Is it about that check you saw? Listen, who are you to lay this on me on a Tuesday? Kate died. We fired the kid. Dan left for the Tribune. That was a goddamn business loan! It wasn’t mine to spend. You think if it was you wouldn’t get a raise? Really. I know. You’re sick of City Council stories. Too underpaid to get death threats for quoting Girl Scouts and pickleball freaks. I know. Tell you what. You know the house on Grand? Conjoined twins moved in. Conjoined twins. It could be a human interest piece. Pull this town’s shriveled heartstrings. Get their story. None there, fine. But call them first, for God’s sake. Either one.”
…
“So then we’re bagging groceries at Lucca’s. Anything at that point. All I care about is moving out of Mike’s. Because she started making moves on him, you see. It got ridiculous. When he’d give me flowers, she’d thank him. When we’d have dinner, she’d eat. And when we would. You know. She’d help. She called it helping. Like I don’t have eyes. Like we don’t-”
“That’s patently false, you resentful bitch. While you were sleeping, he-”
“Anyway, it was for the better because he turned out to be a fetishist. So we start at Lucca’s. It’s fine. It’s a job. But after two weeks we only get one paycheck. We tell him, hey, you hired two women, didn’t you? We pay taxes separately, don’t we?
“Some would say jointly.”
“Well, Lucca says he filled one job, didn’t he? So I take him to small claims. He wins. I appeal. Apparently the county takes a year to look this kind of stuff over. Meanwhile, $12.50 an hour beats nothing. But because I’m attached to a psychotic klepto-”
“Listen, you’re a reporter. Objectivity, right? Honesty? Tell me what’s worse. Taking $25 from the register—that’s two hours I would’ve been yelled at by soccer moms for packing eggs on the bottom—or ratting out your sister.”
“So Lucca cans her. But he promotes me to assistant manager. He says I tried to take him for all he had, okay, me and half the world. But she stole from him. You can forgive anyone for that, he says. That’s love. But the rarest thing is someone you trust not to do it. Hey, get that down? That could be how you end your story.”
Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work appears in Necessary Fiction, Hobart, minor literature[s], Evergreen Review, Split Lip Magazine, Expat Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGATE. She has received support from Bread Loaf, GrubStreet, and The Writers’ Grotto.