It came from my notebook: At the Heart of Mina Jones
When I first met Mina Jones I was living in a cereal box apartment down by the docks, shackled there under a smoke damaged ceiling by thirty thousand dollars in credit cards and debt.
The bachelor's degree I'd taken two loans out for didn't amount to much, just a string of office jobs crunching numbers and answering phones. After a while the corporate efficiency experts came down from the head office, sent in to cut the dead weight and bring down salary expenses. A stiff guy with a gray suit and a gummy smile handed me a tiny severance check and thanked me for my time, cutting me loose for a job tending the cash register and stocking shelves at Craigen Books for eight dollars an hour. I couldn't say I was exactly surprised, but I took the check anyway, and faked a smile so they wouldn't think I was going to come back and shoot the place up. At home I burned my shirt and tie in the kitchen sink, and tried not to give in to the bank statements staring me down from the table.
Mina came in sometimes before we closed up shop for the day. I worked evenings and weekends, all the shifts Chris and Brittney couldn't work because of parties and karaoke nights with their friends. I was too broke to be discriminating about my hours. I knew Mina's name from the signed credit card slips, made out for cheesy romance novels with suit-and-tie heroines in high black heels and pencil skirts on the cover. She didn't look the corporate soul-killer type, even as pretty as she was, a small girl with big brown eyes like a golden retriever and straight black hair that curled a little at the base of her neck. I guess she had to have some money because I never saw her in the same outfit twice, not that I was really looking all that hard, except for a heart-shaped locket pulled tight around her neck by a black ribbon.
I knew better than to look too hard, especially at a girl like that. Girls like Mina usually had better things to do than to be picked up by cashiers. They had fiancés with quarterback good-looks and nice cars and careers to think about. At the very least they had doting fathers, who could pay their ways until they got out of school to be orthodontists or lawyers. I had no marketable skills and a diploma I still couldn't pay for. I didn't stand a chance with a girl like her.
Even for that, each time she came to my counter she smiled at me, if only just long enough for me to see it, signing her name and dotting the i. I always thanked her but she never said anything back. No one else seemed to come in after Mina. I was always kind of glad they didn't, left with her tiny smile as I closed up shop, counted the drawer and locked the doors. After work I walked the eight blocks home alone, warmed up some dinner in the microwave and went to bed, trying to chase off thoughts of Mina Jones before falling asleep to the sound of freight ships passing in the dark.
