Locked Down with Mr. Right

I could only hope that it was a phase. One day he would be mature enough to realize what his dad really was. It felt paranoid but I couldn’t help but wonder if Dave had turned up when he did, demanding visitation as a way to turn Duncan against me. A sort of twisted, Shakespearian vengeance. In many ways I would have preferred a poisoned goblet, getting it over with fast.

I focused on the machine, a severed appendage the last thing I needed at that point. Especially if I did get accepted on the show. It was a pipe dream that seemed to be getting further all the time. It could have just been the way Mercy was talking it up, but it really sounded like it could be really great.

Then again, she made her phone sex job sound like a barrel of monkeys as well. The longer I knew her, the more it became clear that she had missed her true calling in public relations.

“Addie, can I see you for a moment?”

“Sure, Mr. Jensen.”

Shutting down the machine, I followed the foreman to his little office above the factory floor, where he could see everything that was going on.

The thin plywood door closed like punctuation. At least that was how it sounded to me. I ride to pretend that I didn’t know what was coming.

“Coffee?” Mr. Jensen asked, minding his well-learned, yet fraudulent, manners.

“No thank you, sir,” I said, resisting the urge to say ‘master.’ Even though it would make me feel a bit better, it would do little to improve my situation.

“I like to think life is full of opportunities,” Mr. Jensen began, a tidal wave of clichés clearly forthcoming.

I did my best to tune him out. I honestly believed that he thought he was helping, but that’s not how it seemed to me. From my perspective, he was just prolonging the inevitable and adding empty platitudes to injury, which in a lot of ways was even worse.

“It really wasn’t my decision,” Jensen said, doing a sterling impression of Pilate.

“Oh?”

“No, it is the owners, you see. Certain concerns have been raised about your safety. Not with the machines, you understand. We all know you are perfectly proficient there.”

“Thanks?”

“It has more to do with the other workers.”

“The fact that they hate me and drop lewd notes into my locker?”

“Yes, among other things.”

“What other things?”

“Certain, uh, threats have been made. Against you. By them. Most of them, anyway.”

“Death threats?” I asked, appalled.

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, I see. They’ve threatened to fuck me to death. With or without my cooperation.”

“I -”

He was clearly shocked. Mr. Jensen was the type to blush when forced to say, ‘breast of chicken.’ I felt a bit bad about it later. Like he said, it wasn’t his decision and I seriously doubted that he was one of the ones who made the threats. I really was embarrassing the messenger. However, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. In the moment, I was just really mad about losing my only real source of income at the time.

“So, the long and the short of it is I can’t work here anymore.”

“Yes,” Mr. Jensen said, relaxing back into his wheelhouse, “we will give you severance pay, of course.”

I didn’t cry. Not in the office. Not in the locker room, which I had to myself since starting there. Not in the exit tunnel.

I refused to let a single, solitary tear fall until I was back in my own clothes, in my truck, driving along the alarmingly empty streets. The usual traffic seemed almost like a comfort.

I couldn’t really identify a singular cause. I was upset about losing my job because I needed the money. The rape treats were certainly upsetting, but no more than the notes or the graffiti. There was little chance any of them would have actually taken the risk.

But I could still understand the caution of the owners. Logical as the reasoning was, the last fifteen minutes of my life had only added to the avalanche of shit I was already dealing with.

I really wished I had Mercy here with me. She would know exactly what to say to help me feel better. Whether or not it was actually true was completely incidental.

My phone started to ring. Finding a place to pull over, I eased to the side of the road. I really expected to see Mercy’s name displayed on the caller ID screen, but no. It was another name. A man’s name. Not Dave, thank Christ, but also not Duncan.

It was a name I had never seen or heard before. Fairly certain I would have remembered coming across a Tobias Ford.

“Hello?” I said, going for the more traditional salutation.

“Hello, is this Addie Harris?”

“I-it is.”

“Hello, Ms. Harris. My name is Tobias Ford. I am a producer at Avalon studios I am calling to inform you that you have been selected to be on the debut season of our exciting new reality TV show called Second Chance Bachelorette.”