Omens

Mick and Margie

Margie was not having a good morning. Margie had not had a good morning—or a good day—since 1993. That was the year she graduated from elementary school and left Cainsville. It’d been only temporary, hopping onto the bus for high school each morning and returning before dinner, but it had been enough.

At the time, she’d have said she changed for the better. Last week, she’d come across a stack of old yearbooks in her mother’s attic, and she’d cringed as she leafed through the pages, seeing her thin face and sunken eyes. Worse was her expression. A defiant smirk. And the messages her “friends” wrote? None that she’d want her young nieces and nephews to read.

Margie—rechristened Mick in high school—had been voted most likely to end up dead. Her best friend, Nathalie—rechristened Nate—was “most likely to end up in jail.” Their schoolmates got the prophecies right; they’d just mixed them up. By twenty, Nathalie was dead of an overdose. A year later, Margie was in jail.

She got fifteen years for knifing the girl who’d sold Nathalie the drugs. It sounded good—avenging a friend. Eventually that helped her get parole from a sympathetic board. The truth, one she only admitted to herself, was that she hadn’t knifed the bitch for Nathalie. She’d just wanted free dope.

She’d been out for two years now. Clean for nine. But life hadn’t rewarded her turnaround. She supposed she still hadn’t earned it. After eighteen months of trying to make it in Chicago, she’d come home to Cainsville at the insistence of her family. A new guy owned the diner. An ex-con. He would cut her some slack and give her a job. And she’d be home.

Home.

This may have been home once. In prison, she used to lie in her cot and dream of Cainsville the way others dreamed of Hawaii and Acapulco. Paradise.

Only she’d soiled her paradise years ago. Shit on it every chance she’d gotten, and people here had long memories. When she came back, they didn’t see the new Margie. They only saw the kid who’d broken into their homes, threatened little kids in their park, stolen cars from their driveways.

It’d been the dope—she’d needed money for more and had been too stoned to care what she did to get it. That didn’t matter. She’d made them lock their doors. She’d made them call their children in before dark.

They’d get past it, her mother said. Margie just had to hang in there.

She could. She would.

If only the universe would see fit to recognize her efforts and give her a break.

Being a waitress had seemed easy enough. There was a learning curve, and she expected that. What she didn’t expect was that she seemed incapable of getting around that curve. No matter how hard she tried, things were always going wrong. Plates dropped when she was sure she had them balanced. Cream curdled weeks before the sell-by date. Salt turned up in the sugar dispensers even when she’d taste-tested it before putting them out.

Then there was the nurse. After her mother’s hip replacement last month, they’d hired someone to come in while Margie was at work—it cost almost as much as Margie made, but it kept her job safe. The damned woman phoned her several times a shift. Margie had complained to the agency, but they had no one else within commuting distance. So she was trying to keep the calls as short as possible.

And speaking of unwanted interruptions…

“Margie,” Patrick called as she came out from behind the counter, weighted down with plates. He lifted his empty mug.

She pretended not to see him. Damned parasite. Took up one of the best tables for hours every day. And what did he buy in return? A single cup of coffee. She wasn’t even sure he paid for it. She’d tried to give him a check her first day on the job, and Larry came roaring out of the kitchen so fast you’d have thought his shorts were on fire. He’d snatched it from her and said Patrick paid monthly for his coffee.

Like hell.

Patrick had something over Larry, something that made the poor guy break into a sweat when Margie suggested they kick him out if he didn’t buy food.

Larry didn’t deserve that, and she wasn’t putting up with it. She wouldn’t jump to refill his coffee every time he raised his mug. If they were lucky, Patrick would get the hint and take his damned novel to the coffee shop. Isn’t that where writers were supposed to work?

Until then, she’d just keep ignoring him and otherwise do her best. Because she couldn’t afford to lose this job, not when she was so close to turning her life around.