Matt Cowper - The Clerk

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, she came into my office and gave notice, and I gave her The Talk, but it didn’t have any effect that I saw. She wanted to be gone pretty quickly, so I said OK. And we shook hands, and that was the end of it.”

“The Talk, huh?” Thomas said, frowning.

“Yeah. I seem to remember giving it to you about — oh, man, I don’t even want to do the math…”

“Twenty-three years, roughly.”

“Wow-ee. Hell, that’s as old as Orianna is. She’s twenty-three, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Thomas said, feeling foolish. He remembered Reggie’s words: And what are you doing mooning over a twenty-three old? Even I know not to mess around with those young’uns .

“Well, she’s gone now, Thomas,” Vernon said, putting his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “I know you had a little crush on her, if you don’t mind my saying. Maybe I had a crush on her too. Now don’t laugh! A geezer like me can still enjoy the company of a slim young thing. But I try not to let it get to me. Sometimes it’s hard. You know how many people have come and gone over the years. I try to make ’em understand that they’re family, but some people don’t want this family — maybe they don’t want any family.”

“What did you say back then? Some people think they’re better?”

“It was true then, it’s true now, and it’ll always be true.”

The two men made strong efforts not to look at each other. There was too much emotion in the air. Past and present swirled together, faces nearly-forgotten and faces just-seen formed and reformed, until a shifting mosaic of Oxendine’s current and former employees seemed to hover in the air. At the center of the mosaic, Orianna’s calm, thin visage glowed softly. Thomas tried to subsume it into the mass of humanity, and succeeded — for a few seconds.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” Thomas muttered. “And it’ll be déjà vu all over again in the future, too.”

“Yup, that’s right,” Vernon said. “Oh, by the way, can you clean the bathroom today?”

Thomas laughed, glad for the tension to be cut. “Sure thing, boss.”

“Alright. Well, I’m-a go up front and check the weather. And by check the weather, I mean stand up there and do nothing.”

Vernon walked away, rubbing his potbelly. Thomas followed for a short distance, then veered off towards the dairy section.

The Talk. He wished he’d been a fly on the wall when the old fox had given it to Orianna. But then, he just had to recall his own experience, when Vernon had given him The Talk back when he was a confused teenager…

Thomas had been in a malaise. He’d just broken up with Danielle Shaw, his girlfriend of two years. He may have been in love with her, but older people told him he was too young to know what love was. Danielle was pretty in a frail sort of way, she was smart (or she got good grades, which was supposed to be the same thing), and she belonged to no clique at their high school. The hot, popular girls thought she was too plain and not manipulative enough, the athletes (of both genders) thought she looked too fragile, and the nerds thought she didn’t fully embrace her nerdiness. She was a floater, drifting here and there but never settling into an easy category. As Thomas was somewhat of a floater himself, this seemed to be an ideal match. It worked for two years. They laughed at how gloriously free they were from the hive mind, and reveled in intimacy (tickle-fests, belly-button licking) that their more lascivious peers would have laughed at.

But then Danielle went to work for the first time. For a summer job prior to her senior year, she was working as a front-desk receptionist at a high-class-yet-economical oceanfront hotel in Pine Knoll Shores called the Scotch Bonnet. (It was named after North Carolina’s state seashell, and had a three-foot-by-five-foot plastic replica in its lobby, along with plastic smiling crabs and a cross-eyed plastic seagull.) This hotel job was an entirely new thing, one her parents insisted upon because they claimed colleges liked to see work experience on applications.

After being shunned or ignored in high school, Danielle was shocked to find that men out in the “real world” took notice of her. She’d never really been out in the “real world” before: during the school year, she was either in school, hanging out with Thomas, or in her room doing homework. During previous summer breaks, her parents had signed her up for every camp in the area, and she barely had free time to write Emily Dickinson-inspired poems.

Things were certainly different when you put yourself out there.

These men flirted with her and slipped her their numbers as she checked them in, or they lumbered in from the beach or pool, shirtless and dripping, a towel suavely hanging over their shoulders, and asked when she got off work. At first, Danielle rejected them with self-righteous zeal. “I have a boyfriend,” she’d snap, and then she’d think of Thomas’s thick shoulders, his thick brown hair, the way he held her after they’d made love.

But some of her suitors had shoulders equally as thick, hair equally as thick, and she imagined their post-coital snuggling ability equaled, if not surpassed, Thomas’s. She took a chance one night, luring one of the guests (or getting lured) into the dunes as the ocean whispered and the stars shined overhead. (It was too dangerous to go up to the man’s room; there were strict rules against employee-guest relations, and Danielle didn’t want to get caught.) The guy was well-built, with the confidence of a college frat boy, which he falsely claimed to be. (He’d dropped out of community college after one semester, and now lived with his parents in New Jersey and worked at McDonald’s. It had taken a year to save up for this trip, as his fascist parents insisted that he pay $50 a month for rent.)

Technique wise, it was perhaps no better than sex with Thomas, but being under the stars, lying in cool sand, hearing the ocean’s murmur, feeling wickedly rebellious… well, it was amazing.

For two days, she’d abased herself. Then she’d broken up with Thomas. She sat him down at their favorite booth in their favorite restaurant, a seafood joint in Morehead City called Finn Finnegan’s, and told him the news. The usual vague reasons were given: the spark between them had petered out, they were going in different directions, her heart was no longer in port. She patted Thomas’s hand, and told him they could still be friends.

Thomas was dumbfounded, but even worse he felt constrained. If they weren’t in this restaurant, he could yell and storm and demand answers. He could make Danielle cry as she deserved. He might even slap her. How fulfilling that would be! But in this place, with its murmuring conversations, tinkling silverware, attentive wait staff, and fake sailfish mounted on the wall, it would be an outrage to act that way. The best he could do was growl and speak in curt sentences. Finally he told his now ex-girlfriend to “fuck off,” threw down the complimentary hushpuppy he was eating, and power-walked to the exit.

As he pushed open the door, he looked back once. A tall blond waitress was standing by the table, and Danielle was calmly ordering something. He knew what it would be: crabcakes with a side of coleslaw.

So Thomas was in a malaise as he sat down in Vernon’s office and told him that he was going to quit. The reasons he gave were vague, similar to the reasons Danielle had given him: he wanted to “try something different” and “explore his options.” He expected Vernon to smile and nod, tell a joke, shake his hand, and then wish him a happy future. But Vernon did none of these things. He sat rocking in his ancient, squeaky duct-tape-patched office chair, arms crossed, and glared at Thomas.