Edwina

  * * * *

  Six working days later she was fired. It was now Monday morning, and after completing a very stressful week, all sorts of stories were flying about her inconsistency, her inabilities, and her lack of qualifications. So she’d buried herself in work, hoping the problem would go away. It didn’t.

  She’d sat in the chair across the desk from the man who owned her job. He told her all the things she had done wrong and why they’d had no other choice but to let her go.

  “A month’s pension should carry you,” he’d said. He asked if she had any questions, and at the shake of her head, because God help her, she couldn’t think of a single word to say, she got up and walked out of the library.

  Even now she wondered if she’d lost her mind. Had what just happened really happened? Or was it all a bad dream?

  The job she’d worked so hard for—all gone with the snap of his fingers. She walked home. Tears would not come. Anger would not surface. She felt impervious and totally indifferent. Didn’t it say somewhere in the Bible that all things work for good? She couldn’t remember where that was, and it struck her to look it up once she climbed the stairs to her apartment.

  She got to the door, looked in her hand, and there was no key there. She’d forgotten her purse. Edwina sat down on the step and stared at the trees blowing in the wind. A leaf loosened and came sashaying down, landing a few inches from her feet. She picked it up and fingered the veins, the tenderness of the still-green leaf and stared at it in wonder. If God could make such a beautiful thing, couldn’t He..., Her mind would not go any further. There was a walk she had to take.

  Back to the library she headed, steam building in her brain as she walked. How dare they accuse her of mishandling funds, losing books, and all such other nonsense. For once in her life she wanted to fight.

  Stomping back, she opened the door. No one had locked the entry doors. “I suppose I will be accused of leaving the doors unlocked, right after they requested the keys be turned in to them,” she sputtered.

  Two employees walked past her and snuck looks, but she didn’t pay them any mind. She had a few things she wanted to do.

  First, she knocked on her office door and found the woman who’d taken her place. She at least had the decency to look ashamed. The man who’d fired her was sitting there too.

  “May I have my belongings?” Edwina said between clenched teeth. She opened her desk drawer and plucked out her purse and a book. “This, this is my book,” she said pointedly as she waved it in the air.

  “Of course,” the man who’d just fired her said politely.

  “I... I say this to both of you. The charges you accused me of are totally bogus. God knows it, and I know it,” she said and gave them her back. Her ears tuned out everything except her new black flats as they clip-clopped across the polished floors. For the last time.