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Short Story: Love, Despite its History
by Jeremy Griffin
I stroke her hair and make these little shushing noises. “It’s okay,” I murmur into her ear. “Just calm down. I’m here now.”
After a couple minutes she manages to compose herself, and she guides me into the living room. The police have already come and gone, and now Cassidy is left with the cumbersome task of canceling her stolen credit cards, a duty that she has relegated to her boyfriend Ian, who I’m a bit disheartened to see pacing the tiny kitchen with his phone clamped to his head: I was enjoying the idea that I was the first one she called, maybe even the only one. “No, that’s what I’m telling you, it wasn’t my card, it was my girlfriend’s,” he says. “She was the one who got robbed. I have all the information.”
Cassidy flops down into the kiddie pool-sized papazzan chair in the corner of the living room. “He’s been on hold with Visa for like half an hour,” she moans. “I told him to tell me when he gets through to someone who can help. I just can’t handle it right now.” This last part she emphasizes with a helpless little sweep of her hand.
Taking a seat on the adjacent sofa, I ask her to tell me what happened. She was checking her mail outside the building, she explains, when they snuck up behind her—two men, the hoods of their thick jackets cinched tight around their heads, making it impossible to see their faces in the shadowy corner of the parking lot. One of them stood off to the side a few feet keeping an eye out while the other pointed a gun at her. Quiet, he said, sliding her purse off her shoulder and then slinging it over his own, bored, like this was all routine, like the whole thing was just a big drag. Luckily for Cassidy, there was very little cash inside, but there was her birth control, and of course the credit cards.
“He was all like, ‘Hold out your arms’,” Cassidy says. “And so I did, and he pushed my sleeves up a few inches, you know, looking for jewelry? They took my watch and that bracelet my dad got me, you remember?”
[Distillate © HA&L + Jeremy Griffin {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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