I spied a pathway to my left and squeezed past the ladder-back chairs with the B-C crest embossed on them and headed toward Edna’s desk. A pudgy woman with a mass of frizz framing her pasty white skin sat behind it. She was shifting folders around in a way that suggested she didn’t really have a grip on her actions.
“Hi,” I said, leaning on the counter above her desk. “I was hoping to talk to someone about the letter Mr. DeNutti sent over the weekend.” The woman lifted her head, her body remaining perfectly still as if she were shell-shocked. The only part of her that moved was the bag that hung, in shades of bluish-black, below her left eye. She had the pathetically resigned look of someone for whom God was not a savior so much as an angry deity that kept pissing on her life. Were that not true, he might as well have given her a circle of hell under her other eye. Symmetry might have been a gift. Lord knew nothing else looked like it had been.
“The letter?” I repeated amid the incessant ringing of cell phones and the pitter-patter of tiny thoughts coming from the vacuous brains of the coven crowding me. The woman lifted the bush of blonde hair from her face. If she had been 15-years-old instead of 55, her “do” might have been fashionable. But as an uncontrollable Afro around her too white, terribly round face she looked partly angelic and completelyout of place, especially among all the thousand-dollar Japanese iron jobs on the mothers at Bidwell-Coggin. A phone rang across the room on the receptionist’s desk. The clueless woman looked like she might scream. The din in the foyer was even making me anxious.
“Hi,” I said, leaning on the counter above her desk. “I was hoping to talk to someone about the letter Mr. DeNutti sent over the weekend.” The woman lifted her head, her body remaining perfectly still as if she were shell-shocked. The only part of her that moved was the bag that hung, in shades of bluish-black, below her left eye. She had the pathetically resigned look of someone for whom God was not a savior so much as an angry deity that kept pissing on her life. Were that not true, he might as well have given her a circle of hell under her other eye. Symmetry might have been a gift. Lord knew nothing else looked like it had been.
“The letter?” I repeated amid the incessant ringing of cell phones and the pitter-patter of tiny thoughts coming from the vacuous brains of the coven crowding me. The woman lifted the bush of blonde hair from her face. If she had been 15-years-old instead of 55, her “do” might have been fashionable. But as an uncontrollable Afro around her too white, terribly round face she looked partly angelic and completelyout of place, especially among all the thousand-dollar Japanese iron jobs on the mothers at Bidwell-Coggin. A phone rang across the room on the receptionist’s desk. The clueless woman looked like she might scream. The din in the foyer was even making me anxious.
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