A ray of light! “Really?”
“No, not really. Are you crazy? This isn’t a placement program at Brown, Rachel. We have the jobs that no one else will take. Now, if you want me to sit here and rattle off all the jobs no one else will take, I’ll do it. But if you think you will be underqualified for them all, why don’t you do us both a favor and just say so now and we can each get on with our lives?”
Wanda had no idea how badly Rachel wanted to do just that. And she came very, very close—but she had to go and think of her bank balance, and the utility bill, and the tree on Mr. Valicielo’s fence, and then Dad, and smiled meekly. “I won’t say that anymore, I promise.”
Wanda rolled her eyes, sighed again, only a lot louder and longer, and turned back to the screen. “How do you feel about cleaning downtown offices at night?”
Frankly, not that great, but she forced a smile for Wanda’s sake all the same.
Chapter Seven
When Rachel arrived home that afternoon—undetected by the Valicielos—she found a note from Dagne stuck in the door. Hi. Stopped to find something. Call me later.
Probably a toad’s wart or something.
She let herself in the front door, dropped her tote bag in the living room, and still holding the referral sheet from the employment office, she walked into the kitchen—and shrieked.
Myron was sitting there, his head in his hands.
“Jesus, Myron! You scared me!” Rachel exclaimed, her hand and referral sheet clamped over her heart as she sagged against the countertop. “Couldn’t you have said something when I came in?”
“Sorry,” he said, without bothering to look up.
“I didn’t see your car outside.”
“A friend dropped me,” Myron said, and lifted his head. He looked, Rachel thought, like he hadn’t slept well in days. “Sorry I scared you.” With a heavy sigh, he got up and walked to the fridge and opened it wide. He stood there for a long moment, his frown going deeper as his fingers impatiently drummed against the door. “You don’t have much of anything, do you?”
Yes, well, she was having a bit of a financial crisis. Enough of one that she was screwing up the courage to ask him to repay the money he owed her.
“I thought you just went to the store a couple of days ago.”
“Listen, Myron, I really need to ask you something.”
“Okay, so ask,” he said as he shut the fridge and headed for the pantry. He flung that door open and stood, hand on hip, studying the shelves.
“I am really, really broke—”
“Join the crowd,” he snorted.
Right. Well, at least he had a job—two, actually. “Okay . . . so I’m really broke, and I was wondering if you might be able to, ah . . .” Man, this was harder than she thought. Why couldn’t she just open her mouth and make the words come out? Myron looked over his shoulder. Rachel winced, said in a rush, “Maybe pay back the money you borrowed?”
His expression immediately went dark and she instantly felt like a bitch for asking. “Not all of it,” she quickly said. “Just some of it. Enough so I can get by. Like maybe . . . a hundred?” Okay, that was good. Some of what he’d borrowed couldn’t be too hard for him.
But Myron said nothing, continued to stare at her, as if he could not believe she was asking him for even that.
“It would really be great if you could pay me just a hundred, or even fifty,” she said, her voice noticeably weaker.
Myron sighed and stared at the floor for a moment. “Look, Rach, I know I owe you some money. But you could not possibly have chosen a worse time to ask me for it.”
“I couldn’t?”
“I’ve been dealing with some stuff that I wasn’t going to burden you with, but since you asked, I guess I’ll have to.”
“What stuff?” As far as she knew, the only “stuff” Myron ever dealt with was his lack of tenure.
“Something happened at work. A forklift jammed and damaged a pre-Revolutionary hutch and some china. So we filed a claim. But I guess the claim wasn’t done right, so now the insurer has come down to investigate.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, still waiting for the “stuff” that stood in the way of him paying her back.
“Okay? That’s all you’re going to say? Rachel, I am the one who prepares the estimates of loss. I am the one who works with the insurance company. I have the whole administration crawling up my ass over some stupid forklift accident.”
“Why?”
“You just don’t get it,” Myron groaned, rolling his eyes dramatically. “The bottom line is a person can’t just do their job anymore. The slightest thing goes wrong and everyone from the janitor on up is a suspect,” he said, making giant, invisible quotation marks with his fingers.