Run Away Baby

“I have to go,” she said to him. “Grandma, what’s your number? I have to call you back from my cellphone.”

Her grandmother recited her number and Abby hung up.

Abby didn’t work at the coffee shop again until the beginning of July. It never occurred to her that she had no reason to go back there, that any coffee shop would have been a step up from the one she associated with the worst day of her life.

Her first day back Randall was there, waiting for her.

“You’re back,” he told her.

“I guess.”

“Welcome!” His hand had healed and he looked a little less disheveled.

“He’s been in here every day, asking about you,” Tara told Abby after he left.

“Whatever,” said Abby.

The next day he was back again. He was wearing a suit, edging further from that schlumpy man Abby had first met on the day that everything changed.

“Are you in college?” he asked her.

“I just graduated. Barely.”

“But you’re still working here?”

“Yeah. For now.”

“You’d probably like to sit down and have a nice meal after being on your feet all day. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe.” She shrugged.

He recognized in this new, hollow version of Abby someone who was easy prey. He scooped her up and made her his own. She didn’t fight it one bit. She was ripe, damaged fruit for the first greedy bastard to steal.

Chapter 3

Abby’s first day at Lorbmeer, Messdiem & Miller, a receptionist named Danielle showed her to her office. It was an interior room without windows, and it appeared to be the resting place of unwanted furniture and decor. The desk was massive, made of dark wood with a slab of thick glass on the top of it. Old ticket stubs from sporting events were preserved beneath the glass. A variety of mismatched filing cabinets were lined along one wall. A midcentury painting of a sailboat hung beside an oil-painted meadow in a Baroque-style frame.

“I wasn’t expecting an office,” she told Danielle. There were still-damp furniture polish streaks on the credenza, and fresh vacuum zigzags on the cushy Turkish rug that took up half the room.

“It’s been vacant, so I guess they thought why not give it to you,” Danielle said as she picked up the furniture polish and dust cloth that were sitting by the door and set them out in the hallway, as if the mere sight of them might set off Abby.

“Is Clark around?”

“Mr. Lorbmeer is in Tallahassee. Do you need to speak with him?”

“No. I was going to thank him.”

Danielle gave Abby a blank look.

“For giving me this job,” she said.

“We need these to be folded,” Danielle said, placing a stack of papers on Abby’s desk, “and then they can go in envelopes like these, and when you’ve done all this I’ll show you how to use the postage machine.”

“Okay.”