LITMIR.BIZ

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are you fighting?”

      Divorce. Betrayal. Single motherhood. The modern job market as it related to a woman whose only real job had consisted of working as a secretary for her father, the local judge, ten hours a week one summer. A lot of wars. “I’m just looking for a mailbox. I thought there was one on this corner.” She had to mail a car payment on a car that was the main asset she’d won in the divorce after her husband, Michael, had left her a note on the bathroom counter, saying he was sorry but their life together hadn’t worked out and he’d found someone else.

      “Used to be one right there.” The old man gestured, then shook his head as if something very sad had happened. “Not there anymore.”

      “No, it’s not.” Grace glanced at her watch. In ten minutes she had an appointment at the Bayside Jobs employment agency. First she had to mail this payment, hoping to avoid at least one early-morning call mispronouncing her name and threatening unspeakable actions if she didn’t get the car payment in on time. Along with winning the car, she’d won the car payment, thanks to Michael’s savvy at hiding his financial assets.

      Michael Bowes. He’d been the golden boy of Blue Moon Bay, Maryland, the captain of the football team and homecoming king to Grace’s homecoming queen. He’d gone to college in the north and she’d followed a year later. Four years after that, they were married and Michael, then a commercial real-estate developer, had ridden a ride of prosperity right into a lovely upper-middle-class lifestyle. When the bottom had dropped out of that market, he didn’t bother to mention to Grace that they were living on credit cards and line of credit advances and a host of bad gambles.

      By the time he left—no doubt because thugs with stub noses and barrel chests were threatening to break his kneecaps—he’d accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability. He and Grace had had to sell the house and her jewelry and even her clothes. Her yard sales were legendary. And exhausting. When it was all over, she had nothing except bad memories of a man who had once seemed like the Catch of Blue Moon Bay.

      She wasn’t sorry the marriage was over. Often she’d felt as if in their life together they’d lacked understanding of each other, and even real interest in each other. Perhaps if Michael hadn’t made the first move, she would have suggested it herself after Jimmy was grown. She’d never know, because Michael had beaten her to the punch.

      So she’d packed up their ten-year-old son, Jimmy, and moved back to her hometown to live with her widowed mother in the house she’d grown up in. It was only for a year, she told herself. She’d save enough money to move back north, so Jimmy could be near his friends again, in the town that was his home. And she could be far away from this claustrophobic hamlet.

      In the meantime, she’d just get a job here in Blue Moon Bay. Granted, at thirty-three, she should be heading her own household, not lying on the same bed she had as a teenager, counting the same fading roses on the wallpaper, but here she was. She was lucky to have the benefit of her mother’s generosity.

      With any luck it would keep her from having to eat locusts.

      “You have something to mail?” the old man asked, holding out a shaking hand.

      Grace automatically pulled her purse in closer to her body. Too many years in the city. “No, thanks. I was just trying to orient myself.”

      “Used to be a mailbox there.” He dissolved into a long, sputtering cough. “Gone now.”

      She tried to smile and took out one of the only two dollars she had in her purse. “Thanks so much for your help,” she said, dropping the bill into the hat. She noticed there were only three pennies and a nickel in there and, with a pang of pity for the old man, dropped her other dollar in too. “I really appreciate it.”

      “God bless you,” he called as Grace walked away and rounded the corner. “And God bless your family too.”

      “I hope so,” she whispered.

      She looked at her watch again and quickened her pace, hurrying down the shaded street that ran parallel to the old boardwalk a block up. In fifteen years, almost nothing had changed. The salty smell of the ocean still hung in the air and mingled with sweet taffy and caramel corn, though whether the smell was actually there or just a memory, Grace couldn’t say, since it was early May and most of the shops hadn’t opened for the season yet. The pavement was littered here and there with the familiar old Hasher’s French Fries bags, malt vinegar stains dotting the same logo they’d had for at least three decades. It was one of the only landmarks left, now that the once-charming holiday town had fallen in favor of the more exciting Ocean City forty-five minutes away.

      Still, a few dings and whistles of arcade games echoed through narrow alleyways full of shops that only opened during the summer when the tourists came to the beach. Grace fought a feeling of melancholy. Around every kite shop, T-shirt shop, and junk-food joint were ghostly memories of bike spills, melting ice cream on muggy summer nights and first kisses in the shadows of doorways and brightly striped awnings.

      She stopped at the address she’d written for Bayside Jobs and looked around. It took her a moment to realize 32 Maple Street was the tiny space that used to sell funnel cakes and, for a couple of years in the seventies, had been a head shop.

      She paused outside the door and pulled the fabric of her blouse away from her damp underarms. It was a little tight, she’d noticed, thanks to her Oreo therapy, but it would probably be okay as long as she didn’t raise her arms and split the back. If she stood straight, it looked fine. She hoped.

      With a quick breath, she heaved the old glass door open and stepped into the cool, dark, mercifully locust-free office. It still carried the faintest whiff of grease, sugar and marijuana.

      An unpleasantly familiar stout woman looked up from the desk a few feet in front of her. “Grace Perigon,” she said flatly, her face pink under her now-white hair.

      “Ms. Lindon?” Grace gasped, recognizing the voice that addressed her by her maiden name. Ms. Lindon—she’d always emphasized the Ms., leading to rampant speculation among the students about her sexuality—had been the meanest home ec teacher on the east coast, maybe even the meanest in the whole United States.

      Students had called her “the Egg Beater” because she’d always seemed hostile, even when baking a cake.

      Grace felt the blood drain from her face and pool in the toes of her new discount-store pumps. “I have an appointment.”

      “I don’t have any appointment down here for you.”

      “You’re in charge here?” Grace glanced around to make sure, once again, that she’d opened the correct door and not, say, an acupuncturist’s or a martial arts studio. “Bayside Jobs?”

      Ms. Lindon’s brow lowered further than was aesthetically pleasing. “I am Bayside Jobs.”

      That was it. Grace was done for. Except that she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of being done for. She walked slowly toward the large metal desk. The air conditioner hissed in the corner. “Then I must have an appointment with you,” Grace said, in as warm a voice as she could muster.

      For a moment, she toyed with the idea of running back outside to take her chances with the locusts.

      The older woman took out a vinyl-covered appointment book and studied it intently. “I don’t see you here.”

      “Oh.” This was as very bad start. “When I called, I used my married name. I’ll still be using it now, even though we’ve gotten divorced.”

      “What is it?”

      “Oh, just the usual, I guess. We grew apart—”

      “The name,” Ms. Lindon barked. “What is the name?”

      She knew damn well that Grace had married Michael Bowes. Everyone did. There were no secrets in this sardine can of a town. But even if she didn’t know the name, there weren’t enough unemployed people in Blue Moon Bay during the summer to fill two lines of the daybook, much less an entire day, so she could

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