“I would have kept my mouth shut,” the security guard mumbled.
Zoe sighed unhappily. “I really am an idiot.”
“Yup.”
“Please, please, don’t be in my spot,” Zoe chanted softly as she slowly turned the corner, wishing that she knew how to change, or at least temporarily fix, her windshield wipers while she did her best to squint through the heavy downpour.
A moment later, she slowly came to a stop in front of her house...at least, she hoped it was her house. With a small groan, Zoe rolled down the driver’s side window and tried not to cringe when the action was accompanied by a grinding noise. Once it was down, Zoe leaned out and tried to make out the color of the townhouse. It was the wrong color, but at least now she knew that she only had two more houses to go.
A car raced past her, sending a wave of muddy water slamming against her car as it crashed through a large puddle, thoroughly soaking her. This day could not get any worse, Zoe thought with a forlorn sigh as she wiped mud out of her eyes only to be proven wrong seconds later when somebody behind her blasted their horn. With a resigned sigh, she started driving again, but apparently not fast enough for the people behind her, who voiced their displeasure while she drove the remaining twenty yards by blasting their horns.
After the day she’d had, Zoe wasn’t exactly surprised when she spotted Trevor’s pickup truck parked in the middle of the short doublewide driveway that they were supposed to share. Groaning, she did her best to ignore the cars slowly driving past her so that they could flip her off with a special blast of their horns just in case she hadn’t quite gotten the message the first time while she carefully parked her car between two large pickup trucks across the street.
When she tried to close her window, Zoe received a rather pleasant surprise when the window closed quietly. Well, that was a relief, she thought, grabbing her purse and climbing out of the car. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about paying three hundred dollars to have her windows fixed again. She closed the door and turned to walk across the street when an odd swooshing sound caught her attention. Praying that it was just a product of her overactive imagination, Zoe turned around and frowned.
Why did the window look weird?
She pushed her wet hair out of her face and leaned forward to get a better look. It didn’t take long before she realized why her window looked wrong. Her window had come off its tracks for probably the hundredth time this year. Dropping her purse, she wiped her wet hands clean on her soaked skirt and grabbed the edge of the window. She tried to pull the window back up only to have it slip through her hands and slide down several inches before it apparently became stuck again.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Zoe muttered, determined to stop the window from sliding back down into the door where it would have to stay until she could scrounge up the money to have it fixed. With no job or prospects, there was also a very good chance that she’d be living out of her car soon and she wanted to keep it dry and mold-free.
It took several minutes, but Zoe finally managed to pull the window back up several inches. One last pull should do it, she hoped, gripping the window tightly and pulled as hard as she could. When the window slid up easily, she couldn’t help but chuckle. Finally, things were-
Her hands slipped and before she could grab the window, it dropped into the door and if the noise that followed was any indication, cracked. She stared numbly at the empty window for a long moment before she picked up her purse, not surprised when the strap broke off or when the heel on her left shoe snapped off a minute later.
Clutching her ruined purse to her chest, Zoe wobbled towards the front door, only getting stuck in the mud twice and losing one shoe, the right one, before she found herself on the front porch, searching through her drenched purse for her keys. By the time she found them, she was shivering violently from the cold and close to crying for the first time in five years.
She opened the door and spotted her now mud-caked puppy welcome mat and sighed. Deciding that there were worse things in life than a ruined doormat, Zoe let herself into her apartment, praying that her next-door neighbor took it easy on her tonight since she wasn’t sure that she could handle much more.
Doing her best not to ruin her landlord’s carpeting, she made her way over to the phone, deciding that she needed the ultimate pick me up after the day she had. She knew she shouldn’t, especially since she would have to live off what little savings she had left, but she just couldn’t help herself. She called up Black Jack’s Pizzeria and ordered the special: a two-liter bottle of Coke, a large order of chicken fingers with extra honey mustard sauce, and an extra-large, extra-thick Chicago style pizza called The Monster.
For once, the customary one-hour wait for delivery didn’t bother her. Zoe pulled off her mud-soaked shoe and stockings and made her way upstairs to her bedroom. She grabbed a change of clothes on her way to the bathroom, praying that her surprisingly quiet neighbor remained that way.
She quickly pulled off her soaked, coffee-stained, and mud-splattered suit and looked it over. As long as she pretreated the stains and washed it tonight, it should be fine, at least, she hoped it would. She didn’t exactly have the funds needed to go out and buy a new suit for job interviews. This one, with the aid of many interchangeable blouses, had lasted for three years and she’d been counting on it to last another two.
After a five-minute search, Zoe found her bottle of generic stain pretreatment behind the box of condoms she’d bought, what was it now? Three years ago? Or was it five? The realization that she hadn’t had sex in over five years was rather depressing, she thought, tossing the condoms back under the bathroom sink so that she wouldn’t have to look at the reminder that her love life, social life, and professional life just plain sucked.
She liberally sprayed her suit, only wondering if the chemicals in the pretreatment would harm her suit after she sprayed it. Knowing her luck, the chemicals would probably chew through the imitation silk shirt and stain the suit jacket with large weird-shaped polka dots.
With a resigned sigh, Zoe left the suit on the sink counter, climbed into her bathtub, and turned on the shower. For the first time all day, she felt herself relax. She stood beneath the hot spray for several minutes just enjoying the hot water before she applied shampoo to her hair.
A loud squeal escaped her when the water pressure suddenly dropped and the temperature went from comfortably hot to excruciatingly hot in seconds. Startled, she jumped back, slipped, landed on her butt, and cringed as shampoo seeped into her eyes.
“Ow, ow, owie!” Zoe mumbled frantically as her eyes began to sting and her butt throbbed. She wasn’t entirely sure which one bothered her more at the moment, but she knew which one she could fix.
Taking a deep breath, she shoved her head beneath the hot water, silently cursing the low water pressure that was actually pushing more soap into her closed eyes. At least the water began to cool, Zoe thought on a sigh before she squealed again seconds later when the water went ice-cold and she was forced to stand up, hoping that would help the still low water pressure rinse shampoo out of her hair faster.
It didn’t.
Gasping, she ran her fingers through her long thick hair and tried to hurry the process. Minutes later, she was jumping out of the shower and cursing the bastard next-door for not only flushing the toilet but for taking a shower at the same time as her. The least the jerk could have done when he’d realized that she was also taking a shower was to wait for her to finish.
Still grumbling five minutes later and thankfully dressed in warm clothes, Zoe grabbed her basket of dirty laundry, a roll of quarters, her damn near-empty bottle of laundry detergent and headed downstairs. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a private entrance to the basement, so she was forced to balance her basket of laundry while she did her best not to step in one of the dozen or so mud splotches that decorated the hallway floor.
She walked to the door at the end of the small hallway and flicked the light switch on for the stairs all while hoping that the jerk hadn’t tracked mud down the stairs because she really didn’t need to fall on her ass again tonight. Zoe sighed in relief when she spotted the clean pine stairs and headed down to the small laundry room.
It wasn’t until she’d placed her basket on the washing machine that she’d realized that she’d forgotten her suit. She half-debated leaving it for another day, but she didn’t want to take the chance of landing an interview tomorrow and having nothing to wear but jeans.
With a tired sigh, Zoe left her basket and headed upstairs. At least, she had Black Jack’s pizza to comfort her later, she reminded herself.
