Читать книгу Almost Crimson - Dasha Kelly - Страница 8

THREE

MOSS

CECE CIRCLED THE LOT. SHE only parked the behemoth in corner spaces now. Her first month with Aunt Rosie’s old Lincoln Town Car had earned CeCe four angry notes pinned beneath her windshield. They were bitter scribbles from drivers who had been forced to climb into back seats and out of windows to escape her car’s imposing body. Once, she came out of the movies to find the front bumper hanging in defeat.

Besides negotiating parking lots and navigating the long chariot through traffic, CeCe also learned to ignore the bemusement of her small frame emerging from the oversized ride. Leaving the drug store, yarnless, CeCe heard the familiar cross-lot taunt about a booster seat. She wasn’t even inclined to flip them the bird. The day had greeted her with an empty milk container in the fridge, a client ambush as a result of yet another one of Margolis’ errors of enthusiasm, being stood up for happy hour, a screaming pinched toe from a pair of shoes that decided to hate her, and a scavenger hunt for green yarn—nylon not acrylic, moss not emerald.

Two stops later, CeCe finally stood in a checkout lane, frustrated that she hadn’t driven out to the fabric store in the first place. As she left the register, her cell phone chimed. Looking down at the display screen, CeCe smiled for the first time all day.

“Doris!” she said, slipping sideways past two women blocking the automatic door with their baskets and chatter.

“Kiddo!” Doris replied, the edges of her voice still crumbling from decades of menthol cigarettes. CeCe had met Doris in the smoker’s garden, a landscaped corner exclusively for mall employees. CeCe’s smoking habit lasted less than three months, but her enchantment with Doris, a spirited middle-aged Jewish woman, would last beyond the years they worked at the mall. Even with Doris all the way in Florida, CeCe felt a welcome, comforting warmth at the sound of her friend’s voice.

CeCe had worked at Hip Pocket, selling designer jeans to bony teenage girls and metrosexual college boys. At the other end of the mall, Doris hawked dishwashers and deep freezers at Sears. The two adopted each other straightaway, shifting their midpoint meetings from the smokers’ garden to the food court. They ate lunch together every day for four years. A year after CeCe had left Hip Pocket and landed her current job, Doris had announced her move to Florida.

“You’re taking a break from your sexy senior singles bingo game to call me?” CeCe teased, angling her car key into its lock.

“Honey, I told you I’m only hanging with the cool old ladies,” Doris replied with a laugh, “and we do not do bingo.”

CeCe could imagine Doris’ head tilting back to let that enormous laugh escape, her eyeglass chain glinting in the sunlight. Doris once confessed that her silver chain gave her an edge over the other sales reps because it implied “grandmotherly wisdom.”

“My bad,” CeCe said, attaching her Bluetooth before turning over the Lincoln’s engine. “How are the cool grannies doing? Did Maddie get her driver’s license back?”

Doris told CeCe about the gossip and shenanigans of her retirement community and CeCe told Doris about wanting to lock Margolis in the copy room. CeCe drove the long way home as they talked. They still were chatting incessantly by the time CeCe snaked through the labyrinth of duplexes and four-unit apartments buildings and stretched her car beneath the carport.

“What were you doing out?” Doris asked.

“Mama needed green yarn,” CeCe said.

Doris let out another laugh, smaller this time. “Of course she did,” she said. “Hey, can you get me from the airport tomorrow around ten forty-five?”

CeCe agreed, and the day’s irritations melted away.