Taste

To lift and to taste.

It was like something from a made-for-TV movie: she was a hooker and he was a janitor at Horace J. Sanderson elementary school. They were both beneficiaries of Reaganomics, so they both had part-time jobs on the side. They'd meet outside the apartment complex. He'd wait for her, run to catch up with her when she pulled up and got out of her car. They'd talk. He said he was involved in electronic design. True; he spent four hours a day soldering the same three 47 Kohm resistors onto numberless printed circuit boards that would be obsolete in six months. She told him that she was a saleslady. Doubly true; her part- time job was as a telemarketer, trying to sell magazines to hostile people. He thought that he was in love with her and they both knew it.
He'd think about her, when he was scraping Hubba-Bubba off the bottom of desks, and he'd think how completely dissimilar the color of the gum was to the color of her lips. Surrounded by prepubescent children, who talked to him and laughed when he was far away (but not far enough), he thought about Rachel selling silverware at Best, because that was the first thing that came into her mind when he asked her what she did. He imagined saving up enough money to walk in there and buy something really expensive, to impress her with how much money there was in electronics. He imagined their conversation, rehearsing it (he had plenty of time; he figured it would take at least five years to save enough and that only if he walked to work each day rather than take the bus.) He knew it was futile; he walked through the day grey and looked at himself in the short little mirrors in the school bathrooms and he knew.
She thought about him, too, when she was washing herself, or when she put her head on the desk, in her hands, after the fifteenth person had cursed at her on the phone: faceless, hateful phantoms, who would spend the day telling and retelling what they'd said to her, embellishing their morbid little tales. She'd think about Jamie (35, and he was still called Jamie) and she'd hope that he wasn't the person that she'd just talked to. He had a look in his eyes that reminded her of a puppy, a homeless dog that you'd take in, feed, and then drive to the pound, and it'd look at you when you turned to leave it for euthanasia. But she knew that look, and she knew that most of the people she interacted with on a daily basis would give her that look if they felt like Jamie did, but they didn't, and she knew what they said and did to her, and somehow, puppy dog eyes weren't enough for her.
Rachel was glad that their work schedules overlapped so neatly. She never had to turn down his requests to go out to dinner, except on holidays, and then she'd tell him that she was going to visit her relatives. She'd get into her yellow Celica and drive away, waving farewell to him, giving him an honest smile (because he was a nice guy, or at least as nice as any other human who is trying to get something) amd she'd park her car two blocks away and go to telemarketing hell where the chair was still warm from the last person, and her day would be exactly the same as it had been before, except she'd get off the bus two blocks early.
Except that Jamie decided to buy some flowers for her one day, so he walked to Maurice's Flower Shop and got three lilies, two irises, and fifteen daisies, along with some nameless little green sprigs they put in there to up the price, and headed back home, with a warm feeling in his stomach because he knew she really would smile at him and he hadn't purchased flowers for anyone since he was in high school. It was as much a gift to himself as to her, and when Rachel saw him walking down the street towards her, having no idea that she was there, and when Rachel was wearing black stiletto heels and a very tight purple skirt and a purple Jogbra, and when Rachel did NOT want Jamie to see her and realize what she meant when she said that she was a saleslady, Rachel turned and headed a different direction in a real hurry, almost surely losing a sale right then and there, and since Jamie took that moment to get onto a bus (he'd decided to splurge today) he didn't see her heel catch in the storm drain grate, or see her trip and fall on her right hip in a very unladylike manner, to the distinctive sound of ligaments tearing and bones snapping.
So when Jamie knocked on her door to give her the flowers, she met him with a brave smile and a pair of crutches, and told him the truth, or at least a little of it. She said that she'd caught her heel in a grate and she'd broken her ankle, and Jamie said that he felt extremely sorry for her, and she experienced a serious sinking feeling in her heart when she realized that he was going to be knocking on her door every single day until she was able to work again, and she said to herself, "Shit."
The next evening, Jamie knocked on the door, and she sighed and crutched her way over to it (step kaCHUNK step kaCHUNK) and opened it, and Jamie looked at her and said, "I know I'd drive you crazy if I showed up every night, so I made these and if you need anything else, please give me a call." Then he handed her a basket, which on subsequent investigation had two dozen fresh, hot cornbread muffins, a bottle of honey, four bananas, three oranges, and a get well card that said, simply, "Get well," and a small piece of paper with Jamie's phone number on it. He smiled at her, wished her a good evening, and went home to look at silverware in a catalog, and she struggled mightily to get the basket over to the table without dropping everything on the way, because she hadn't been on crutches since she was thirteen and she jumped out of a swing wrong, and she sat down and ate fully eight of the cornbread muffins, with honey, and one orange, and cried for a little while, and went to sleep with ice on her ankle.
So two days later she called him up and asked him if he'd be willing to drive her to the grocery store, which he did, and he ended up taking her list, making her sit down at the front, where the air conditioning was best, and getting all the stuff she'd listed, as well as adding in two packs of chewing gum, a kiwi, and a rose. They drove back home but were stopped by a parade, so they got out of the car. He peeled and sliced the kiwi (she'd never had one before, she'd said once, and he'd remembered it for months) and they watched Shriners driving lawnmowers in formation. Rachel was short, Jamie was tall, and he thought she really needed to see the Shriners. So he lifted his friend up to sit on his shoulder, she tasted a kiwi for the first time ever, and the sun shone, for a moment, equally on them both.