Don't Fail Me Now(14)



After I get food for Cass and Denny, I go out back in the parking lot and sit on the curb. I’ve been stressing all day about how to come up with the extra hundred bucks for Aunt Sam, and all I can think of, short of robbery or selling Goldie for scrap metal, is to ask for an advance on my paycheck. In fact, I’ve been avoiding Yvonne for two straight hours because I’m so ashamed to have to ask for a handout. I start to listen to Mom’s voicemail again to psych myself up, but then Yvonne bangs through the kitchen exit dragging two handfuls of garbage bags, and I know I have to seize the moment.

“Hey!” I call, shoving the phone into my back pocket. It’s a warm spring night, and a soft breeze—trash-scented, but still kind of nice—blows through my hair. “Need some help?”

Yvonne drops the bags at the foot of the big gray dumpster we’ve affectionately nicknamed Hellmouth and shakes out her arms. “You know it,” she sighs. “My shot put skills aren’t what they used to be.” Together, we heave the heavy trash up over the four-foot lip. On the last bag, runny cheese sauce drips down onto our forearms, and Yvonne dashes back into the kitchen for some napkins, cursing in Spanish.

“Nasty,” she squeals as we wipe ourselves down. “This job should come with a hot water bonus, ’cause you know I need two showers just to get the smell off me after.”

“I know,” I laugh.

Yvonne examines her clothes for stains. “Would you believe my mom keeps asking me why I don’t have a boyfriend?” she asks, rolling her eyes. Yvonne is twenty-five and still lives at home. By her own calculation she’s gained forty pounds since she quit school, stopped hurdling, and started eating free fried food three meals a day. “And I’m like, Mama, you see any man who likes a woman who smells like day-old ground beef, you send him my way.” She laughs bitterly. “At least I’m not in high school, though. I don’t know how you do it, those guys can be such dicks.”

“It’s not just the guys,” I say, flushing with shame as I relive the highlights of my day. I don’t ever want to go back.

My mental state must show on my face, because Yvonne stops laughing and puts a hand on my arm.

“Hey, you okay?” she asks. “You’ve been kind of out of it today.”

“Yeah, sorry.” I know the more I tell my boss about what happened, the more sympathetic she’ll be, but I don’t think I can bring myself to say the actual facts out loud. “I just had a bad weekend.”

“You wanna talk about it?” She smiles warmly. “I’m not above making a ten-minute trash dump, and I’m starved for gossip.”

“It’s not the fun kind,” I sigh.

Yvonne’s heavily lined brown eyes scrunch in concern, and I try to screw up my courage. “It’s just my mom . . . has some health problems,” I say (technically not lying). “And there are some . . . unforeseen costs.” I feel like an * using what I know about Yvonne’s brother to manipulate her sympathies, but I don’t know what else to do.

“So you need money,” she says. Her tone’s not judgmental, but hearing the words makes me feel like a beggar. And one of the first rules Mom taught me is that we Devereaux don’t beg. We plan, we find, we take, we earn, but we do. Not. Beg.

“Yeah, but not like a loan or anything,” I say quickly. “I was just wondering if there was any way to get paid sooner than Friday.”

She frowns. “Corporate doesn’t let us give advances on checks, but—”

“It’s fine, forget about it,” I say, trying to smile like it’s no big deal.

“Let me finish!” she says. “But I know how hard you work, and I know you got those kids to take care of, so if you need cash, I could loan it to you.”

“No, I couldn’t take your money.” I wish I could rewind time ten seconds and just not bring it up. Yvonne is the closest thing I have to a regular friend, and I’m getting dangerously close to making her pity me.

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t give it to you for free,” she laughs. “But I can spare a couple hundred for the next few days, and then you can just sign over your check to me.” She leans in conspiratorially. “I’m secretly loaded,” she whispers and then cracks herself up laughing.

I relax a little bit. “Thanks,” I say. “But you know, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t really need it till Friday anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” I force a smile and lie through my teeth. “Just making a big deal out of nothing.”

“All right, if you say so.” Yvonne shoots me a suspicious side-eye and starts trudging back toward the kitchen. I shove my hands in the pockets of my loose black uniform pants and look up at the sky. There’s one of those perfect half moons tonight, like a black-and-white cookie missing the chocolate part. I remember being freaked out as a kid that someone was eating away at the moon when it wasn’t a full circle. But then Buck told me about the shadow of the earth and how the moon is always whole, it just doesn’t always look it. He even taught me a rhyme to track the phases:

If you see the moon at the end of the day

A bright full moon is on its way.

If you see the moon in the early dawn

Look real quick, it will soon be gone.

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