Victoria Roubideaux.
For a while in Denver she took a job. It wasn’t much of a job, only working part-time at a gas station convenience store on Wadsworth Boulevard a mile from the apartment, working at night for others when they called in. She had gone in for the interview and the little man with his white shirt, the manager, had walked her through the store and said, Where would you stock the Vienna sausage and the sardines? and she had said, The shelves with the canned foods, and he said, No, next to the crackers. You want them to buy both of them at the same time. There’s a reason for what we do here.
He wanted to know when she was due to have the baby and in answer to this question she had told him a lie. She said the baby was coming later than was true, that she was expecting to deliver at the end of May. You still sick a lot? he said.
No, she said. I was at first.
This is just part-time, he said. With little notice. Just when we want you, if we need you to come in. Whenever somebody calls in claiming they’re sick. All right. You still want it?
Yes.
All right. We’ll train you starting tomorrow.
She went in and trained for parts of three days with the woman on the afternoon shift and then a night with the woman on the night shift, and then she waited a week and a half for the first call. When it came it was at suppertime on Monday, and Dwayne was tired and didn’t want to drive her to work. She said she would walk. She got up from the table to leave, and that shamed him so that he drove her after all and neither one of them said anything to the other on the way. She worked through the night without incident and in the morning when she got off her shift she took the bus home since it was past the time Dwayne was due to start his shift at Gates. Upstairs in the apartment she found a note from him on the table saying, See you tonight I’m not mad anymore are you, written like that other note a month ago with a pencil on a scrap of paper in a slanted child’s scrawl.
Two weeks later, the third time she was called, she was working behind the counter and a man came in at one-thirty in the morning when she was the only one in the store. He loitered in the aisles picking up different things, putting them back. A skinny man with a badly wrinkled face, with lank brown hair. Then he came up to the counter with nothing in his hand to buy and said, I guess you know Doris, don’t you?
Who?
Doris. She works here.
I met her, yes.
What do you think about her?
She’s nice.
She’s a bitch. She locked me out and called the cops on me.
Oh, the girl said. She watched him, to see what he was going to do.
What do you think I got in the car? he said. Go ahead, think about it.
I don’t know.
I got a gun out there, he said, looking straight into her eyes. With three shells loaded in it. Cause there’s three of us. Her, me and her goddamn dog. I’d love to kill that son of a bitch. I can’t stand that son of a bitch. You think I’m crazy, don’t you.
I don’t know you.
I am crazy. That fucking dog. I wouldn’t hurt you though. When do you get off?
I’m not sure yet.
Sure you are.
No. It may be later. I don’t always know.
Here. I’ll buy some chewing gum. I got her goddamn dog anyway. I got him out in the car with me right now. She can lock me out but I got her dog. I can start with him if that’s what she wants. Okay, don’t work too hard, he said. He took his package of gum and went outside.