Oh, I Think So

"When you get to the bottom, you go back to the top of the slide, where you stop and you turn and you go for a ride," she rambled, trying not to emphasize the rhymes.  "Till I get to the bottom and I see you again." "Let me stop you right there," he said.  "If I want to hear the words to 'Helter Skelter,' I will listen to the Beatles in my car.  I don't want to hear that song right now.  And not recited like you are trying to be deep." She didn't say anything for a few minutes.  She didn't peg him for a Beatles fan but she knew that no one ever knows what someone knows until you know that someone.  Thinking about that last sentence made her temples throb, so she gave up the lyrics and spoke again. "Hand towel wincing.  White tornado activates the black globe.  While away the donuts in cave followed by Michael Phelps.  Dancing horses want cabbage on the rain in Spain." He never turned his head to look at her j...

There were no assassins, of course, because she was only famous enough to be murdered and, really, no one wanted her dead that she knew of.  There were the You-Are-Dead-To-Me friends from another era who, for one reason or another, decided they didn't want to acknowledge her existence any longer.  There were the good friends who blurted out that they would kill her when she suggested a place they hated for lunch, much as she offered to slay them when they wanted her to go to a particular bad movie.  Sitting on the banquette, having the occasional sip of coffee, she believed there would be no life-or-death excitement. When she was wrong, she admitted it.   She thought the worst thing going on was that her new manager was a controlling maniac who played favorites and made life hell for those he perceived as a threat to his way of working.  She wasn't young, she didn't want to be  the manager, the clients loved her, and she was punctual and rarely absen...

Mr. King directed her away from the table, along the edge of the eating area, toward the back set of escalators. "I could have been nicer to him," she said.  "Maybe been a little more understanding.  He probably has issues and a routine." "He has a routine, all right," said Mr. King.  "But he changes it whenever it suits him.  We get a lot of nonworking regulars here, and he's probably the most selfish one.  All about him at all times." She smiled.  He was a military man who appreciated order so of course he had a name for the indigent segment of building visitors. "Nonworking regulars?" she asked. "Doesn't work in the building or anywhere, could be somewhere else but is here every single day.  Sometimes he hangs around out front, bumming cigarettes.  He doesn't smoke but he swaps with other nonworking regulars.  Last week I saw him trade three cigarettes for the autobiography of Steve Jobs.  Go figure." ...

She watched Lee race away -- he really did walk faster than anyone she'd ever met -- and she looked at the coffee from the donut place.  It was fine but what Jodie did to French roast beans was art.  She ground the coffee for 20 seconds.  She knew what the exact measurement should be for their pot and she put in just a smidge more.  When she had a day off, she and Lee tried to duplicate Jodie's efforts, going so far as to stand there and watch her do it, attempting to listen to her coffee tutorial, but Lee started thinking about how busy his day was going to be and she thought about how Jodie pronounced place names -- Bonus Airies, Sayo Pa-oolo, Bellow Horontay for Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Belo Horizonte, respectively -- and how the timbre of her voice was like nails on a chalkboard.  She took another sip and decided the donut shop coffee was perfectly serviceable for today but what was that smell? He didn't seem very big under his two coats, knit hat (co...

When she first started working in the building, a multi-purpose office building and train station downtown, what struck her most was how dim the lighting was in the food court which mostly didn't smell at all of the fried chicken, the Indian food, the two Mexican joints, the french fries from several places, the donuts, the Chinese places.  Grease didn't hover in the air and attach to every surface and the soap-and-candle establishment kept its odors inside.  What did permeate every hallway of the building was when the popcorn place got to popping and cheesing and caramelizing their fresh kernels.  It made it all the way up to the top floors of the building and hung in the air as a tantalizing reminder of a light snack made into fatty goodness for those who liked it or weren't yet sick of it and for those who wanted nothing to with the stuff, it said that this was the jankiest building around. The chairs in the food court were not welcoming.  They didn't invi...