It's in the mail

Chuck stomped into the office wearing low-cut torn jeans and a Grateful Dead t-shirt. He hadn’t shaved since last Thursday and hadn’t washed his stringy hair since Friday. He squeezed in his narrow cubicle chair, and swung his legs up onto the miserable shelf that constituted his desk and let them plop with a bang that had Catherine nearly jump out of her skin.

Catherine sat at the next cubicle wearing a tartan plaid skirt and buttoned-down white blouse with blue lace trim. After a nasty herpes bout, she’d decided to redo her hair in a Marlo Thomas bob. Maybe the new style would divert people’s attention from her lip pimples.

“Gracious,” Catherine said. She’d dropped Cathy in favor of Catherine not longer after Prince William married Kate Middleton. “Could you be a little less obnoxious this early in the morning?”

“I’ve got a mother, okay? So lay off me.”

“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

“Never went to sleep,” Chuck said. “Too busy coding the website. What’s with the hair? It’s kinda nice.”

Catherine smiled to herself. He had noticed. But before she could reply –

“Charles Hemphill,” Mrs. Findlay boomed from across the room, heading over with her bouffant gray hair and pointy-rimmed glasses. “You need to pay for the headset you took home, and you know it. Where’s the forty bucks?”

“Hey, lady, it’s in the mail. You’ll get your forty smackeroos.”

Chuck looked over at Catherine. The left side of his mouth turned down and he looked up at the ceiling.