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I turn to Bea, my heart still beating a little faster than normal from the excitement.
“Sorry about him,” she says, looking up toward the loft apartment with a look on her face I haven’t seen before.
She looks happy, content.
“Yourfiance,” I say hesitantly.
Bea lets out a sigh.
“You caught that, did you?”
I nod and offer her a smile.
“Nate proposed almost two years ago and well—he’s tired of me putting off wedding planning. If he had it his way, we’d just hand a wedding planner a blank check, but—”
The silence hangs thick in the air for a while before I brave asking her a question.
“What do you want Bea?”
Bea looks at me, a look of surprise washing her face. As if she forgot I was even still here. She lets out another sigh.
“I just want to be his wife. Well, enough about my life. You better get to your deliveries.”
I agree and head out the door for my route now that it’s no longer blocked by a man’s abs.
That afternoon when we walk down the street toward the only bank in town after Bea locks up the bakery, I get suddenly nervous. I’m sure there isn’t anything I should actually be worried about when it comes to opening a bank account, but I can’t help it. I’m doing yet another thing behind my parents’ back. Without their permission. The lies and deception keep piling up and the guilt I’ve been trained my whole life to feel can be overwhelming.
When we have to stop at the corner while a few cars pass by, I wipe my hands on my jeans before I return to meticulously squeezing each knuckle on my left hand with my right hand. All of these new things I’ve been doing are steps toward freedom. Freedom, I remind myself, I want so badly. They’re also pushing me toward my life being completely upended, and that’s scary. Hence, the return of my nervous habit of squeezing my knuckles.
I used to do it a lot more when I was younger, especially when I was first expected to participate in things with the church. On Saturdays we used to stand outside the homeless shelter in Sheridan and hand out toiletries kits. It had a cheap bar of soap, a toothbrush, and travel toothpaste. But of course, at the bottom of the small bag, were church documents printed onto little flipbooks. Luckily, as I’ve gotten older, I learned to volunteer for other jobs that aren’t quite as predatory and skeevy before I can be asked to participate in the more in your face recruitment tactics. Most of the time, I can get away with cleaning the church building once a month and working in the copy room every other week.
Every church member is expected to contribute ten hours a month to the various “charities” and community tasks. Calling anything the church does for non-church members a charity is laughable. It’s all done with the hidden agenda of trying to recruit more members. The more I’ve learned about the church from listening to outsiders gossip and the more I’ve learned about how different our church is from even the typical Christian churches—the more I realize, we recruit members because more members means more people to contribute their time and money.
When Bea and I walk through the doors of the bank there’s no other customers and we walk right up to the counter. The woman behind the counter has dark-framed glasses and shoulder length brown hair. She smiles at us as we approach.
“Hi Bea,” she says.
“Hey Janet, this is my new employee Aubrey. She needs to open a bank account,” Bea tells the woman.
The woman behind the counter hands me a form to fill out and asks to see my I.D. I hand over my driver’s license and begin filling out the form. I’m lucky to even have a license. The only reason Mom and Dad let me get it is because they wanted me to be able to drive Dad to his doctors appointments. He can drive himself but they think it looks better for his disability income if he appears to not be able to.
The whole process of setting up my bank account takes less than twenty minutes. When it’s over, I have a debit card with my name on it and forty dollars in the account. I only had my tips from today with me. I’ll have to bring the rest of my money that’s hidden in my room to deposit on Monday.
Bea says most people don’t normally deposit their tips. When I gave her a wide eyed look her expression softened and she said, “You’re not most people though, Aubrey, are you?”.
I think she gets it–that my money is safer here in the bank than at home.
I make it home just in time to change out of my work shirt and help Mom set the table for dinner. I’m still wearing a jacket zipped up over my shirt anytime I’m wearing it at the house, or changing at work. It’s just a basic tee shirt. Girls my age wear much more revealing clothing, but I know Mom would have a problem with how fitted it is.
Dinner is the same as it always is. Mom and Dad sit on either side of me at the scratched wood dinner table. We all hold hands while Dad prays for nearly five minutes. I choke down my pork chop and sweet potato in silence while Dad talks about his latest revelations he’s had listening to Pastor Johnson’s recorded sermons. I’ve always hated pork chops, but Dad loves them. Therefore Mom makes them at least a few times a month. I’ve never been asked what my favorite meal is. Children should be seen and not heard is what Mother says.
No one asks me anything about work. I think they’re choosing to pretend I’m not working. When we’ve finished eating, I wash all the dishes and wipe down the table before I go to my room under the guise of wanting to get some more Bible studying in.
In the solitude of my room I pull out my Bible but lay the romance book in it to read that instead. I’m almost halfway through it but I’ve definitely had far less time for leisurely reading now that I’m working. I read for several hours, and when I can tell Mom and Dad are sound asleep and the house is quiet, I pull on a sweatshirt over my night shirt and push the window in my room open.
The air is finally getting a cool bite to it at night. Soon it will be harder to come out to the water tower at night. That is, unless I want to deal with the icy ladder. For now, though, I’ll keep up my Friday night ritual.
As I sit on top of the water tower looking out over Easton, I think about everything I’ve done since I was up here last Friday. I got a job and opened a bank account. I talked to Adam–who I no longer have to think of as library boy–and didn’t completely fall apart. My thoughts surprisingly drift to Emmett. I think about his gray-blue eyes and his large hands that have touched my skin more than once and the strange burning sensation it left. I didn’t hate it. Even if he infuriates me with his constant popping up in my path and his always cheerful demeanor.
