Matt Cowper - The Clerk

So they’d remained work friends — though the shirt Cynthia was wearing beneath her apron today did reveal ample cleavage—

“I didn’t know it was your birthday yesterday!” Cynthia said, jolting Thomas out of his fantasizing. “Vernon told me this morning, but I haven’t really gotten a chance to talk to you today…”

“Well, it was,” Thomas replied after hastily swallowing a bite of sandwich, and trying not to look at the aforementioned cleavage, though it was now less than three feet from his lips. “The Big Four-Oh.”

“Well, belated happy birthday! Did you do anything special?”

“I did things that were special to me,” Thomas said slowly, “but other people would probably think they’re boring.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I just did a few things,” he replied. “Took a walk on the beach. Drank a little.”

“Sounds like fun!” she replied. If he had said he’d spent the day counting the fibers in his carpet, her response would’ve likely been the same. “Forty years old! Well, you don’t look a day over thirty.”

“Well, thanks,” Thomas said, immensely pleased, though he knew it wasn’t true.

“Isn’t forty when people start having midlife crises?” Cynthia asked.

“Yes, uh, I guess this is the age when people start to question things.” He coughed unnecessarily. “But I feel great. I don’t really understand what the big deal is. I guess people want to have this perfect life, and when they look back and things don’t look perfect, they panic.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re able to look at things so maturely.” She paused, studying him shyly. “I… well, my parents want me to have this ‘perfect life,’ like you call it, so I know what you mean. They keep bugging me to ‘do something with my life,’ as if I’m not doing anything now! I live in a nice house with three other roomies, and we split everything, so it’s not like I’m drowning in bills. And I’m five minutes from the beach! And I’ve got a nice job! Oh, it burns me up sometimes!”

It wasn’t like Cynthia to unload like this. Thomas reluctantly commiserated: “Sounds like we’re in the same boat. My parents — well, one of them, and my sister, too — they say the same thing sometimes.”

“Really?” she asked, her eyes shining. “But… they don’t understand your position? How you feel? I mean, you’re pretty settled in here, right?”

“Naw, they don’t understand,” Thomas replied, though he was leery of the shining eyes. “They think being ‘settled in,’ as you put it, is a bad thing — in my situation, at least.”

“Exactly! My parents want me to be a carbon copy of them. And I’m not .”

“I think most parents are like that, though they always deny it. Just ignore them. You’re not living with them anymore, so you don’t have to put up with their crap.”

“I know. But still… it’s hard sometimes.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t know what else to say.

“So… have you guys had fights or anything? Over the years? I haven’t really heard you talk about your family…”

No, this was getting too personal. Thomas shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t want to share any of that.”

“OK, well, sorry if I, you know, brought up bad memories…”

“Oh, it’s fine. You didn’t bring any up. They’re the ones who have bad memories, not me.”

“…I see.”

“Just keep your chin up,” Thomas said, though he immediately regretted uttering that banality. If someone had said it to him when he was gloomy or pissed off, he would’ve growled at them. He tried to come up with something better, and finally remembered one of Vernon’s aphorisms: “Don’t listen to the insects drone, as Vernon would say. They all end up kamikaze-ing into the nearest light anyway.”

Cynthia smiled. “That’s a good saying. He has a bunch of them, doesn’t he?”

“He certainly does.”

“Well, I’ll get back to work!” she said, though her enthusiasm seemed forced. “Enjoy the rest of your lunch.”

“I will, thanks.”

She shuffled out of the back room. Thomas could hear the plastic double-doors swish and creak as she pushed through them and returned to her deli post. He munched the rest of his sandwich thoughtfully.

“Did you clean the bathroom yet?”

“Yes,” Thomas replied with a glare. “I cleaned it top to bottom.”

“Huh,” Vernon said, grinning awkwardly. “I guess you can only do so much to it, it being old and decrepit like it is. One day I’ll get around to renovating it…”

“You’ve been saying that for at least fifteen years.”

“Oh, you don’t think I’m serious? Just you wait. It’ll be done before the year’s out — actually no, it’s already December. Next year then. I’ll get it so fixed up and shiny, the Queen of England wouldn’t mind setting her royal derriere down on our toilet.”

“Queen of England? If she saw how that bathroom looks now , she’d start another war with us just to rid the world of its awfulness.”

“Aw, stop it,” Vernon said, laughing. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

Around two o’clock, as he was stocking some box dinners, Thomas heard Rock Lewis’s foghorn voice blaring from the front of the store. He was likely picking on Peggy and flirting with Orianna, the two cashiers on duty today. Thomas grinned and waited for his own blaring treatment, which would happen sooner or later.

In a few seconds, Rock comically skidded to a halt at the end of the aisle. He squinted as he peered at the blurry male putting up cartons; Rock had poor vision, but almost never used the generic drug store-bought glasses that sat in his shirt pocket.

“Thomas Copeland!” he hollered, once he was certain it really was Thomas standing there. “What you up to?”

A native of Harker’s Island, Rock possessed the strange brogue of those hard-nosed people. He was a “high tider” (pronounced “hoi toider”) and proud of it. He enjoyed accosting dingbatters with his incomprehensible accent, and laughed when the dit-dots squirmed and tried to understand him.

He walked towards Thomas, a grizzled, sun-baked old man in a hole-filled t-shirt and faded jeans that were already worn out when Thomas was still a baby. He was as hairy and burly as a bear: white hair poked out from his ears, rose from his arms like a protective matting, and stuck out from his shirt collar as if it was angry at being held back by cotton fabric. His forearm muscles bulged, and his neck didn’t exist. Even though Rock was pushing seventy, Thomas wouldn’t want to tangle with him.

“I’m working, Rock,” Thomas replied. “What about you?”

“Work! I wish I had some. I’m poorer than a church mouse, ol’ boy. Tough toimes.”

“No boats being built?”

“I dunno. Ain’t done that in some toime.”

Rock — so nicknamed because of his powerful physique, which in his youth had been truly intimidating — was one of the area’s ne’er-do-wells. His father had been a commercial fisherman, but Rock had never really gotten into that — you had to get up too early, and if you got in the meat you had to bust your ass, because fish were fickle, and these might be the only ones you’d catch all week. After his parents had booted him out of the house after high school (an injustice he’d never forgiven; all he’d done was bring a girl or two home for some bed-shaking fun, which as a grown man was his right) he’d joined a painting crew. He didn’t like that either; it was so goddamn boring, just swiping a brush or roller back and forth hour after hour. No wonder most painters were drunks or drug addicts. This cycle had continued for decades: Rock would find a job, tire of it within six months, and then quit and try out a whole new industry. Most recently, he’d been working with a boat builder over on the Island, but he’d reached his six month limit in November, and so he’d quit.