Fender Bender Blues by Niecey Roy Read Free Book Online Page B

him to it and finished another pamphlet. This time she didn’t yell in elation. It had already lost the excitement and now it was tedious work. “Wow, he ordered for you? That would have been annoying. As if you don’t know how to say ‘spaghetti, please’.”
    “Then we shared dessert, a cheesecake. It was so romantic,” Leah finished. Despite her anxiety over Leah’s newly found love with a complete stranger, Rach smiled, picturing the happy grin on Leah’s face and the faraway look in her eyes. No question about it, she was a goner.
    “I would have told him to get his own cheesecake. Those fancy restaurants never have big enough slices for one person, let alone two people,” Rach teased, stacking the fourth pamphlet on the small pile.
    She looked up and found William and the customer staring at her as if she were committing customer service suicide. Who would have thought a copier service would be so demanding?
    “I’ve got to go, there are people staring at me. I’ll have to call you later,” Rach whispered into the phone. Leah said goodbye and Rach snapped the phone shut. Hurrying to the counter, she tried a polite smile at the woman who once again stared right through her while she chomped on her gum. “Would you like me to help, William?”
    He beamed at her. “Mrs. Mulberry would like these copies in color and folded in half. This will be a good training session for you.”
    The woman gasped and looked like she might fall over. “I think not, young man. You know how important these flyers are. I’ll not have a—a beginner messing these up.”
    William withered under her gaze and Rach bit back a reprimand. What was with this lady, anyway? Poor William looked like he would rather be swallowed up by a black hole than deal with Mrs. Mulberry.
    Rach plastered on a smile and said cheerfully, “I run the machine very well, so you needn’t worry about a thing.”
    Mrs. Mulberry attacked her gum. “I sure hope so. These need to be finished before noon; I still have to put mailing labels on them. I hope I am leaving this in good hands, William. Your employee had better not screw this up.”
    Rach bit her tongue and picked the flier up off the counter. She read it out loud, “Welcome to our fundraiser.”
    The woman worked for the local country club and at twenty dollars a plate anyone could attend a fundraiser for the survivors of the Midwest flooding.
    “Yes,” Mrs. Mulberry snapped. “And I have people depending on me to get these out today.”
    Not impressed by the woman’s aggressive behavior, Rach gave a small whistle. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”
    Oops, she hadn’t meant to say that out loud. William’s eyes popped wide open.
    The woman balked, snapping her mouth shut. Speechless.
    Thankfully, the phone rang and Rach excused herself to answer it.
    “We’ll get these done, don’t you worry, Mrs. Mulberry. They’ll be perfect and ready to pick up in a couple of hours,” William promised.
    After the woman left, Rach turned to William. “Pleasant lady. Is she a frequent customer?”
    His shoulders sagged and he nodded. “Yeah. She’s a real hard person to please.”
    “We’ll get the fliers done, no biggie,” she assured him with a pat on his shoulder. Rach took the flier, on a mission to do her best. She swept her curls up into a messy ponytail and got to work, nursing the finger with the paper cut. A two-sided color copy folded in half—even a child could do it.
    ****
    Apparently a child could have done a better job, so said Mrs. Mulberry when she’d returned at noon smelling of passion fruit gum and sporting the same unfriendly expression she’d left with earlier that afternoon. And not only were the fliers wrong, in her opinion Rach and William were the biggest imbeciles she’d ever met.
    Rach could have sworn she’d pressed the double-sided button when she’d printed the fliers. She left the copier to do the five hundred copies and went to finish up the