Moonbeam McQueen

I was at a coffee shop with my coworker, Lori.  She’s one of two friends I made during training class at my latest temp job, and the three of us formed an amazing, almost magical bond from the moment we met. We’ve become so close that many days, after quitting time, we’ll sit in the grass in front of our office building and laugh like fools and talk for a couple of hours before heading home. We just can’t seem to get enough of each other, and we often remark about how incredible it is that our paths crossed at a time when all of us needed such a friendship most.

Lori is a single mom, a beautiful black woman from the west coast. A couple of years ago, she was in the legal business, living in a luxury apartment, wearing designer clothes, paying her son’s private school tuition and supporting him without help from his father. A little over a year ago, she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. She wears a wig, and is now unashamedly breastless (“I carried those huge things around for so many years- no way did I want them back”).

Temp workers usually have a story, and these days, it’s often a sad one. We’re  usually people in transition, and some of us are transitioning from an unpleasant, not-so-distant past. One of the guys in our training class was, until recently, a big shot in the telecommunications industry. None of us could figure out how or why, with his illustrious background, he was working with the likes of us, why someone who bragged about his big house and his wealthy wife was struggling so much. Little by little, we started piecing things together… car accident, chronic pain, Hydrocodone, erratic behavior… bingo. No drug testing at the place where we’re working.

Lori has secrets too. She would give us bits and pieces of her history, but it just didn’t seem to make sense. She told us that during her illness, she had lost all of her possessions. She now lives in a tiny, furnished, pay-by-the-week apartment and wears thrift store clothes. She sleeps on a sofa in the living room, and her formerly private school educated son gets the bedroom and attends a not so great public school nearby. Lori worries about all of the riffraff that shares their complex (“You wouldn’t believe all the pedophiles!”), and how she can make ends meet. $200 a week for rent and $50 a week for her pay-as-you-go phones, and there’s hardly anything left over for groceries and school supplies. Her car is an unrealiable heap, donated to her by a charity agency during her chemo.  She’s frantically trying to figure out how to get it to pass an emissions test so that she can get her tags renewed.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” our other friend, Vikki, told me. “Something doesn’t add up.”

It was true. Lori’s story is a riches-to-rags one, but pinning her down on the details seemed impossible. It’s frustrating, watching a friend struggle, but it’s been  more frustrating knowing that she could change things but won’t. How did she lose her great job, and who fires a woman with cancer, anyway? Why was she paying such impossibly high rent on her current wages? Where was her “other” car, the one she drove before her illness? How did she lose all of her possessions? Why was she paying $200 a month for a cell phone, when there are sensible, more cost-efficient alternatives? Why did she ever move here to begin with? It’s 1700 miles from the place she calls home.

She worries me to death. She has a sweet, gentle soul, and she’s been through so much more than most of us can imagine. At work, she’s a nervous wreck, so afraid that she’s going to lose this job that she can’t think clearly enough to perform well. It’s painful to watch. I’m afraid she’ll lose the job too, but I can’t imagine why she’s even here. She has a background and skills that would pay her  three times what she’s currently making, and the demand for what she does is high.  When I’d ask her why she didn’t go back to that line of work, she’d become evasive and say that there were no jobs in this area, and she just wanted to take it easy right now, but no way is the life she’s living an easy one.

“Maybe it’s drugs,” Vikki speculated. “Maybe it’s a man.”

“I don’t know,” I told her, “but the truth shall set you free. I’m going to see if I can get her to tell me the truth.”

And so we went for coffee. Lori started rambling the way she does, which is a deflection tactic, but I wasn’t having any part of it. She calls me her sister and her friend, but I was beginning to feel that the terms were empty. After all, friends and sisters sort of know each other, don’t they?

I asked her what I’d normally consider some pretty nosy questions.  I got the time line on how she went from luxury apartment to losing a high paying job during 9/11, to relocating to a smaller apartment, to becoming ill, to losing another high paying job after a layoff during her illness, to having to move to another apartment with no time or help or resources to get her things out in time. She told me about passing out in a parking lot from the heat during her chemotherapy treatments, and about how furiously angry her son had been with her for getting sick. About how she’d just deluded herself into thinking that she could hold things together financially, but she couldn’t even afford the COBRA payments that were allowing her to go to the doctor. About how hard it was living so far away from everyone she knew, and having to do all of this alone. By the time she finished, we were both crying.

I asked her about why she hadn’t been looking for jobs in her pre-cancer profession, but she started darting around again, saying that all of the work was in Dallas or Fort Worth, and she didn’t want to risk the drive, or leave her son at home alone in Pedophile-land.

“Do you know how many jobs there are in that industry within fifteen miles of here? I looked it up.” She seemed shocked, but mostly she seemed very, very nervous.

Then it hit me.

“Lori, why did you move to Texas in the first place?”

She looked down at her coffee cup, and started fidgeting. She told me about her son’s father. She was engaged to him, but after they began living together, he changed. He became possessive, abusive, and….

“….and so you ran away from home.”

She nodded. And I understood. I mean, I really understood the whole thing.

“When I look at you Lori, I see such an amazing person. But you carry this shame around with you all the time. It’s almost visible.” She looked me right in the eyes for the first time in a long time.

“It’s your credit, isn’t it?” I asked her. “You’re afraid you can’t get a legal job because your credit fell apart.” It seemed at that moment that she might fall apart.

“Lori, listen,” I told her, “I guessed what happened to you because I’ve been there. I haven’t had anything nearly as horrible as your illness, but I’ve had an illness. I’ve been a single mom with major medical bills. My credit is wrecked. I sold most of my stuff and moved to Ohio for a job I was promised that didn’t exist. Later, I sold more of my stuff and moved in with someone who I thought I’d be with forever, but he got laid off and things started to change. I had a great job by then, but it got outsourced. I ran away from home, and for a few months, I deluded myself into thinking that I could earn my living as a writer. Now I’m starting over, living in a strange city in a rented room, trying to keep my car running, doing temp work.”

“I know what it’s like to look back on who you were and what you did and how much pride you took in it, then having to swallow that pride. But you can’t be ashamed of where you are or what you’ve been through. Things fall apart sometimes, and all of us are one step away from where you are right now.”

“And yes, you may apply with some law firms that won’t hire you because of your credit, but there will be one that will. They’ll meet you and fall in love with you and they’ll give you a job. But you have to stop living like you’re hiding from the past, because what you’ve been through, and the fact that you’re here to tell about it, is something you should be very, very proud of.”

She hugged me tightly. Personally, I would’ve said, Okay, okay, enough with the lecture, but she didn’t. She put her cheek against mine and said, “I love you, sis.”  Then she said, “One day, about a year from now, we’re going to talk about this night, and we’re going to reminisce about the days when we were temps.”

Next week, we’re going to find her a cell phone plan. I’m bringing my laptop  so that afterward, we can sit at Starbucks and look for real jobs.