LOU'S TATTOOS

Chapter 5: MIAMI

From atop the MetroRail train platform at Government Center Station, Lou could see the pastel streaked sunrise spreading across distant Biscayne Bay. She nearly reached for her camera — she went nowhere without it — but instead she hurried down the escalator to catch the MetroMover shuttle on a lower level.

When her shuttle pulled into Bayfront Station, only a small park separated Lou from the soft morning light glinting and glittering on the Bay. Lou could resist no longer. As she and a dozen other early commuters poured from the shuttle onto the second-story platform, Lou stepped toward the platform edge and pulled her camera from its bag.

While other worker drones drained away from the platform onto the sidewalks below and flowed toward their office buildings, Lou O'Malley stood alone and snapped pictures of the sun rising over white cruise ships, palm trees framing the mirror-still bay waters, and the soaring, spindly, oddly evocative Space Shuttle Challenger memorial sculpture.

Then she looked at her watch, quickly packed up her gear, and ran for the stairs.

When she stepped off the elevator at her twenty-third floor office a few minutes later, Lou could hear phones ringing, computer keyboards clicking, and muffled conversations humming from beyond a turn in the corridor.

Racing around that corner, she arrived at her cubicle in the nick of time, tossed her purse in one drawer of her desk, hid the camera bag in the file cabinet, sat down and looked busy. She answered her desk phone, which had not rung, and ardently listened to the nonexistent caller, just as her boss opened his office door.

The boss looked at Lou, looked at his watch, and smiled. He looked at the empty desk in the cubicle beside Lou's, and he frowned.

"Where's Debbie?"

Lou covered the phone with her hand and whispered to him, "She called to say her flight was canceled. Mechanical problems with the plane."

"Yeah, right," said the boss. He whipped out a handkerchief, polished the brass nameplate on his office door, then disappeared into his office.

Lou hung up the phone with a sigh.

A coltishly young mail clerk pulled up his rolling cart beside Lou's desk and began dropping envelopes onto it. "Boss, boss, boss, boss, boss, and," he flourished the last envelope before dropping it with a triumphant, "O'Malley!"

"Thanks, Mark."

"Have a nice day, Lou."

"Don't tell me what to do." Neither of them laughed at the old joke.

Mark looked at the empty cubicle next door and hefted the mail he had planned to deposit there. "Where's Debbie-Do?"

"Plane broke down," said Lou, sifting through the boss's envelopes.

"Yeah, right," said Mark. "Well, here's her personal mail." He dropped scads of envelopes, all sizes and colors, onto Lou's desk.

He picked one up and sniffed it. "English Leather. This girl's wasting herself as a legal secretary."

He sniffed another. "British Sterling. She'd make a terrific hooker."

Another. "Calvin Klein. Bet this one's gay."

And another. "Uh-oh! Avon!"

He and Lou made eye contact and said, in unison, "Married." Lou took the Avon-scented letter and tossed it in the trash.

"Deb's really a nice girl," Lou said. "She just likes men. And she seems to make them feel very ... grateful. And how come you never sniff my mail?"

Mark gave her a look that said, "Get real." He and his cart moved on down the hall, around the corner, and out of sight. "See ya," he called.

"Later, dude," Lou answered.

She dumped Debbie's personal mail into her camera case, stacked the boss's mail and began to open it. She stapled each piece to its attachments, date-stamped all of it, and sorted it by priority. The intercom buzzed. Lou activated her speaker phone, saying, "Yes, sir?"

She mouthed the boss's words perfectly as they exploded from the speaker: "Lou. Decaff. Black."

He clicked off. Lou stood, picked up the lonely personal envelope Mark had left for her. The return address read Heritage Photographic Publishing. She sniffed it.

"Rejection." She tossed it back onto the desk, unopened. She picked up an empty coffee mug from the desk and left the cubicle, mumbling to herself. "Thank goodness I've got this really terrific, totally respectable day job, with its teeny — but dependable — pay check. I wonder if I'd make more as a waitress. I'd still be getting coffee for people, but there might be tips."

~o~~o~~o~

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This is such a short chapter, I'll post another one today also.  Happy reading!  

Iris