Just Before Her Last Sorry
As Chelsea pulled into the employee section of the parking lot, she let herself listen to the end of ”Down by the Water” by PJ Harvey. She sighed and turned off her car. The heat had caved in on her now that she wasn’t moving. She leaned over to crank up the passenger window, but it stuck. She was thinking about her girlfriend Angelica and how they’d be going to college soon and then what would happen? They’d been fighting and working around the edges of breaking up, but they couldn’t seem to do it. “Fuck it,” she said, grabbed her purse, and made her way to the entrance.
Starting mid-day in this 100-degree heat was brutal. When she had the early shift, she arrived at 4:30 a.m., just as the first golfers were arriving to “get in nine holes before breakfast” as they sometimes said. But they said that to the boys she worked with. To her, they said things like, “Hey, sweetie, you want to meet me in the bag room after this?” Or “Can you polish my club for me?”
It didn’t help that she had to wear a skirt: Girl cart attendants wore skirts, boys wore pants. When it was this hot, she was glad not to be in pants, but bending over to mop up the dew on the cart seats, hopping in and out to bring more carts around — she got pretty sick of their pale, puffy faces turning toward her, their small eyes focused anywhere but her face.
