Page 40 of Slander
I press it back down, grip the wheel, and keep driving because the truth underneath the fear is simpler and worse: I don't have a single other option. There's no savings. There's rent in three weeks. The school took my paycheck and the town took my name and this—thispaint job, these strangers—is the only door that's open.
So I drive through it.
The new Beans and Babes is a half-finished storefront with brown paper on the windows and a hand-lettered sign that says ‘Coming Soon’.
When I push open the door the smell of fresh paint and sawdust hits me, and a blonde woman with her hair tied up in a bandana looks up from a clipboard and looks at me for about one second.
One second is all it takes her.
I watch her read the whole thing off my face—the fear, the swallowed pride, the wreck of the week behind my eyes.
I brace for it. The pity, or the curiosity, or the careful kindness that's just pity in a nicer dress.
It doesn't come.
"You'd be Sophie." She sets the clipboard down and crosses to me, wiping her hand on her jeans before she puts it out. "Meghan. Njal said you're a hard worker who needs some extra work. I've got more wall than I've got people and a useless prospect who paints like he's mad at the drywall, so your timing's good."
"I—yes. Thank you. I really appreciate?—"
"Can you cut a clean line along the ceiling?"
The question's so practical it knocks the speech right out of me. "I—I've painted my whole house. Twice. My daddy taught me to cut in before he'd let me touch a roller."
"Then you're already better than Bodul." She picks a paint-stained shirt off a sawhorse and tosses it to me. "Put that over your good clothes. Coffee's in the back, strong stuff, not the swill we sell for the customers. Bathroom's down the hall." She's already moving, already pointing. "We're doing the back wall first. I'll show you where to start."
And that's it.
Nohow are you holding up.
NoI heard about what happened.
No hand on my arm, no sorrowful tilt of the head, nowe're all just praying for you.
Just a stained shirt, a wall, and a woman treating me like a person who showed up to do a job.
I have to turn toward the wall for a second so she won't see what it does to me, the plain ordinary kindness of being handed a task instead of a verdict.
I tie the shirt on, pick up a brush, and go to work.
* * *
A woman shows up around ten with a tray of iced coffees and a smile that takes up her whole face.
"You must be Sophie." She sets the tray on a sawhorse and hands me one without asking if I want it. "I'm Dasha. I work at the other location—well, I work wherever Meghan points me. She points a lot." She drops her voice. "Don't tell her I said that."
"I heard that," Meghan calls from across the room.
"She has ears like a bat," Dasha says, not bothering to lower her voice this time, and grins at me.
I don't know what to do with her.
She's maybe in her early-forties, bright and easy, and she's looking at me like I'm somebody worth being friendly to.
It's been so long since a woman looked at me like that without a knife behind it that I almost don't trust it.
"You're Njal's girl," she says, settling onto an overturned bucket beside me like we've known each other for years. "He came in a couple days ago with a whole face on, wouldn't say why, and Rio bet me twenty bucks it was a woman. I'm collecting tonight."
Njal's girl.
