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“Helen,” Milton says, his face pinching as if it’s a dirty word. “And she can’t even open a safe deposit box.”
My compulsion to help this poor woman with her gorgeous dress supersedes my need for self-preservation. “Oh, that one has—”
“She’ll get it,” Cindy cuts in, and I can barely contain my shock, standing open-mouthed. We’ve never been able to get 304 to open. It’s completely bent out of shape. Why is Cindy letting Milton humiliate Helen?
Cindy takes my arm and leads me out of the room. As soon as we’re back in the main area connected to the lobby, I whisper-yell, “What the hell, Cindy?”
She flashes a wan smile. “He might take some getting used to.”
“Like a soul-sucking maniac!”
“He’s not that bad.”
She’s in denial. She doesn’t want to think that she’s leaving us to be miserable. “Helen is very nice,” she says.
“I like her style.”
“I knew you would. You two can form an alliance and make it through.”
Janet sneers at us as we approach the customer service bays. “Meet Milton?”
“I did,” I say, wondering what her angle is. Why doesn’t she hate him?
“He gave me vault privileges,” she says. “That’s head teller work.”
I whip around to look at Cindy. “But I’m assistant head teller!”
“It will be fine,” Cindy says. “It’s a reorg.”
God. If Janet gets promoted over me after I’ve been assistant head teller all this time, I will die.
The only good thing about the first day back is Helen. She’s resourceful and finds a flat-head screwdriver to jimmy open 304. Milton seems annoyed that she got it done. “It’s still mangled,” he says dryly, as if that can possibly be her fault since she only arrived two days ago and 304 has been busted since 2010.
Thankfully, Milton does not show up for Cindy’s farewell happy hour, citing “important events.”
I’m glad. We drink at Tillie’s bar, and she keeps us at happy hour prices long after seven. We’re all teary, and even Janet manages a few nice words. Helen turns out to be hilarious and a cheap drunk, so I worry less about the impending doom of a day of work without Cindy.
I keep Drew from my mind by sheer will, forcing him out whenever a thought of him pops in, right up until I curl into my covers that night.
And then I’m weeping again, lost, a big hot mess. I wasn’t able to afford therapy, not ever, none of us did, but I saw a high school counselor a lot when my grades slipped because Garrett left home, leaving me with yet another hole in my life.
Each loss is every loss,she’d told me, and the words had taken hold.
So it wasn’t just Drew I’d lost. It was the feelings that young girl had for the boy who came to play football with her brother, who hauled herscreaming after getting caught stealing from a lemon tree, and whose mother gave her warm cookies and kicked off an obsession with cookie dough as safety.
Even more than that, though, it’s about my mom. And the dad I had before she died.
And the hope for Lila, who’s stuck now.
And tomorrow I have to face my first day at my old job without my best work friend.
I’m done being positive.
Life sucks.
Chapter 36
DREW
