Mourning Crisis

by Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

  I realized my mistake when that line went out the door and wrapped around the building. Only a few miles from the Biltmore Estate, I assumed practically every tourist that had children and didn’t want to pay to eat at the estate decided to stuff their kids' mouths with chicken biscuits.

  I gave up and waited out the line. Experience had taught me it moved fast anyway, and I couldn’t afford to waste my gas on driving to another location.

  As the line moved, I scanned the internet on my cell phone. Okay, so, I Googled myself, hoping some of the trash talk had died down and praying I would be able to move forward instead of on like Miss Ashtray Licker had suggested.

  I jumped and almost tipped over onto the person in front of me, a scrawny old man thinner than a toothpick, which I would have likely crushed with my rather voluptuous bosom when someone tapped my shoulder from behind. The toothpick man would have either died from a voluptuous boob crush, or a heart attack caused by the thrill of said voluptuous boob crush. Okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but actors had a flair for the dramatic.

  “The line’s moving lady. If you’d look up from your phone every once in a while, you might know that.”

  I swiveled backward and stared into a metal Asheville Police Department badge. I bent my neck back and groaned. “Lovely. Just what I need.”

  A smile hijacked the tall man’s face. “Mayme Buckley? Well, isn’t this a blast from the past. How ya doin’?”

  The annoyance I’d just felt disappeared when I zoned in one the scrumptious face of my high school crush. The one and only Christopher Lacy.

  Hold up. My ill-tempered attitude nudged the high school Mayme begging to break free from deep within me. You really want to see this guy right now, cranky Mayme thought?

  As if my day wasn’t already bad enough. On a scale of bad to falling-through-a-stage-floor-really-stunk-but-not-as-bad-as-seeing-my-high-school-crush-at-the-lowest-point-in-my-life bad, well, I stuffed high school Mayme back where she belonged, deep in the bowels of my—not the bowels, but deep inside the pit of my soul, and groaned. I wasn’t prepared to run into anyone from high school, let alone someone I’d swooned over for four years straight. Someone that didn’t know I’d existed.

  “Hey, Chris.”

  He yanked my arm and flung me out of the line. “Here, I got this.” Dragging me to the front counter, he chatted up the little old lady pulling chicken mini’s from the warmer. “Stella, this is a high school friend of mine. Grab her whatever she wants on me, will ya?”

  “Sure, sugar. Whatever you want.” She smiled at me. “What can I get you, honey?”

  “Uh, just a four-piece and a Diet Coke. Thank you.” I backed away and listened as Christopher Lacy, the boy I’d crushed on all through high school, ordered his breakfast. He moved back to me and winked. “Sometimes it pays being a dick, as in detective.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I was going to say, that sounded offensive.”

  He laughed. “I know, that’s why I clarified. I learned that lesson the day I was promoted.” He pointed to his badge. “Major crimes unit, Asheville PD.”

  “Oh.” I blushed.

  He smiled. “Cute.”

  “What?”

  “The pink color your cheeks get when you’re embarrassed. Did that in high school, too.”

  He noticed that in high school? Wait, he noticed me in high school?

  Stella hollered to him, and he grabbed our breakfast.

  He held the tray with our food. “Got time to sit and catch up?”

  “Uh, sure. I guess.” I had all the time in the world. I just wasn’t sure I was capable of verbally expressing that, or anything else much over a grunt or cavewoman speak for that matter.

  Christopher Lacy wasn’t just some guy from high school. Christopher Lacy was the guy from high school. The most popular guy of my graduating class, for starters. The star of the football team, the president of the student council, the star of the lacrosse team, the valedictorian, and the one boy I’d had the biggest crush on for four years running. I might have mentioned that a time or twenty, but when it came to Christopher Lacy, I lost track of pretty much everything. He also dated the most popular girl, of course. Caroline Hartford.

  Blech.

  I never quite understood the allure of the infamous Caroline Hartford. Was it her long, stick straight, overly processed, bleached blonde hair? Her perfectly applied matte lipstick accentuating her already plump, luscious lips? Perhaps it was the mountain-like breasts she barely covered or the legs-to-her-neck—which, I knew, went against the mountain-like breasts comment, but a jealous girl didn’t require logic. Whatever it was, her rude and holier-than-thou attitude erased any positive personality traits that allowed her such high popularity status, in my book anyway.

  The fact that she treated me like something that fell off the turnip truck after it rolled in a pile of manure left sitting in the hot sun for hours, aside, she just wasn’t that nice of a person in general. And even though Christopher Lacy hadn’t known I existed—or so I’d thought—he’d never been unkind to me, so what he’d seen in her was lost on me.

  Christopher took a sip of his coffee. “So, what’re you doing back in town? Last I heard you were making it big in New York.”

  I tried not to choke on the partially chewed chicken mini sliding down my throat. “Things don’t always go as planned, I guess.”

  “That’s too bad. Out of everyone in our class, I always thought you’d end up a star.”

  I coughed on the mini with that shocker of a statement. It took me a good few seconds, but I swallowed it down without making a complete fool of myself.

  He jumped from his seat across from me. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Went down the wrong pipe.” My voice was scratchy and deep, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the sexy sound of it. I sipped my Diet Coke. “You thought I’d become a star? I’m surprised you even knew who I was in high school.”

  He laughed. “Of course, I knew you. When you got the lead in the fall play our senior year, I practically had to restrain Caroline from hunting you down and—” His eyes wandered off, and he watched a teenage boy with a flat-billed baseball cap stuff a handful of sugars into his pocket. He held up his left forefinger. “Give me a minute.” He stood and sauntered over to the kid.

  I couldn’t hear what he said, but the boy stuck his hand back in his pocket, removed the sugars and placed them all back from where they came. Christopher then lifted the boy’s hat and put it in his hand. He said something else to the boy, and the boy nodded, kept his head down, and left the restaurant.

  “Sorry about that. Kids lack respect these days, and when I see them behaving that way, I have to right it.”

  My whole body tingled. He hadn’t changed one bit and was absolutely the last thing I needed to focus on at that moment.

  “Anyway, I knew you. We had some friends in common, but Caroline viewed you as a threat, so I kept my distance out of respect for her.” He rolled his eyes. “Guess I did a lot of things for that girl I regret now.”

  “You two aren’t together anymore?” I regretted the question the minute it left my lips.

  He snorted. “That ended years ago. Last I heard she married some businessman and moved to Atlanta.” He wrinkled his nose. “I feel sorry for the guy, but I hope they’re happy.”

  “I take it it didn’t end well, then?”

  “Most things that end don’t usually end well now, do they?”

  I nodded. “That’s a pretty true statement.” Wow. Good looking, a detective, so obviously, brave, and wicked wise, too. I’d just landed a front seat in hottie heaven right there in an Asheville, North Carolina Chick-Fil-A.

  He handed me a napkin. “You got a little drool or something on the corner of your—”

  I yanked the napkin from his hand and swiped it across my mouth, utterly horrified at the thought of drooling in front of him.

  It hadn’t phased him one bit, or if it had, he just let it s
lide right over him. He glanced at his watch. “I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got to get to the station.” He took his wallet from his back pocket and removed a business card from it. “Here’s my card. If you ever need anything, give me a call. It was nice catching up.”

  I stared at the card and then up at him. “Yeah, uh…thanks for breakfast.”

  He smiled and headed to the door.

  Shell-shocked, I couldn’t finish the last of my four chicken minis, which was a real bummer because those things were full of buttery goodness. And they were free. As a former starving Off-Broadway actress and a recent starving unemployed person in general, I shouldn’t let any food go to waste, so I wrapped the chicken mini, all one inch square of it, in a napkin and stuck it in my purse.

  My high school crush had just bought me breakfast and given me his business card. While that didn’t sound like a big deal, given the recent grievous self-esteem beat down, small wins mattered, and to high school Mayme Buckley, that wasn’t a tiny win. That was the Daytime Emmy Award right there.

  I changed my mind about saving the mini, figuring it would be a hard lump by the time I remembered I’d kept it, which could possibly be years, and dumped it in the garbage and then headed to the next community theater, confident my newfound confidence would shine through the holes of my self-esteem like little beacons of light. Or maybe like one of the Light Brite paper designs I’d made as a kid. I wasn’t sure which, but I hoped for something positive. I was determined to find an acting job to jump start my all-but-dead acting career.

  Four hours later that new-found confidence deflated worse than my 90s blow-up chairs. I wound up with my figurative tail tucked between my legs and one expensive heel broken and limping out of a local temp employment agency with a brand new night job opening and separating mail for a large medical insurance company claims department.

  I’d start that night at eleven o’clock. Momma thought it was perfect, which confirmed for me it was the worst job ever. I’d work through the night and have plenty of time to take classes at the community college to better myself. Apparently, I didn’t need sleep. I couldn’t complain too much though. It was a job, and it paid sixteen bucks an hour. Well above what I thought I deserved for sorting mail, and I could watch movies or listen to books on audio while doing it, so when I put it in perspective, it wasn’t all that bad.

  2

  I’d tried to nap before my first shift but couldn’t. Momma didn’t understand that I’d been up since seven o’clock that morning, and I’d be up until after that the next day. Maybe she did understand and didn’t care, I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She chatted on the phone loud enough for the neighbors a mile away to hear, clanked pots and pans together in the kitchen, upped the volume on the ancient TV to the maximum level and hollered to Daddy across the house and outside without an open window anywhere.

  I wanted to think she’d done it on purpose, but I knew she hadn’t. They’d been without me forever, and they had their way of doing things. I’d come back and interrupted that way, and I had to adjust. It was wrong of me to expect them to change, even though I knew they had. If Momma had her way, my door would be opened already, my bed made, the room dusted and vacuumed and fresh flowers from the field down the street in a vase on my dresser. Momma loved fresh flowers. They filled vases throughout the house. Daddy picked them for her almost daily.

  At four-thirty she burst through my door without knocking like she’d always done. “Up and at ‘em. You’ve got work to prepare for.”

  I yanked the pillow from my side and buried my head under it. “Momma, I’m an adult. I know how to wake myself up.”

  “Now sugar, I know how you get when you’re tired. You don’t want to start your new job all ugly like that.” She yanked the covers off me, pulled them up to her nose and smelled them. “Heavens, what’d you do, roll in the mud with the Johnston’s cows?” She shook her head and made a pee-u sound. “Come on, now. Get a move on.”

  The Johnston’s owned a local dairy farm a few miles outside of town. The family joke was when Daddy had a particularly lousy plumbing job, he must have worked at the Johnston’s farm because he’d come home smelling like manure. I knew the point Momma wanted to make. “I’ll throw them in the wash before I leave. Promise.” Though I doubted I’d remember. They smelled fine to me. I suspected she used that as a tactic to get me out of bed. I hadn’t even been home a full forty-eight hours.

  I dragged the covers back over my body and snuck a peek at the centuries-old digital alarm clock on my wicker nightstand. “Momma. It’s four-thirty-one. I don’t have to be there until ten-thirty tonight to fill out paperwork. That’s six hours.” I hid my head under the pillow again. “I need to get some sleep, or I’ll never be able to focus tonight.”

  She jerked the covers off me again. “You know you end up all cranky and what not after a long nap. You don’t want to go to your first day of work a hot mess now, do you?”

  I tugged the covers back over me and tucked them under my body so she couldn’t pull them off again. “My first night, Momma. Night. And I’d like to start it alert, so I really do need to get some rest.”

  She sighed. “Well, then fine. If you think that’s the best way to do this, then you just go on with yourself.” She made some frustrated Momma sound and stomped out.

  And I never did get back to sleep.

  Daddy filled his green work thermos full of high-octane coffee, the most potent stuff he’d ever had, he’d said. “I got it at that organic farmer's market, the one that’s open year-round.”

  The fact that Daddy had gone to a farmers market stunned me. “Daddy, whatever possessed you to go to one of those?”

  He patted his growing belly. “Me and my baby bump here, we got to start taking care of ourselves better. The doc told me those organic veggies are better for me, so I thought I’d check them out. Turns out they’re pricier, too.”

  “They sure are.”

  Momma sighed. “He don’t need no organic vegetables. He just needs to stop sneaking that extra scoop of ice cream at night.” She waved her spatula at him. “He thinks I don’t know what he’s doing, but I’m not blind. I see the carton, and I know it’s not me eating all that chocolate chip mint.”

  His pudgy cheeks turned bright pink, and he winked at me.

  “Well, I think you look wonderful, Daddy. Don’t you worry a bit about that baby in there.” I poked his belly. “You’ve got at least another four months before you deliver.”

  “Better check the floors though. Don’t want you crashing through them,” Momma said.

  He patted his belly again. “With this thing, I’d probably bounce right back up.”

  “Well, that’s my cue to leave.”

  “Good luck, Meme,” Daddy said. He kissed me on the cheek. “Knock ‘em dead.”

  “It’s a health insurance company, Daddy. That’s probably not the ultimate goal.”

  “You never know,” Momma said. She waved her spatula at me. “Good luck, darlin’.”

  Twenty-seven minutes later I’d arrived at my new job with my attitude in check. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t upset either. I’d resigned myself to the fact that my life hadn’t turned out how I’d planned, and outside of a miracle, it was what it was, and I’d just have to make the best of it until I was able to get my acting career back on track, whenever that may be.

  My trainer, Ashley McDonough, turned out to be a sweet girl, a few years older than me and not at all dissatisfied with her life. Married with two kids and six months pregnant, she worked the night shift while her husband worked a day job so they could afford their mortgage and not pay for child care.

  The thick lines and raccoon circles under her eyes were easily explained, but she didn’t seem to mind. The toothy smile stretched across her face, and genuine good-natured attitude were a testament to her true happiness, and honestly, I envied her. I wondered if I’d missed something in the simple life of the South. If my dreams of fame, or whatever it
was, had clouded over the happiness of an uncomplicated, authentic life with someone I truly loved? An image of a light-brown haired, brown-eyed, trim but fit, maybe five foot eleven man, carrying a chunky baby with me walking by his side flashed through my mind. The man was Christopher Lacy, and the baby, ours. Woah, there, Mayme. Don’t even go there.

  Ashley walked me through each step of the mailroom process from recognizing the different mail types, to opening the claim envelopes, date stamping them, sorting them, scanning them, reviewing the scan and sending it off, and filing the claim in the proper place to accommodate the HIPAA compliance laws. She’d explained that HIPAA stood for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and that it meant we had to keep everything on the claim forms private and secure, but that was next to impossible in my opinion, though I did my best to follow the stringent rules. It wasn’t like I understood what anything on them meant anyway. Ashley explained that I’d get the codes down quickly and wouldn’t need the cheat sheet in less than a week.

  It was by far the most boring thing I’d ever done in my life, including my high school job of directing parking traffic for the park district during the Christmas lights displays. Actually, that wasn’t boring by comparison.

  “Generally, people have the same common sicknesses.” She explained the primary diseases and categories for sorting the claims. I hadn’t realized things were that simple.

  “My husband thinks it’s because of aliens, but I think he’s crazy. He’s one of them people that swears we should all wear tinfoil on our heads, so the government don’t record our thoughts.”

  Maybe the simple life wasn’t for me after all?

  “So, how’d you end up here?” she asked.

  “Well now, that’s an interesting story, for sure.”

  “We’ve got all the time in the world, so go ahead.”

  When I told her, she gave me a lengthy, slow full-bodied appraisal. “Honey, if you’re plus-sized then I’m what them Hollywood people call obese, and I’m talkin’ about when I’m not a stay and play for a baby, you know what I’m sayin’?”