name="Just Call" by A. R. Gregory

Say What?

Andy Coucher, what a name, huh. My sedentary surname couldn’t be helped, but my first name? Did my stupid parents think I’d never grow up? How can anyone named Andrew not get forever pegged Andy, unless maybe he’s in line to the throne of England?

So there I was, less-than-noble Andy Coucher, in yet another new job, new city, new life, and as always starting at the bottom of the barrel. I was in such a funk that even Heather was looking good to me. Heather was this courier for a manufacturing company that did business with the mechanical engineering firm I worked for. Every two or three days, she would trudge into my office lugging long cardboard tubes stuffed with rolled-up blueprints that had been approved or rejected. As the firm’s newbie, one of my thankless jobs was to sign for and inventory them. Every time Heather showed up, it was her carrying the tubes, me trying to carry the conversation.

To put it kindly, Heather wasn’t a very together person. While she looked like she was twenty or so, she seemed like a shy twelve-year-old. I could tell she was flattered that I paid her any attention at all. She probably figured I was an up-and-coming young executive type since I wore a tie and had my own little windowless office. She must have wondered why a worldly thirty-year-old like me, who’d already been married and divorced, would bother to talk to her. But who knows what Heather thought about anything? It wasn’t like she was saying. In my efforts to make conversation with her, to open Heather up, all I’d managed to do was spill a bunch of personal trivia about myself.

Truth was, I was a just-hired junior engineer. In the social pecking order of the firm, I was lower than the secretaries, even the receptionists. And as things would turn out, I wouldn’t be around much longer either. But what the hell, it was a go-nowhere job anyway. The economy was about to tank. In half a year this going concern I’d just joined would be gone too. My fondest memory of it would be the day I heard it went belly up.

Now, Heather was a textbook example of the most absurdly conflicted personality type ever, the shy person seeking attention. And shocking people with her looks seemed to be her only strategy, maybe her only hope. Heather’s desperate ploys included clipped purple hair, raccoon’s mask eye makeup, black nail polish, a tongue stud, lip ring, nose ring, a slew of studs and rings around the rims of her ears, and God knows how many tattoos. A butterfly peeked out from the neck of her T-shirt, flower petals from under a sleeve, a little fairy or pixie or other winged creature flitted behind one of her ears. Once when she bent to lift one of her cardboard tubes she’d dropped and her t-shirt rode up, I caught a glimpse of ink on her lower back too.

But if you overlooked all the surface dramatics — and I guess I was that desperate — Heather didn’t seem that bad. She wasn’t overweight. Maybe borderline plumpish, but hardly a pudge. Cuddly, I’d call her, which in my opinion was a plus in the sack. Her boobs looked a decent size too, a big plus, though who could say for sure? The bib overalls she always wore made any assessment tricky. All in all, Heather was kinda cute. And the more we talked — the more I talked as Heather stared at the floor — the better she looked.

After my crazy, driven ex-wife Kirsten, Heather’s emotional blandness was even a welcome relief. It wasn’t like I needed another manipulative drama queen in my life. Kirsten had always bemoaned my “flat career trajectory.” She and her whole family seemed worried sick about it. If I didn’t settle down and get serious about my work, Kirsten’s life would be ruined. Her father and mother were always on me about letting their wonderful daughter down. How could I not dump her, dump them? What better reason to quit my last job, start over again from scratch in a city halfway across the country, even at fifteen percent less salary? The smartest thing I did in that marriage was getting out of it. No, wait, my real stroke of genius was not getting pampered Kirsten pregnant, being tied to her through a kid for the rest of my life.

So I was a bachelor on the prowl again. It’d been six months since my divorce, and it wasn’t like my new job description had anything to do with meeting new and interesting people. So what the hell, the next time Heather walked in, I was ready and waiting. “Hey, Heather, why don’t you and me do dinner sometime?”

Heather’s eyes burst wide with panic. “Oh, uh, well, uh... I, uh, I, uh... I dunno.” I thought she’d trip trying to barge out my office door, like she couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I had to run after her with the receipt I’d just signed for the stuff she’d brought, which she snatched, then took off again without a word. She seemed so upset, I figured she’d quit her nothing of a courier job just to avoid having to see me again. My pickup style with pathologically shy girls obviously needed tweaking.

Was it the dinner thing that freaked Heather out? Like she thought I was asking her out on a formal, old-fashioned kinda date? All that sensitive, nice-guy stuff was so last century, right. Like most chicks these days, Heather was probably so muddled by playing emotionally tough and independent, she couldn’t wrap her mind around a guy treating her like anything special. Maybe I should have just talked about us meeting up somewhere, hanging out, hooking up or whatever, like it was no biggie if Heather wanted to or not.

But guess what. The next day Heather was back on the job, hauling more cardboard tubes into my office. Somehow in the meantime, she must have gotten used to the idea of going out with me, because she brought it up herself. She even seemed excited about it, even thrilled, at least by Heather’s emotionally pinched standards. “So, uh, like if you wanna, I guess that dinner thing’s okay,” she muttered as she studied her sneakers, still unable to look me straight in the eye.

“Deal, Heather!” I gave her a big high five. “We can do dinner or whatever you like,” I added and shrugged. It was all coming back to me now, how to hit on women!