Divine and Dateless (20 page)

Inés sat across from me on the sofa as I unwrapped the foil. Yeah, a whole carton of ice cream was obviously not enough sweets.

“Want some?” I asked and then held my breath while I waited for her answer. Then I wondered what the heck was wrong with me. Back on Earth, if anyone had even looked sideways at my chocolate during PMS time, they risked the chance of losing a limb. I guess all of these overly nice Purgatory people were rubbing off on me.

I released a ragged breath when she waved me away with a toss of the hand. “No, thanks.”

“So how was your new job?”

“Agonizing as fuck,” I answered without hesitation.

She snorted. “Yeah, chica. Inés has heard stories about the call center.”

I took a bite of chocolate and leaned forward. “Go on.” Truthfully, I didn’t know if I wanted to hear her call center dirt, but if this place had a seedy underbelly, I’d best be prepared. Besides, I’d never been one to turn down a good bit of juicy gossip.

She leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing and features going hard. “That call center employees have the highest rate of do-over.”

“Do-over?” I scrunched my brow. “What’s that?”

“Aye,
chica
.” She gasped and then wagged a finger in my face. “You don’t want to know.”

But of course I did, and she knew it. I scooted so close our knees were touching. Then I grabbed her hand and squeezed. “Tell me.”

“Reincarnation,” she said on a rush of air as her eyes widened. “People would rather become bugs than work there.”

Holy crap! That tub of ice cream hit the bottom of my stomach like a lead brick. “So they ask to become reincarnated?”

“Yeah. Poor fools.” She shook her head before making the sign of the cross. “They have to start over and work their way back up. It will take them a thousand years before they ascend again.”

Seriously, why would anyone want to start a new life as a bug? I mean, I understood my job sucked ass big time, but could anything be worse than being stepped on and swatted? “Wow. What about their family?”

“They get a new family. A do-over is exactly how it sounds.” She pulled a face and clucked her tongue. “They ain’t gonna remember nobody from their old life, and nobody ain’t gonna remember them.”

No family would mourn their loss? As if they’d never existed?

I thought of my mom, and how she would cry for me once they discovered my body. Today was Monday, so I’d only missed one day of work. They probably wouldn’t discover me for a few days, but when they did, she would be crushed. Would it be better if I did a do-over? Started as a dung beetle or maybe a microscopic bug that lived on a leaf? Small, insignificant, forgotten. Geez, the prospect seemed so tempting (insert sarcastic eye roll). Besides, if I wiped myself from my mom’s memory, she’d only have my self-centered sister left, and that was just sad.

“I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t want to forget my mom.” A familiar ache settled in my heart, the same ache I got whenever I thought of my mom. I missed her sorely, and I couldn’t help but worry about her. Then an idea struck me. If the twins could watch their funeral on television, then surely Inés would know how to find the channel. “Speaking of my mom, I have a question for you.”

She kicked off her heels and leaned back against the sofa cushion, smiling sweetly. “Ask me, sugar.”

“I heard that I can see Earth from my television. Do you know how to do it?” I eyed her while I waited impatiently for the answer.

“
Chica
,” she said in a surprisingly deep and masculine tone. “You don’t want to do that.”

“But I want to see my mom.” The whine that slipped into my voice made me sound like a sick, mating cat, but I didn’t care. I missed her terribly.

“Believe me, you don’t.” Her vibrant expression had turned to ice as she stared at me with arms folded across her chest. “People go
loco
watching Earth TV.”

“Please, Inés,” I begged. “I need to know she’ll be okay without me.”

Inés stood and peered down at me with fists cocked on her hips. “She won’t be okay, honey, and neither will you if you get addicted to that TV.”

“I won’t get addicted. I swear it.” I stood and made a sign of the cross, hoping if I did end up with an addiction, God wouldn’t bump me back down to level two for lying. “I just want to watch for a few hours.”

She finally relented. “All right.”

I practically jumped for joy as I threw down my chocolate bar (okay, I’d gone certifiably crazy) and handed her the remote.

“You’re on HDMI-13.” She clicked the input button and scrolled through the options. “You need to be on HDMI-1.”

Seriously? The answer was that obvious?

“HDMI-1 shows you your personalized options for level one. You can scroll through the channels to see what people you left behind are doing with their lives.” She handed me the remote.

Sure enough, as I clicked through each channel, I saw people I hadn’t even thought of: my ex-boyfriend and his skanky, cougar sugar-mamma; my eighth grade teacher, who’d found lice in my hair and caused a big scene in front of the class; the stockroom guy at work who was always giving me accusatory looks whenever I asked for a new box of paperclips or sticky pads.

Wait a minute! Why was the guy at my workstation going through my stuff? And what was he doing at work so late? Up to no good, I suspected. What a nosy jerk! If I hadn’t been dead, I’d have marched down there and given him a piece of my mind. I jumped off the sofa and waved my remote at the television, on the verge of launching into a tirade, when he pulled an unopened tampon from my drawer and began sniffing it.

Ewww.

Then he pocketed it and walked away. Okay, that was just weird. Well, at least that explained why I could never find my tampons at work. Psycho stockroom guy had been stealing them. I really didn’t want to wrap my head around why at the moment. I was supposed to be looking for my mom, but damn, he was psycho.

I scrolled through the channels until I found her, and then time ceased to exist as my gaze tunneled on the sight of her shadowed silhouette on my TV screen. Mom looked much like an older version of me, but her hazel eyes lacked the vibrancy they’d had when she was younger. I vaguely remembered her smile being brighter, and her laughter more robust back before my uncle died. My sister used to whisper to me that when Uncle Mikey passed, a piece of our mother had died with him.

I never knew my father. My mom said he left sometime after I was born, that he'd walked out on us because the responsibility of providing for a family was too much for him to handle. But that wasn’t the case with my uncle. He was like my surrogate father, and his death had crushed Mom’s spirit like a sledgehammer pounding a hole through her chest. A few years later, my grandma died of stomach cancer, and my grandpa keeled over from a heart attack during her funeral. Imagine how my mom would react when she found my body.

Mom was sitting beside the bed of an elderly patient, reading a book out loud. And not just any book, but our book:
The Giving Tree
. I was barely aware of the tears that cascaded down my face as she read the words I’d known by heart. I silently chanted along, knowing when to pause for dramatic effect and when to go on. My mom had read to me every night before bed during my childhood, all the way up until my teen years when I’d asked her to quit coming into my room.

I’d never forget the heartbreak in her eyes when I closed the door in her face. No, I hadn’t wanted her to stop reading to me, but I was tired of my sister’s relentless teasing. She’d called me a baby who couldn’t sleep without her fairytales. And though I’d refused to admit it at the time, my sister had been right. It took me months to learn how to fall asleep without the sound of my mom’s soothing voice lulling me into slumber. That was probably one of the loneliest times of my life. Jack had died a year earlier, and then I had no mom to offer me comfort, all because I’d cared what my stupid sister thought.

If I could go back in time, I’d never shut that door in my mom’s face. I’d beg her to read to me every night before bed until I left for college. Actually, if I could go back in time, I’d fix a whole lot more than that, starting with gluing down the switch on my blow-dryer. I would have kept Jack locked up in the backyard until I got home from school. I’d also tell Travis and our professor to fuck off, and I’d stay in school, too. Finally, I’d make more time to spend with my mom, maybe I’d even volunteer with her more at the retirement home. Yeah, there were a lot of things I wished I’d done differently, but it was too late to change the past now.

I turned off the television and chatted with Inés, faking fatigue after about twenty minutes, feeling relieved when she took the hint and excused herself. After she left, I snatched up the remote. I watched Mom as she read to another patient, drive home, and finally say her prayers before climbing into bed.

I sobbed when she specifically asked The Lord to watch over me. If she only knew her prayers would go unanswered. If she only knew that soon she’d find her daughter dead.

Luckily, Mr. Dallin had included his emergency phone number in the “Welcome to the Family” packet he’d given me on the way out the door yesterday. My boss was surprisingly understanding when I called in sick that morning. Yeah, I had a land phone hanging from a wall in my kitchen. I hadn’t even realized it was a phone until Inés pointed it out when she’d called me on it this morning. I’d thought it was some ancient blender or maybe a fire alarm, but no, the big ugly beige thing with a long, knotted cord hanging from my wall was actually Purgatory’s latest advancement in communication.

I still thought it funny how they could be so far behind in some areas of technology, and yet I had the latest model television and DVR in my living room.

Mr. Dallin coughed into the receiver so hard, I feared he had a chicken bone, or maybe the whole chicken, lodged in his throat. He said even he had bad health days, too.

Geez, ya think?

I was fairly certain I heard the beeping of his defibrillator in the background.

I felt kind of bad when he wished me well before we hung up. I really was sick, bloated, and pissed off, after all. I probably wouldn’t have been a very perky, happy family member today. That’s what I kept telling myself. My desire to stay home had absolutely nothing to do with my need to watch channel one. Nothing at all.

Allison, my sister, had stopped by Mom’s house for breakfast, and when my mom asked her if she’d heard from me, my sister responded with a disinterested shrug. Oh well. It was not as if I’d expected her to care.

All time seemed to stand still when my mom said she was going to drive up to Seattle later today. I was hoping Mom wouldn’t be the one to find my body, but she had a key to my apartment.

Shit!

My heart began pounding out a wild rhythm as the scenario played out in my head. Mom would find me, break down, and then try to resuscitate my corpse. When the reality of my death set in, she’d break down again, and then what? Would she have a heart attack and die? Though I felt selfish for wishing her death, I hoped she did die. At least she’d be reunited with our family, and we could visit each other on weekends. Then maybe she wouldn’t be so sad.

But knowing my mom, she’d find a way to carry on, living as a shell of herself, if only to serve others.

I turned off the TV and stood up, nearly doubling over as a cramp hit me. I didn’t care how lousy I felt, I had to get out of this apartment or I’d go crazy obsessing over my mom. Besides, I needed to get my hands on some real tampons. These wadded up paper towels just weren’t cutting it. I wasn’t quite sure how this credit thing worked, but maybe Inés could loan me the money until payday, even though I was still indebted to her for a conditioning treatment. She’d refused to take a cheesecake payment, telling me she didn’t trust herself not to eat it, and I certainly wasn’t wasting a whole slice on tampons.

I heaved myself off the sofa and trudged toward the bathroom, figuring a shower wouldn’t hurt before I left. PMS usually left me with that not-so-fresh feeling. Not only was I bleeding like a stuck pig, I smelled like one, too. I stopped short when I heard a thump on my front door.

I turned and heard another thump. That was weird. The thump was followed by a scratch and a distinct whine. I stared slacked jawed as the scratching intensified. My limbs and brain solidified, and I was too stunned to move. Then came another whine, a low mournful sound that caused a flood of childhood memories to come rushing back.

Jack!

I raced to the door and flung it open, tears stinging my eyes as I looked down into his soulful brown gaze and floppy black ears. He barked several times, wagging his tail frantically. I collapsed to my knees, wrapping my arms around his soft, furry neck. I alternated between squeezing him and crying as he pressed me against the doorframe and licked the tears off my cheeks.

As I clung to my dog, all my Purgatory troubles seemed to melt away. Who cared about cheesecake, beefcake, PMS and a dead end job? Everything was going to be okay now. My best friend had come home.