The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

Author:Danielle Evans [Evans, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Vera took him to a McDonald’s and watched him nibble at his French fries and chicken nuggets. She considered dropping him off on the steps of a police station and just walking away, but that felt fraught with unsavory possibilities. He might follow her and get more lost than he already was. Someone might see her leaving him and try to stop her. There’d be more questions asked than she had answers for. She had one thousand dollars in cash tucked into the lining of her handbag, and when she went to drop this package off tomorrow she’d have ten thousand dollars more, and her whole life in front of her.

The year before she’d dropped out, she’d fulfilled her university’s mandatory community service requirement by working with a literacy program at a women’s prison. There were women not much older than she was doing ten years for holding, selling, transporting—mostly their boyfriends’ drugs. A classmate said once that they’d bargained their lives for a few thousand dollars, which just emphasized for Vera how much the classmate had missed the point—most of these women weren’t getting money in the first place. They’d done it for love.

Fuck love. This was not a love story. Josh was in his late thirties, already balding and prone to wearing button-down Hawaiian print shirts. He’d half-heartedly hit on Vera once, but even he couldn’t take the flirtation seriously enough to be offended by her rejection. He owned the record store, which had been a hardware store until his father died. For at least the last decade he’d been making more money selling pot and small-time quantities of pills out of the back room than he had selling records out of the front room; not because he’d started selling more drugs but because people had stopped buying music. Until now, Vera had strictly worked the front-room business, maintaining plausible deniability of whatever else her employer was doing. She kept a blank face while ringing up music of questionable taste, pornographic album covers, actual pornography, and cigarettes that twentysomething men purchased for the fourteen-year-old girls lingering outside. Vera got good at pretending not to notice people who didn’t want to be seen.

The revival downtown had been promising her for years sputtered and stopped when the recession hit. Even after she’d dropped out of school, it had seemed better to stay put than to go an hour backward and end up at home again. Her father had suggested she get her cosmetology degree and work at the nail salon that had opened in town, and Vera said, You want me to get a job literally watching paint dry? When she called her parents back to apologize for her tone, she made it sound like Josh’s store was really something and she had big plans, when in fact every day she felt like she had less energy to even imagine what better version of herself she might become.

Beneath the renovated downtown lofts that nobody had moved into were boarded-up windows that were supposed to be art galleries.

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