Make Me Work Read Free

about it in the shower this very morning. It happened on a Jersey-shore vacation with her folks when she was three years old. She was playing beside her parents’ beach blanket, dropping her bottle in the sand and then crying because it had sand on it. Her mother cleaned it off for her four or five times, and then the next time she dropped it the old man leaped up and flung it into the waves. That was how Lisa was weaned. Thirty-five years later, a T-shirt was making her feel bad about this. So it was true: she was hysterical. All the stray garbage-signals of the world had found their satellite dish, and its name was Lisa. Her father was dead now, meaning he was truly alive. Alive forever. Leaving her husband had brought him back; she thought about him every day.
    Milo poked his head into engineering. “I’m playing the long mix of this,” he said. “Seven minutes.”
    â€œMilo,” said Lisa, “promise me something or I’m gonna worry. Don’t go in Mitchell’s store wearing that shirt, O.K.? He’s weird about Elvis.”
    â€œMitchell weird?” Milo said. He looked down to see what shirt he was wearing. “Lisa, I drive all the way to Brattleboro to buy music, just so I won’t have to set foot in Mitchell’s store, ever, for any reason. No matter what I’m wearing.”
    Lisa shot him with a gun-shaped hand that meant “Good thinking.”
    â€œI don’t shop at Mitchell’s store, either,” said Rodney. “He yelled at me once, and all I was doing was looking through the bins.”
    â€œYeah, but how many hours had you been looking?” Milo asked.
    â€œI don’t keep track of things like that, Milo.”
    Lisa wheeled her chair back to look at Rodney. He was really a very sweet man, she thought, far sweeter than most. But he’d shaved himself badly the day before, leaving a patch of brown-gray stubble under one nostril, and several more on his neck. No, Rodney was not the answer. She stood and kissed his cheek. “You’re not the answer, either,” she told Milo.
    â€œWhat’s the question?”
    â€œWhat is Lisa doing for the rest of her life?” she said, and gave herself to the fluorescent hallway, the shining linoleum path to the coffee machine.
    â€œShe’s doing the classic-rock show on WWHY!”
    â€œOh, no,” she said, not looking back. “No, no, no.” Though it was perverse and destructive, she allowed herself the thought that she was old enough to be Milo’s mother, simply to enjoy the consolation of the subsequent thought: But I would have had to get started awfully early. And then she recalled that she had gotten started awfully early.
    She yelped once in the coffee room and poured herself a mug of the black acid bath from the Mr. Coffee carafe. One of Milo’s pre-dawn survival tricks was to put three foil bags of ground coffee in the filter instead of one, and then coax the results past his tongue with heavy measures of non-dairy creamer. He had left the morning arrivals to figure this out for themselves.
    She had a sip of sludge. She hadn’t been on a date since leaving her husband, and now it was the weekend again and she just wanted to go out with somebody, and not somebody she already knew, either, which ruled out everyone. There was a very nice gay man, HIV negative, who donated sperm to lesbian couples in the area. She never thought she’d join the ranks of the turkey-baster moms, but it was starting to look like either that or become Lisa Harrington, Raccoon Lady of Hollyfield, Vermont.
    It had been a dumb move to feed the raccoon in the first place, she’d be the first to admit it. But he was cute and she was lonely. Recipe for trouble.
    Her rented house had a pantry window facing the redwood deck in back. Since the end of the bitter-cold weather, she’d been leaving it open so Sergeant Pepper, her cat, could come and go at will. One