamed to know her, much less be her.
Dropping Preston off at daycare so she could sit in a cubicle for the next eight hours made Ayla want to vomit.
Her son stood at the door, holding it open for his mommy and smiling, and her heart melted. For a moment she considered calling in sick, but the fact that her most recent power bill came in one of those ugly fluorescent orange envelopes with “URGENT” stamped all over it motivated her to be a responsible adult, no matter how badly she didn’t want to.
/> “Okay, how about this. After I pick you up, we’ll go to Roberto’s for a quesadilla and then to Leatherby’s for ice cream,” Ayla asked Preston, who nodded enthusiastically. “And I think we can make some lemonade at daycare, too.”
Preston cocked his head sideways and gave her a confused look.
“There’s a saying, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. Have you ever heard that?” Her son had not, or if he had, he didn’t recall. “Lemons by themselves don’t taste very good, right? You can’t eat one like an orange. But you can use them to make lemonade, which is yummy. Make sense?”
“We’re going to make lemonade at daycare today?” Preston asked.
“Not really,” Ayla explained. “What it means is that we’re going to take something that seems bad, in this case the boys at daycare not talking to you because you can’t speak Spanish, and turn it into something positive. Something good.”
Understanding flickered in Preston’s dark eyes, but he couldn’t make the complete connection in his six-year-old mind.
“You’re going to learn to speak Spanish. And then, maybe teach those boys English. I know once they get to know you, they’ll see how cool you are. And I bet they are, too. What do you think?”
“Spanish seems really hard,” Preston countered. “But I could try.”
“Riding a bike seemed really hard at first, right? But now you ride with no hands and do tricks and everything.”
