Being blazingly high sometimes helped move the shift along. Today, Mitch had smoked his last buds on the way to work and had been dreading spending the last five hours of the shift straight and sober, when Charles had suggested he make a weed run for both of them. Mitch had forked over $50, leaving himself $27 to last three more days until pay-day. Now he was wondering if dreading your job so much that you paid the last of your money to avoid working it with all your mental faculties intact might be an indicator that it was time to get a different one.

“I wanna go home,” whined Denise. “I’m sick.”

Denise was Mitch’s new eighteen-year-old associate. He had won her in a poker game. The department managers had been playing cards with the new-hire lists as a way of determining who got assigned where. Mitch had cleaned house and wound up taking the two Nigerians on the list (all the Nigerians worked hard and had good weed contacts) and the only attractive girl. The downside was that Denise, who was still in high school, had only applied at Accu-mart so she could work in the clothing department and hang out with her friends and get them discounts. She now found herself stocking brake pads and steering wheel covers largely out of view of the public, so she was constantly whining.

“You can go when Charles gets back,” Mitch said.

“Nooooooo,” she whined. “You sent him to buy weed.” She looked at him saucily. Apparently, Charles couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Did you at least finish stocking the order we got in?”

“Almost,” Denise said, now chirpy and pleasant, sensing victory, any apparent signs of illness gone. “I just left the smelly things out. I can’t stand picking up those boxes. They make your hands smell.” She made a gagging face.

“All right, thanks. You’ve done a good day’s work.”

“Thanks, bye,” said Denise, heading for the time cards.

“Your fifty-three minutes of service to the Accu-mart Corporation have been invaluable…” he called after her, but the swinging doors leading to the stockroom were already banging shut, and through the circular scratched green Plexiglas windows he could see her beautiful blonde head bending over the time cards. Dammit. Now he was sober, bored, and had no one to look at. Where was Charles?

“Where’s Charles?” asked Bob Sutherland, the store’s general manager, who had crept up unnoticed. Sutherland gave Mitch the creeps. He could be either bossy and demanding, constantly trying to intimidate, or jovial and overly friendly. He was also the stupidest man Mitch had ever worked for. A few months earlier at a manager’s meeting, Sutherland had pointed out how well the sporting goods department at an Accu-mart in Santa Monica had done, selling surfboards. He had recommended that the sporting goods manager order ten surfboards, not taking into account that it was late fall in Wilton, Pennsylvania, over two hundred miles from any surf. The one board that had been sold since still mystified everyone. Who was that guy who bought a surfboard in central Pennsylvania as winter-time approached? The other nine took up a block of racks in the storeroom.

“I sent him to buy drugs,” Mitch said.

Sutherland laughed. Today it was Dr. Jekyll. “When he comes back, give him these,” he said, handing Mitch two envelopes full of forms. “There seems to be some kind of problem with his paperwork at the INS.”

“Will do.”

“Seriously,” Sutherland said. “Where did he go?”

“Umm, I sent him to the Autocenter to pick up a case of wiper blades. Ours didn’t come in.”

“Well, did you call the distributor? They should just bring them over. It’s their problem, not ours.”

Fuck, now Sutherland was going to get on the phone to the distributor and bitch at them about not dropping off wiper blades that they had actually dropped off.

“It was really slow here,” said Mitch. “I figured it would give him something to do.”

“You could have had him clean the stockroom,” said Sutherland, and then Charles walked through the stockroom doors.

“Did you get the wiper blades?” Sutherland asked him. This was turning into a disaster in a hurry.

Charles nodded and smiled. “Wiper blades,” he said cheerfully, in heavily accented English, walking past both of them to resume stocking the aisles. Charles’s English was perfect, and he actually had very little accent, but he could deflect conversations with feigned idiocy when he wanted to. Cold air from the outside had blown in with him, and Mitch smelled the heavy, warm scent of freshly smoked reefer.

Sutherland turned to leave, either not smelling it or not sure of what it was, or perhaps just anxious to go. Mitch had developed the distinct feeling that Sutherland would leave almost any conversation when an hourly employee showed up, especially one who didn’t speak English as a first language. He really didn’t like being around them. He babbled for a few seconds on his way out about how Mitch should make the distributors work for him, not the other way around, and Mitch nodded dutifully, as if he was learning something of great import from an extremely competent man. Then thankfully, mercifully, he left.

Mitch turned to Charles. “Damn, that was nearly very ugly,” he said. “Did you hookup?”

Charles nodded, his eyes so red they looked like he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He smiled broadly. “It’s gooooooood,” he said.

KEVIN WOKE UP still remembering the dream. It was the most undramatic of dreams, embarrassing in its banality, but as with so many of his other dreams, he knew that because of it, he would spend the day with a vague sense of unease, of personal disappointment and dissatisfaction. Lately he had begun to wonder if this was the only emotion he ever felt.

In the dream, he had been standing in line in a coffee shop with his six-year-old daughter, Ellie. All the other people in line were young couples with children, and they were glowing with delight at parenthood, at family, at their place in the community. They seemed to sense Kevin’s unease, and they regarded him with suspicion because of it. He saw young couples sitting on the plush coffee shop couches, looking at him and asking each other, in whispers, who he thought he was fooling, hanging around in a coffee shop with middle-class normal people, trying to pass himself off as one of them. When Kevin blinked himself awake and stared at the ceiling, he wasn’t sure if it actually had been a dream, or if it was a memory of the last time he and Linda and Ellie had gone to Starbuck’s.

As he felt Linda stir next to him, he reached over and gently grabbed her ass, not as an overture of sex but more to see what she would do. Her hand shot down and pushed him away. She had never been a morning person, but the abruptness and finality of her movements surprised him.

“Ellie’s up,” Linda murmured angrily, her face partly under the covers. “Could you get her breakfast started?”

Kevin hated it when Linda gave him orders disguised as suggestions, especially when he had just been about to do the thing she was ordering him to do. It was as if she thought he was a small child, like Ellie. And worse, she knew it annoyed him, so frequently she would know he was about to do something and suggest it anyway, just to piss him off. What was she expecting him to do? Just lie there and let his kid go to school hungry? A deaf man would know Ellie was up, and didn’t he get her breakfast ready every day of the week?

As he got up, he pulled the covers aside quickly enough to send a cold blast of air against Linda’s back. She slapped the covers back down. Kevin shivered as he groped around in the near darkness for his hooded sweatshirt. He could almost see his breath in his own bedroom.

“We can’t keep the thermostat this low,” he said. “I know it saves, like, a dollar a month, and that’s really important, but I’d rather Ellie didn’t catch pneumonia.” Linda remained quiet. Kevin knew he could bait her in the mornings, get away with sarcasm and the odd dig here and there, simply because he woke up quicker than she did. The arguing part of her brain, which Kevin felt was most of it, warmed up slowly. It wasn’t usually until her second cup of coffee that she started grinding away at his soul with her complaints and observations and outright orders.