Taylor Made

by Sherryle Kiser Jackson

  “Now I have met you more than halfway,” he said quickly slicing her card in two with a pair of utility scissors he was also prepared enough to have in his box of tricks. “It’s time you meet me.”

  Corey clipped through his own old credit card and then the replacement cards in the envelope. Pill was frozen into a gesture of “oh, no, you didn’t.”

  “We both have to learn to work the budget without an instant safety net,” Corey reasoned.

  “Oh, okay, Corey,” Pill said. He didn’t know whether she was breathing heavily to calm down, or if she was beginning to hyperventilate. Laser assaults were being fired at him again, this time from his wife’s glare. “Why are you acting like such a butthole?”

  “I guess the same reason you are being such a prude.” He paused to let that one sink in. “I’m trying. I’m trying to find something to hopefully make things better in the long run.” That will eventually make you happy. “What about you?” Corey asked.

  She snatched up the pads sealed inside the portfolio he had given her and walked toward the main entrance and stairs in a seductive walk that wasn’t lost on him.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “To my cell, Mr. Warden,” Pill said, this time the click-clack of her heels on the hardwood were sounding eerily like tit and tat.

  “I guess I’m supposed to continue to let you just walk all over me,” he said, turning too quickly for his sore back, which halted him from moving until the spasm subsided.

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. He realized that was exactly what he had invited her to do since they first met.

  Chapter 10

  Oil sheen. Pill sprayed a halo of the finishing dew and waited for the haze to rest on her client’s roller set as her client ducked and flinched. Pill smirked. No one could escape the forced reintroduction of moisture stripped away in the cleansing process or at least receive some sort of residual mist. Pill had ingested so much oil sheen she was sure her lungs were full of it by now.

  Oil sheen was her finishing tool and spit shine—her closer. That and her fingers were all she needed to complete her current look. The last client of the night was a friend of Mercedes’s. Mercedes had put up the red flag when her friend with harsh strawberry-blond highlights bounced in the shop. Mercedes had one waiting, one in the chair, and one under the dryer. Pill saved her. By the looks of things, she would be finished with Ms. Shortcake before any of her coworkers called it a day.

  Pill began finger combing at the back of her client’s head, relaxing the curl from the roller silhouette it hung in. She extended her leg to hook the heel of her suede-studded pumps on the pedal to lower the chair so she could complete the top. Nothing. She pumped twice. Her chair was stuck again. She should never have touched it, Pill thought, recalling how she had adjusted the height to see her reflection in the mirror when she was styling her own hair earlier.

  I can’t send the child out with unplucked curls on top, she thought. Pill looked around the styling area. Everyone was still working on clients. There was only one chair open at station one, Carmen’s chair.

  She needed a new chair. Pill was bold, but didn’t think she could ask for anything from Carmen right now, especially something as expensive as a new styling chair if she wasn’t on point with her booth fee. It was practically the middle of November, and she had just amassed enough to make her bail. Both Carmen and Corey, in her opinion, were being pigheaded. Boss Lady wouldn’t accept installments, which was all Corey was dolling out these days. He had given her $300 toward the debt and was sure the remainder would come from the week’s tallies.

  The first thing she did was tendered cash for a few tardies with their cable provider and electric company. Only she knew how close to cutoff they were when she snatched those bills from Corey’s hands the other day. Then she went with Shae to the beauty supply chain to replenish her supplies that she had been borrowing for the past week and a half. Between Mercedes and Deena, she owed them at least sixty to seventy dollars’ worth of products. Once there, she couldn’t resist the urge to purchase a dashiki-inspired shirt dress and add a few exotic-looking bangles to her collection.

  Pill liked it better when there was no apparent money manager in the family. This newfound power gave Corey permission to micromanage her to death. She hated writing down every cent she made and spent. At first, she tried to be honest in her documentation, but she was afraid to see the totals of her daily and weekly spending. Corey also had her leery of taking out a large lump sum from the account. She had to work his system at the institutional level.

  Every day he wanted to talk numbers. Then he would wonder where the loving had gone. The thought of being intimate went in one ear and out the other with the constant lecturing about their finances, she thought.

  All cash, no paper trail was her motto these days. She did carry a secret weapon, though. Silver Sliver was a credit card that she applied for without Corey’s knowledge but didn’t think she would receive. She had yet to use it. It was her ram in the bush. If God kept a ram in reserve to save Isaac, then He could have sent this card snail mail to save her.

  “I’m hungry,” Candy hollered out as Pill approached Carmen’s chair, ushering her client.

  Pill stared at Candy’s side profile now that she was stationed right beside her. There was no noticeable difference in her belly. Her middle appeared to balance the two hula hoop-sized ripples that increased each time she had a child. Pill didn’t know if anyone was keeping count, but this was at least the fourth announcement Candy had made about hunger. They seem to be coming at fifteen-minute intervals now. This was the same kind of bemoaning that preceded the birth of her last two children, D’Marc and Princess. Pill hoped for Candy’s sake that she wasn’t pregnant again.

  “What?” Candy asked, apparently feeling herself being sized up. She temporarily stopped taking clips from the top of her client’s wrap style.

  “Can someone please take this girl for some real food?” Pill queried. Perched upon Carmen’s stool and with the client’s seat lowered to the ground, she was able to work out the top curls with her pinky and the end of a rat-tail comb.

  “I know, right?” Deena cosigned from her station.

  “Oh, you know what we should do? We should all go out to eat after work. I haven’t been to Texas De Brazil in a while. Jerome says they are way too expensive, so we never go,” Mercedes said, escorting her client to the dryer with magazine selections under her arm.

  Why should he worry when he’s spending her money? Pill thought.

  “Oh my gawd, I love their wings,” Candy commented.

  Going out with the girls sounded like heaven to Pill right now. Not because she was terribly hungry or desired more of their company, but rather she was trying to avoid Corey and the tyranny of the daily tally. She needed a break—she deserved one, but she only had $635 in her smock. If only she could put off Carmen for one more day, she’d be at liberty to really dine and enjoy herself.

  Pill gave Strawberry Shortcake a final spin to check the continuity of her comb out before unsnapping the personalized Epic Beauty protective cover from around her. Before Pill could write her a receipt for services rendered, the young girl handed her a folded wad that amounted to forty-five dollars, which was twenty dollars short of what she should have charged. She must have noticed Pill’s hesitation as she fingered the three bills to recount. Ms. Shortcake explained the hookup fee she usually paid her girl, Mercedes. It was all she claimed to have.

  Pill pocketed the money in her jeans and shot a look across to their girl, Mercedes. She was on her own from now on when in a jam. Pill was so busy cleaning any mess she may have brought to that station that she hadn’t noticed Carmen walk up behind her until she could see Carmen staring at her from the reflection in the mirror.

  “Pill just took over your station, Boss Lady,” came the ungrateful voice of the one she just tried to help out.

  “Maybe I need to tack on a ten- to fifteen-dollar rental charge i
f people are going to use my chair.” Although her tone was jovial, Carmen’s eyes and facial expression communicated her true lack of appreciation. “You’re gonna be into me big time.”

  This standoff isn’t cool, Pill thought. The scene temporarily silenced the salon. Holding out on Carmen always gave Boss Lady something to hold over Pill’s head. Pill reached into the left side of her smock and handed her the entire contents, lent and all. She hated to do it, but Pill considered the extra thirty-five as interest and chair rental since Carmen was so petty. There was no discretion as Carmen fingered through the money as Pill had done with her last client’s payment before reversing direction back to her office.

  There seemed to be five more minutes of silence as Pill swept up her dignity along with the hair sheddings. She knew five minutes of salon silence meant fifty minutes of salon gossip later this week whenever she was not around.

  She had to go out to dinner with them. She didn’t want people to believe she couldn’t afford to. She dumped the debris from the dustpan into the wastebasket and proceeded to Shae’s station.

  Pill watched for a moment as her girlfriend used the tooth of her comb like a latch hook to spin tiny sections of her client’s hair into coils. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch what she thought looked like mini porcupine needles springing out from the lady’s head. Pill could see this older woman with the youthful face sporting a flower or pinning the top down with a jeweled hairpin.

  “What’s up?” Shae asked, completing the last row at her client’s hairline.

  “Everyone’s talking about going out to catch a bite after work,” Pill said as if she were ramping up to ask permission.

  Shae didn’t even let her get the statement out before scrunching up her face. “No can do. Got to save my dinero—weekend travel expenses, remember?”

  Shae almost snapped Pill with her client’s cape. After unsnapping it, she reached over to the nearest dryer and set it for only ten minutes. Pill stepped to the side as Shae’s client changed chairs.

  “I guess people are going as they are.” Pill looked down to inspect the appropriateness of her scoop neck tunic. She was good; she didn’t know about the others, though. “C’mon, Sun-shiny Shae, I wanna hang out with you and the girls. We could go on diets together.”

  They figured out a long time ago, telling people they were on a diet saved money. There was something about being on a diet that made people want to tempt and feed them from their own plates. They could order the house salad and leave full, especially in a big group. Going on a diet was another of their Mosby Court codes.

  “Girls with empty Louie bags should not go out to eat,” Shae had the decency to whisper.

  “It’s BGBC. Plus, it’s not empty. I got forty-five from my last client,” Pill demonstrated by taking the forty dollars out of the back pocket of her skinny jeans and dropping it into her oversized bag with her wallet and latest issue of Cosmo.

  “LV, BGBC, it’s all letters. What time are we talking about?” Shae asked, picking lint off her bright yellow Democracy Now! shirt. She too had on skinny jeans that tucked inside what looked like actual Eskimo boots.

  Pill took her response as an affirmative and clapped her hands together like a girl making the cheerleading squad. She turned to ask the coordinators, Mercedes and Candy, about the logistics when Carmen swept past her down the center of the styling area.

  “We are all going out to eat. You should come too, Carmen,” Mercedes said.

  That brought her to a standstill. At least three pairs of eyes, including Pill’s, grew large as Carmen thought about it. Her seriousness aside, Carmen was cool, but most of the time she took the stance that she was either too good or too professional to really socialize with them.

  “Yeah, I might. Everyone’s going?” she asked, polling the crowd. Tentative nods confirmed the count. “I do have an idea I want to talk to you all about before the next staff meeting anyway. I guess I will join you guys for a while. I better carry some business cards with me too.”

  Mercedes looked as if she wanted to rescind the offer. Pill could hear Shae let out a sigh of disgust at Carmen’s need to be a walking advertisement of the shop. They had to understand that was just how Carmen was—steady on the grind.

  “First round is on Boss Lady,” Candy announced.

  Chapter 11

  Corey was circling the block in his Brown Bomber, which was a nickname drivers like him used for their trucks. It was a new route in an unfamiliar truck, but the streets were very familiar.

  Pill used to live on this block with her sister. He remembered the doorstop to her apartment building where he learned Pill’s kisses were a delicious delicacy. He remembered the beige microfiber couch where they would talk and watch TV hours after their date had ended. He realized in that simplistic happiness that he could do that with her forever. They tested the restraints of their commitment to God, adding logs to the flame of his ever-increasing desire for her with heavy petting and touching. His resolve to remain chaste in their relationship always won out.

  He thought about visiting his sister-in-law, Sheena, while he waited to make his current delivery, but decided against leaving the truck parked for an extended time on the narrow street. Sheena attended their church sporadically when she wasn’t working her second job. They would see her from time to time. Although they were both petite, Sheena was the complete opposite of Pill. She was plain but polished as if she bore the title of her first job, administrative assistant, 24/7. When the sisters were together, he could tell they shared a deep bond, but family gatherings were rare. Corey wondered if that was by design.

  He turned right on Braddock Road, bringing him back to the reality of why he was circling the block at a quarter past seven. He had one last delivery that required a signature receipt, but no one was home when he tried to deliver to a Mr. Earl Thomas earlier. He checked his docket on the dash-mounted clipboard to confirm Mr. Thomas’s address once again. He noticed a special insignia used to mark his name that he hadn’t noticed before.

  Corey felt as if it were his first day driving. Instead of the newer digital signature pads with built-in message boarding to the warehouse, the truck he was forced to take out this morning was caught in a time warp. He reached for the Boost Mobile walkie-talkie phone to call dispatch. The loud chirping heard between each transmission was about as annoying as the static in the CB technology it replaced years ago. Pressing a button to talk was as close to hands-free as he could get in this delivery truck.

  “Henricho Dispatch, this is Crystal,” a pleasant voice said.

  “Crystal, this is Taylor in truck eleven. It says I have a delivery for a Mr. Earl Thomas that needs a signed receipt. He’s not coming to the door. Are there any special instructions for this delivery? Please advise,” Corey said, hoping she would tell him to head back to the warehouse.

  “Lucky you, Taylor. I promise you that you and Mr. Thomas will become quite close. He is a gem.”

  Corey waited before chirping in, “Oh, goodness, this doesn’t sound good.” Then, he mumbled, “What have they gotten me into?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want to jinx your new run. Forget I said anything, Taylor,” Crystal said, chiming off quickly.

  Corey didn’t need any added stress in his life. It was bad enough to come in and find you have been reassigned a new truck and route. He was accustomed to coming in early familiarizing himself with the packages that the night guys had loaded overnight. It added an additional ten to fifteen minutes sorting time at each stop when he went into his day blind.

  “You all had me reassigned. I think it is only fair to let me know what I have to look forward to, especially if it is a problem route,” Corey managed, cutting a corner with his right hand while chirping in with his left. He had the phone in his lap now because he realized this might not be such a short call.

  “It wasn’t me. Honeywell got reassigned for not delivering Mr. Thomas’s stuff too many times.” Crystal paused, chirping out, but imm
ediately chirping back in. “It’s medicine, so you have to make every attempt to deliver tonight. Mr. Thomas will call and complain about you, and I mean, corporate office.”

  Corey looked over his shoulder as if he had X-ray vision to see through his interior door. “Corporate? Are you serious?” Chirp.

  “As a heart attack. He gets this big shipment once a month.” Chirp. “Sometimes, he sends stuff back.”

  Corey held the phone in his hand as he waited at the stoplight. The sun had started to go down. He needed this resolved so he could get home and kick his feet up. He had been dreaming of a good meal and sports highlights. “It would seem that if this guy has a regular delivery, and it is so important that he receive it on a certain day, that he should make some connection with his driver to be there on the date of arrival.”

  Crystal sighed deeply. “It was a cat and mouse game every month with Honeywell and Mr. Thomas, and my office had to play referee. Hopefully, you can stay clear of the drama.”

  “Naturally, you guys sided with Mr. Thomas,” Corey chirped in, wondering now if he had an ally or an enemy on the other end. She’s giving me a heads-up, he thought, which was more than he could say for the guy at the docket desk this morning who abruptly told him, “You’ve got the East end. Take number eleven,” with no explanation.

  “My job is to log in the complaints from both sides, prepare dockets, track packages, and keep your trucks in working order,” Crystal said.

  He wanted to ask her why he was chosen to switch with Honeywell and why he couldn’t keep his old truck, but he didn’t.

  He also found himself wanting to know what she looked like. Her voice was soft like that of a little girl, but it delivered a quiet strength.

  “Sounds like dispatch is UPS code for spy,” Corey chided, “and just in case you are one, I need to get a message to the bigwigs. Tell them I have a life outside of work. I can’t sit here waiting for Mr. Thomas to get home. I want my old route back. I knew the old route like the back of my hand and could get to my regulars and randoms and punch out by six-thirty at the latest.”