Cha-Ching! by Ali Liebegott Read Free Book Online

roof. She dialed Sammy’s number, and someone answered on the second ring.
    â€œSammy?” Theo asked, trying to remember her voice.
    â€œWho’s this?” a woman with a thick New York accent said.
    â€œTheo.”
    Theo heard children screaming at each other in the background.
    â€œWe met in jail when she was visiting San Francisco.”
    As soon as the words came out of Theo’s mouth she regretted saying them.
    â€œOh yeah,” the woman said cheerily, “She told me about that. She’s working on a fishing boat right now.”
    â€œOh.”
    Theo was at a loss.
    â€œDo you want to leave your number?”
    â€œI don’t have one yet. If you talk to her can you tell her I moved to New York?”
    â€œSure. Make sure to stay outta jail,” the woman said, cackling, before she hung up the phone.
    Theo stared at the pay phone trying to come up with a plan to find a job and a place to live, now that the one person she knew was off working on a fishing boat. She left Cary Grant in the truck and went into the Kwik Stop to buy a Coke and cigarettes and hot dogs. Theo brought everything to the register and stared at the acne on the skinny cashier’s chin.
    â€œHi,” he said.
    â€œHi,” Theo replied.
    She added a local newspaper to her pile of things.
    â€œCan you tell me the name of this town?” she asked.
    He looked surprised by her question.
    â€œYonkers.”
    â€œI’m still in New York, right?”
    â€œThat depends on who you ask.”

three
    Theo needed to get a job. She drove through Yonkers stopping at every business with a help wanted sign while Cary Grant watched out the window, anticipating each return. When she ran out of the will to walk into strange, sad Yonkers businesses and ask about a job, Theo took the dog to a park and perused the classified ads for apartments; most were too expensive and didn’t allow dogs.
    The pay phone in the Kwik Stop parking lot became her office. She called a phone number for a $300 room in Yonkers, and when the answering machine picked up she realized she didn’t have a call-back number, so she left the pay phone number and said she’d be available after 5 pm .
    Theo looked for jobs some more, and then returned at 5 pm . Placing Cary Grant’s bowls on the ground next to her truck, she waited for the phone to ring. The day already felt like a week. Having nowhere to live, or just to be, made the hours stretch on forever. Theo wasted two hours waiting for the pay phone to ring and then drove around to find a park to sleep for the night. She reclined her seat and placed her hand on Cary Grant’s rib cage, feeling it lift slightly each time the dog inhaled. She used it as a kind of meditation and drifted into a tense slumber as her psyche waited for cops to show up and tell her to move along, or for a psycopath to crawl out of the bushes and kill her.
    When sleeping in her truck on the cross-country drive she hadn’t thought of herself as homeless, just economical. Now that she was no longer in transit, one day of washing her face and brushing her teeth at the train station had filled her with despair.
    Over the next couple days, when not applying for jobs or housing or getting lost in the hairball of Westchester County highways, Theo casually wandered supermarket aisles, stuffing thirty-cent rolls in her mouth and chewing them as quickly as possible, afraid to spend any cash in case she needed it for a room deposit. The only groceries she bought were a can opener and four cans of baked beans, twenty-five cents each. She was trying to combat a constant headache, the result of hunger, or smoking too much, or a combination of the two.
    Theo filled out job applications, sometimes ten a day, listing the pay phone as her home number with specific instructions to call only after 5 pm . After a particularly demoralizing rejection for a cashier position at a Friendly’s diner, she