Fender Bender Blues (6 page)

His Hawaiian shirt billowed in the spring breeze and his lips were pinched together in a nervous line as she drove away.

Another five minutes in the driveway and he might have changed his mind about loaning out his classic.

She gave the car a little gas just in case he changed his mind about lending her the car and chased her down to get it back.

Chapter Seven

William, her new teenage supervisor and son of the owners of Copy Masters, hadn’t stopped staring at her since she’d sat down at the workstation he’d proudly dubbed hers. She sat at her designated spot against the wall with an ancient computer that froze up on her every time she sent the printer instructions. The pamphlet she’d been given for her first project at Copy Masters was taking much longer to complete than she’d expected of something that had sounded so simple.

The print screen was frozen on the monitor and she struck an angry finger at the Enter key again. No way was karma coming around this late in life. The only time she’d ever been mean to anyone had been in high school. The girls had been horrible to her and she’d been horrible right back. Surely karma understood kids being kids.

“Let me help,” William offered from behind, startling her from images of bratty high school girls in cheerleader outfits making fun of Rach’s hair. She leaned to the right as he crowded her space. The smell of cologne invaded her nostrils and she held back a cough. A lock of mousy brown hair rested over his eyes. He swiped it away and it fell back onto his forehead the moment he released it.

He flashed his shiny metal grille at her and she smiled back. Why hadn’t his parents thought to do the orthodontia in grade school? Didn’t they know how cruel teenagers could be? She shuddered, remembering the teasing she’d endured in high school when her hair had been a much brighter orange and less manageable.

He tried to look down the front of her shirt, an impossible feat with her high-collared Japanese-style blouse. Amused, she scooted her chair over to give him the space he didn’t want and two seconds later the computer was back in working order and the printer across the room hummed to life.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She scooted her chair back and inspected the screen. “How’d you get it to work?”

He grinned and wiggled his bony hands. “Magic fingers.”

Rach returned his smile, but decided the best comment was no comment at all and escaped to the copy machine. When she bent over to peer at the display, he ogled her from behind. She sighed and waited for the copies to print.

She hadn’t realized there was so much to a copy machine. The big beast in the back printed two-sided, correlated—whatever the hell that meant—stapled and even hole-punched. She’d already messed up a batch of one hundred copies, hid the mistakes, and tried again.

An hour later, she was taking out her frustration on a stapler when her cell phone rang. Happy for the interruption, she glanced at the display and answered without a second thought. “You never called me last night, you jerk.”

“He really is perfect,” Leah said as a customer walked into Copy Masters. Her eyes were narrowed in a beady glare and her back stiff with purpose. She attacked the gum in her mouth, chomping double-time, and slapped the manila folder down onto the counter.

Yikes.
There was no way she was going to help that woman. Rach barely knew how to make a double-sided copy.

“Hi! William will be with you in just a moment,” Rach greeted in the chipper tone William had been using on the customers all morning. The woman stared blankly at Rach’s smile.
Oookkkayyy then.
She turned around and faked great concentration on the pamphlets at her work station. She hoped William would return soon from the back room or she’d have to get up and help the crabby lady herself. She picked up a pamphlet and told Leah, “No such thing.”

The black plastic binding slipped from the two holes she’d managed to jam it into.
Plastic piece of crap.
She huffed and tried again. She’d never put one together before and it was proving to be a pain in the ass.

“Sure there is, you just haven’t found your perfect man yet. You’ll see,” Leah insisted.

Rach smiled at the absurdity of the comment. “The only thing more unrealistic than your perfect man is
two
perfect men in this world. There definitely is no such thing as two of them co-existing in the same universe. At least you’ve proven he’s not a serial killer.”

“I told you, he’s too gorgeous to be a freak.”

Rach smiled. “He could still be a nose picker.”

Leah laughed. “He didn’t pick his nose.”

“Of course he didn’t do it in front of you, they never do.”

“He showed up at my door with a dozen roses and a box of chocolates,” Leah continued.

“Sounds like overkill to me,” Rach said matter-of-factly and waved at William when he walked through the storage room door. “William, we have a customer.” He gave her a curious stare, as if wondering why she hadn’t gotten up herself to help the woman. Rach waved the pamphlet at him. “I’m having the worst time with these things!”

“Oh, okay,” he answered and hurried to the counter. He gave the customer a wide smile. “Welcome to Copy Masters, We Master You Faster!”

“William, save me the spiel. I called two days ago to have someone pick these fliers up and there they sat in the office when I came in this morning. Can you tell me why that is?” The woman demanded and set the fliers in question on the counter.

“I, uh, I’m really, um, not sure, Mrs. Mulberry,” William sputtered and Rach looked up, worried about the nervousness in his voice.

She started to get up to go to him for support, but Leah said, “And then he opened the car door for me and helped me inside.”

“As if you don’t know how to get in and out of a car. You’ve been doing it for years.” William would be fine. Sometimes dealing with things on one’s own was the best way to rise above adversity. When Mrs. Mulberry went in search of her cell phone ringing inside her purse, Rach gave William an encouraging thumbs-up and turned back to the project on her desk. She finished her first unblemished pamphlet of the day and in her excitement, cried out, “
Yes!
”

Only seventy-five to go. Hadn’t the company heard of the new “going green” trend? They could have saved time and money by distributing a PDF version to everyone’s e-mail and saved her the paper cut.

“Ouch.” She shoved the finger into her mouth and sucked the throbbing, miniscule wound. As luck would have it, she’d been hired the very week the binding machine had gone caput.

“Then he took me to an Italian restaurant and ordered for me,” Leah gushed, clippers buzzing in the background.

“These need to be done today,” Mrs. Mulberry said after silencing her phone.

“Of course.” William nodded emphatically.

She gave William another smile of encouragement but he still looked like he might pee his pants. Rach left him to it and finished another pamphlet. This time she didn’t yell in elation. It had already lost the excitement and now it was tedious work. “Wow, he ordered for you? That would have been annoying. As if you don’t know how to say ‘spaghetti, please’.”

“Then we shared dessert, a cheesecake. It was so romantic,” Leah finished. Despite her anxiety over Leah’s newly found love with a complete stranger, Rach smiled, picturing the happy grin on Leah’s face and the faraway look in her eyes. No question about it, she was a goner.

“I would have told him to get his own cheesecake. Those fancy restaurants never have big enough slices for one person, let alone two people,” Rach teased, stacking the fourth pamphlet on the small pile.

She looked up and found William and the customer staring at her as if she were committing customer service suicide. Who would have thought a copier service would be so demanding?

“I’ve got to go, there are people staring at me. I’ll have to call you later,” Rach whispered into the phone. Leah said goodbye and Rach snapped the phone shut. Hurrying to the counter, she tried a polite smile at the woman who once again stared right through her while she chomped on her gum. “Would you like me to help, William?”

He beamed at her. “Mrs. Mulberry would like these copies in color and folded in half. This will be a good training session for you.”

The woman gasped and looked like she might fall over. “I think not, young man. You know how important these flyers are. I’ll not have a—a
beginner
messing these up.”

William withered under her gaze and Rach bit back a reprimand. What was with this lady, anyway? Poor William looked like he would rather be swallowed up by a black hole than deal with Mrs. Mulberry.

Rach plastered on a smile and said cheerfully, “I run the machine very well, so you needn’t worry about a thing.”

Mrs. Mulberry attacked her gum. “I sure hope so. These need to be finished before noon; I still have to put mailing labels on them. I
hope
I am leaving this in good hands, William. Your employee had better not screw this up.”

Rach bit her tongue and picked the flier up off the counter. She read it out loud, “Welcome to our fundraiser.”

The woman worked for the local country club and at twenty dollars a plate anyone could attend a fundraiser for the survivors of the Midwest flooding.

“Yes,” Mrs. Mulberry snapped. “And I have people depending on me to get these out today.”

Not impressed by the woman’s aggressive behavior, Rach gave a small whistle. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”

Oops,
she hadn’t meant to say that out loud. William’s eyes popped wide open.

The woman balked, snapping her mouth shut. Speechless.

Thankfully, the phone rang and Rach excused herself to answer it.

“We’ll get these done, don’t you worry, Mrs. Mulberry. They’ll be perfect and ready to pick up in a couple of hours,” William promised.

After the woman left, Rach turned to William. “Pleasant lady. Is she a frequent customer?”

His shoulders sagged and he nodded. “Yeah. She’s a real hard person to please.”

“We’ll get the fliers done, no biggie,” she assured him with a pat on his shoulder. Rach took the flier, on a mission to do her best. She swept her curls up into a messy ponytail and got to work, nursing the finger with the paper cut. A two-sided color copy folded in half—even a child could do it.

****

Apparently a child could have done a better job, so said Mrs. Mulberry when she’d returned at noon smelling of passion fruit gum and sporting the same unfriendly expression she’d left with earlier that afternoon. And not only were the fliers wrong, in her opinion Rach and William were the biggest imbeciles she’d ever met.

Rach could have sworn she’d pressed the double-sided button when she’d printed the fliers. She left the copier to do the five hundred copies and went to finish up the pamphlets. A sweet, little talkative nun from the Catholic Church had come in and Rach had gotten wrapped up in helping her pick out stationary for the church administration. When she went back to check on the fliers, there were one thousand one-sided copies sitting in the output tray. Five minutes ‘til the hour, William panicked and Rach was calming him down when Mrs. Mulberry arrived.

“You could staple the pages together and save some trees,” Rach suggested. It sounded like a great idea. She pasted on a big fake smile, hoping to charm the woman with some optimism.

No such luck. Mrs. Mulberry gawked. Turning her fury on William, he cringed like a baby kitten in the eye of a snarling bulldog.

“How could you let this happen? Are you daft?!” Mrs. Mulberry raged. Rach narrowed her eyes and nudged him to the side to take the heat. His face had gone from pale to shades of crimson her own redhead genes would have trouble matching. Beside Rach, William gripped the counter so hard his knuckles turned white.

“It’s okay, William, just breathe,” Rach soothed, patting him on his bony back.

If he didn’t remember to suck in air soon, she’d be performing CPR.

“I think you’re taking this a little bit to the extreme,” Rach reasoned, her patience waning.

“Do you have any idea what this does to my
deadline?
I can’t believe I entrusted these fliers to you! I don’t know how you people run a business—it’s unacceptable!”

William’s parents made their entrance and Mrs. Mulberry found a new target. A good thing, because poor William was almost comatose.

“Mr. Thompson, if I had known you left important projects for trainees and your son, who apparently hasn’t a wink of common sense in his head, I would have taken my business to Happy Printing around the corner. Look at this,” she demanded, waving two of the copies that should have been on one sheet under the man’s nose. “This is a disgrace. How can someone screw up a
double-sided copy
?”

How indeed,
Rach pondered as she sidled to her workstation, but William caught her on the move. He looked like he might throw up any second. Rach mouthed, “I’m sorry,” and he shrugged in response.

Mr. Thompson—a spitting image of William, minus the metal grille—glanced nervously at Rach while his very unhappy customer did her best to degrade his mentality. His cheeks were the same shade of red as William’s and by his skittering glances everywhere but Mrs. Mulberry, he suffered the same confrontational issues as his son. Mrs. Thompson, sensing both her son’s and her husband’s angst, stepped in to handle the tense situation.