Plenty (Act III)

Tripping over something in the dark, “Shit,” she says, gruffly, and a hollow echoey thump, a clank and a stumbling clatter, a snap of a light switch and there she is, catching a mop handle as it’s leaning out of the mop bucket there by the door, her with her legs bare under the oversized blue sweatshirt that says Brigadoon! Gently setting the mop back against the wall. Brushing back her wine-dark sleep-matted hair. Before her a rack of cubbies stuffed with spray bottles and cartons of light bulbs and bundles of paper towels under looped hanks of orange extension cord. “Leo?” she says, and then in a smaller voice, “Jessie?” Looking at the door behind her, simple, slender, unpaneled, painted brown, a round knob with a cheap gold finish. “I just,” she says. Her hand on the knob. A sharp rush of breath in through her teeth and a jerk of her wrist and she opens the door.

Outside a hall white with sunlight from a window somewhere down the length of it right there by the doorway the buzzing red bulk of a Coke machine.

“Oh, hell,” says Jo. She closes the door. Takes her hand off the knob. Rubs her mouth, her chin. Turns around and around again in the narrow little closet, brushing the overstuffed rack of cubbies, rattling, clank. “Oh hell.” Her hand on the golden knob once more. Twisting it. Letting go. Flexing her fingers she leans her forehead against the jamb. Maybe she says something, muttering, head rocking back and forth until she lifts it away looking about the closet again, taking up the knob a third time, her other hand a fist in the air, laid flat on the wall, reaching for the light switch there under a shelf. She snaps it off. She opens the door.