Up to No Good

Once Charlie started riding his mountain bike to the warehouse, we took turns giving him a lift home.

            The first afternoon Van didn’t pick him up, Charlie’d addressed us. “Now that we have Jeremiah and Hannah,” he said, “Vandalia needs the car more than I do.”

            “She’s always had the car, Charlie,” Mark pointed out as he shook his hand violently to get the key out of the office door lock. “Did it get repo’d?”

            Charlie's weight fell against Mark's for a moment, then he straightened. Nodded.
            “Tell you what,” he said. He seemed to be trying to laugh. “Vandalia’s not at all happy being confined to the house.”

            Mark laid his arm across Charlie’s shoulders. “I’ll keep an eye out for a decent used vehicle for you guys. Make some calls in the morning.”

            “Where all’d she used to go during the day?” Jason said.

            Charlie shrugged. “I have no idea. Grocery store maybe? Toys R Us?”

            Truth be told, we’d heard tales about how Van spent her days, how sometimes a car or two might be seen outside their place ‘round about the little ones’ naptime. We brought it up in the office one day before Charlie returned from his route.

            “Don’t say anything,” Mark said. “It’s a small town. Sooner or later, he’ll find out.”

            Mom O. had nodded approvingly, her lips forming a definitive, though nearly colorless, line. In an instance of rare tenderness she slapped her blood pressure monitor out of the way to reach across the desk toward Mark. Wiggled her fingers when he didn’t stretch his hand out to meet hers.

            “I taught him good,” she told us. “That if you can’t say anything nice about a person, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

            We’d exchanged a glance in that moment, as if we were all remembering the strumpet-trollop-hussy day, but we stayed silent. None of us cared to engage Mom O. in a verbal skirmish. Her tongue was far too sharp. Not to mention, her signature was required on our paychecks.

~~~~~~~

One morning Mark’s sister came and fetched Mom O. to take her to the heart doctor.

            “I’m fairly certain I’ll be fine to drive afterward,” Mom O. said as she slipped her arms into her windbreaker sleeves.

            “Just go, Mom,” Mark said. “Try to relax a little while you’re out. Have lunch maybe.” He tucked a twenty into his sister’s palm as they turned to go. “I mean it,” he mouthed.

            As Mom O. headed toward the door she paused. "Oh, and if Vandalia’s friend Lucy drops by for Charlie’s paycheck, it’s there in my desk drawer.” She’d taken to using Van’s full name ever since she learned Van had lost her mother early on.

            After the door clicked shut, we all faced Mark. Waited for him to glance up. When he did, his mouth fell open.

            “What?” he said.

            “She’s up to no good, boss,” Jason said.

            Mark shook his head. “Who is?”

            “Van,” Adam said. “She’s been ragging on Charlie twenty four seven. Trying to get him to quit here."
           Jason stood on his tiptoes. Peered out the window to check if anyone was coming.
          "She wants him to get a job driving one of those water trucks," he said, "for a fracking outfit. These days there's tons of ads in the paper looking for folks with a Class A license.”

            Mark removed his reading glasses. Sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
            "I don't need this," he said. "Not right now, I don't. Our busy season is right around the corner." 
            “You gotta do something, boss,” Jason said. “Besides making a fool of him, now she’s gonna force him to leave a good job with decent pay and—”

            Mark signed the letters Mom O. had left in a neat stack on the edge of his desk.

            “The way I see it,” he said without looking up, “it’s not really our business.”

            Adam cracked his knuckles and we all cringed at the sound of it. “We just thought you should know,” he said. “In case you . . .”

            Mark rolled his chair back from the desk until it struck the wall. Rotated it around to face the coffeemaker. He reached for a mug then seemed to freeze.

            “Actually,” he said over his shoulder, “there's no telling how it'll go with those two. Keep your eyes peeled. Let me know if you run across someone who might fit in good down here. Just in case.”

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Vandalia and Charlie

Charlie once told us it wasn’t Vandalia he fell for so much as the way she applied lipstick. When he described it, he sounded like he was in church.

            “She lines, primes, paints, blots, glosses.”

            Fact is, the making of Van's candy apple lips mesmerized us all. Every day she drove to the warehouse at 5:15 to pick up Charlie. As soon as we heard the putter of the Escort’s engine or its door slam, we’d make our way toward the office to watch her do it, paint her lips.  

            Vandalia wasn’t a beautiful woman by traditional standards, but something about the way she held herself felt compelling, magnetic. Come to think of it, it was more gravitational. Like she was a sun and we were her planets.

            There in the beginning, Mom O’Dell was the only one who recognized Van for what she was.

            “I’m telling you,” Mom said after Van and Charlie left one day, “that female is a strumpet. Someday, hopefully soon, Charlie’ll regret joining up with her. Mark my words.”

            Jason leaned forward on his folding chair. Reached toward Mom O’Dell’s candy dish.

            “Mom O?” he said. “What’s a strumpet?”

            Adam flicked his eyebrows up and down. Spoke under his breath. “A gal ya wanna strum, or pet, or both, I'm thinking."

            Mark, our boss, rarely engaged in our end of the day banter. That afternoon, like every other at 5:25, he snapped his fingers.

            “Paperwork,” he said. “Now please.”

            “A strumpet,” Mom O said, as we fished in our cargo pockets for the day's sales slips, “is a woman of ill-repute. A trollop.”

            Jason tilted his face and squinted until Mom-O produced another option, two in fact.

            “A hussy, Jason. A tramp.”

            Jason perked right up. “Oh,” he said with a grin. “Got it.”

            Mom O shook her head and returned her attention to her calculator. “And the boy wonders why he still lives with his parents,” she said softly to her ledger.

            Jason relocated his Fireball to the space inside his lower lip. Fixed his eyes on Mark.

            “Why’s Charlie get to go home before the rest of us?” he said. “Every daggone day he does.”

            Mark didn’t glance up from the stack of receipts he was perusing. “Because, Jason, Charlie’s numbers are perfect,” he said. “Every day. Without fail.” He paused to pin each of us with his gaze—me, Jason, and Adam. “You all would do well to learn from him.”

~~~~~~~

After they’d been married approximately one year and a baby, Van only entered the office on Wednesdays, payday. She’d perch on the edge of the folding chair there by the door, cross her legs, and rock Jeremiah’s pumpkin seat with her foot while she shined her pout.

            Pregnancy had significantly increased the size of Van’s bosom, a fact she took full advantage of. The office air fairly crackled the day Mom O, in a roundabout way, addressed Van’s near indecent exposure. Mom stood, walked around her desk and over to Van. Without a word, she removed Jeremiah’s traveling blanket and draped it across Van's chest. She used her cupped hands to pat Van's shoulders simultaneously, firmly, as if to make the cloth stay put. Forever. 

            “It appears, Van,” she said when she returned to her seat, “that you are chilly. You best cover yourself so you don’t take sick.”

            Recently Van had begun to line her eyes like Marilyn Monroe and when she narrowed them that afternoon, we fully expected her to hiss.

            “Why, thank you, Mom O’Dell,” she said, her mouth barely moving. “I do appreciate your interest in my well being.”

            Van then proceeded to pinch a corner of the covering and draw it away, revealing her impressive creamy expanse once again.

            “However,” Van said as she tucked the pale blue fabric around her sleeping child, “I am more concerned for Jeremiah’s health than my own.”

            Mom O’s pleated face compressed in on itself. Her lips seemed almost to disappear. We would say later that her face resembled an ancient sow’s.

            “That’s touching, Van,” she said. “It most certainly is.” She hunched toward the floor and yanked her bottom desk drawer open. Jason had informed us not long ago that Mom kept a secret stash of peanut butter cups in that very drawer.

            We held our breath as Van leaned toward Mom’s desk, her cleavage straining the fabric of her top considerably. It reminded us of a dam, perilously close to bursting. We felt suddenly strained ourselves.

            “My mother named me Vandalia, you know,” Van told the hump of Mom's back. She spoke with her chin thrust forward. “It’s really what I prefer to be called.”

            When Mom O didn’t respond, Vandalia’s gaze traveled from one of us to the next. She held her face as if someone was taking her photograph. Lips forward, her cheeks indented slightly, eyes wide. Adam inspected the ceiling. Jason moved toward the candy dish. I retrieved my Swiss Army knife from my pants pocket and went to work on my fingernails.

            Charlie entered the office from the outside. Smiled and waved. “Have a good night, you all,” he said as he held the door wide to accommodate the baby’s safety seat and Van.

            After they left, Mom O handed Jason his paycheck which he folded and creased and tucked into his breast pocket.

            “Not to change the subject,” he said, “but tell me again why we get paid on Wednesdays?”

            Mom O’s fingers flew over the calculator keys. “Van can’t seem to make money last Friday to Friday so she had Charlie beseech Mark to change payday to Wednesday. Apparently she thought that’d help.”

            Jason rooted through the candy dish and made his selection. Bent a Tootsie Roll in two and popped one half in his mouth, twirled the other between his thumb and middle finger.

            “You’d think if Charlie’s so good with numbers, he’d pay their bills his self.”

            Mom O swept pink eraser bits from her ledger page. “You’d think now, wouldn’t you?”

            Mark snapped his fingers. “Paperwork. Now please.”

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