You Don't Love This Man by Dan Deweese Read Free Book Online Page B

sidewalk, and a faint breeze sent the leavesaflutter, their papery rustle mingling with the muted roar of traffic from the freeway overpass a block away. Decades ago, when the branch had first been established, the neighborhood had been a thriving industrial area. Those businesses had moved north, though, to land that accommodated bigger warehouses with larger loading docks, and in the intervening years, our location had become marginal: we were six blocks from the nearest retail street, fifteen from the nearest chain grocery store. Two blocks south, the street between the back of a beer and wine distributor and the front of a wholesale tile showroom wasn’t even paved—it was just gravel poured over the rusting, decommissioned rail line that used to snake through the entire neighborhood before World War II, when manufacturers loaded and unloaded their own rail cars. An elderly customer once told me that the last time he remembered the line being in use, Eisenhower was president. What was left in the twenty-first century were old apartment buildings, a handful of empty structures once home to small manufacturing concerns, and an art college two blocks west, which occupied just one restored warehouse, and outside of which unhappy-looking young people would smoke for ten minutes before casting their butts to the ground and heading back inside. I already had the business of every going concern in the neighborhood—none of the competition had a branch of their own in the area anymore—but our branch still missed our monthly sales goals fairly often. Upper management rarely bothered to complain, though, because they knew the deal: location, location, location.
    Down the street, I could see a motley group of five or six figures gathered in the shade beneath the overpass, dwarfed by the massive concrete pillars that held the freeway in place seventy feet over their heads. Some sat upon the concrete embankment,others stood near shopping carts, and though they were a block away and in the shade, a few of the figures seemed familiar. Homeless people often brought cupfuls of change into the branch to be run through our coin machine. At a recent staff meeting, some of the tellers had complained that these people didn’t have accounts, so why were we serving them? I’d asked if there had been any particular trouble, and the girls had exchanged uncertain glances until Charlotte had blurted, “One of them doesn’t have a nose.” “He has nostrils,” Tina said. “But he doesn’t have the top half. It’s just a crusty hole, like a rat ate it or something.” The girls had laughed—at times, they acted their age—and when Catherine confirmed that this person had visited a few times and was not lovely to look upon, the girls admitted it was his looks, really, that scared them, but still, could we make him go away? “But what if his fortunes change?” I had said. “What if he wins the lottery? Maybe then he’ll buy roses every week for the tellers who treated him so well when things were rough.” The girls had sighed, frustrated—they wanted better than roses, it seemed—but gave up on driving him out.
    I wondered if this fellow was a member of the group I was peering at in the shadows beneath the overpass: the one leaning over his shopping cart with his ball cap pulled low, perhaps, or the one supine on the embankment with his arm over his face. When I looked down to dial my phone, a cackle of faint, disembodied laughter carried from that direction, and I looked up to find that one of them had turned and seemed to be looking toward the bank. I trained my eyes on the sidewalk and walked slowly along the back of the building, listening to the line ring, until I heard a woman’s voice inform me that—Miranda cheerfully stated her name—was not currently available. Did that mean her phone wasturned off, or just that she wasn’t answering?