Day 24. The Beginning of the End?

The days were slowly creeping by, and the 8km race I’d been training for was only a week away. My nerves had yet prevented me from asking for time off from work, but I knew it had to be done. Plus, things hadn’t been going so badly as of late.

I’d been promoted from maid to waitress (although Bashir’s beady little black eyes still followed me around the restaurant), I’d managed to elicit a few smiles from Mr. Mean Man, and I was becoming friends (well, it was more like people who spoke to each other quickly and quietly while the boss wasn’t looking, but I’ll take it!) with the other servers at work.

Yet, when I asked Anna if we were allowed to request time off, she told me about the ordeal she had gone through that had nearly cost her job. When asking for the weekend off for the Grand Prix the month prior, she had received a screaming lecture about her inability to commit and her general lack of skill as a waitress. (She is, in fact, one of the best I’ve worked with.)

“I was going to be honest, tell him I just needed the time off,” she explained, hovered over the computer screen to avoid another why-are-you-standing-around-doing-nothing-in-my-restaurant lecture. “But I knew he’d take it badly—or worse—say no, so I lied and told him my friend had surprised me with tickets and I had to go.”

When my shift was over, I found Bashir in the back office and knocked on the already open door. I took several deep breaths in an attempt to quell my pounding heart, but to no avail.

Bashir looked up from his desk, “Come een, Laureen.” Shudder.

“I just wanted to let you know that the race I have been training for, you know, how I can’t come in Saturdays? Well, it’s next weekend, on the 8^th.”

“Ok Laureen, we discuss this later,” he said, looking back down at his stack of papers. But terrified that if we discussed it later he would deny me the time off because he hadn’t received a week’s notice, I pushed on.

“Actually, I need to make sure you know now. It is a week away. And I’m going to need the 7^th off as well, because the race starts early in the morning and I will need a day to rest.” I was praying the nervous tremors in my body weren’t apparent in my speech.

He lifted up the April page of his calendar to the month of May and dragged his thick finger across to the Friday and Saturday I was requesting. “So, you need the 7^th and the 8^th for the race.”

Oh, if only you could have heard his tone. Like I was asking him for a year off. Like it was such an inconvenience. Like I was a troublesome child.

He didn’t speak for what felt like ten minutes, but was probably closer to a few seconds. “Ok. You take the Friday night and Saturday. But Sunday is the Mother’s Day and you do not take that off, do you understand?”

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t need Sunday off, just the 7^th and the 8^th.”

“Ok,” he replied, his voice labored and heavy with the hassle of accommodating another person’s schedule. “But you could never have Mother’s Day off.”

“But I don’t want Mother’s Day off,” I repeated, confused. “Just the 7^th and the 8^th.”

I headed home, puzzled by our exchange, but relieved that I had managed to secure time off for the race.

“I got the time off!” I told Curtis, excitedly, as I walked into the apartment. “Time off for what?” he asked.

“My race! The Mother’s D—” My heart sank. The Mother’s Day Classic. The 8k Mother’s Day Classic. I flung my laptop open and pulled up the race webpage. Of course. How did I make that mistake?

“What’s the matter?” Curtis asked.

“The Mother’s Day Classic, the race I’ve been training for, is on Mother’s Day.”

“Well, yes. That makes sense.”

“But I asked for the wrong days! For some reason I got the 8^th in my head and I asked for that day off and he said ok but there’s no way in hell I’m allowed to take off Mother’s Day or else he’ll eat me alive or have me drawn and quartered or worse—withhold last week’s pay!”

As he always does, Curtis managed to calm me down, and assured me we’d find a solution to my sticky, and potentially life-threatening, conundrum.

I slept uneasily that night.

It’s not as if I could just waltz right back in and tell him I’d made a mistake, that I actually did need the Sunday off. I already knew he’d never give it to me… he’d made that clear enough. I was stumped for ideas.

What was I going to do?

Love,

the traveling (and very nervous) stahr...