Nicole was day-dreaming.
Well, not day-dreaming exactly, more like letting her mind skitter along on a stream of consciousness.
It’s how she spent most of her days.
Nicole had not grown up wanting to work for the post office, but after she got out of college, there weren’t a lot of prospects for a history major without a teaching certificate.
“What were you thinking?” her father had grumbled, as if he’d had no idea what she’d been doing for the last four years.
It wasn’t like she’d kept it a secret. She’d lived at home all through college, helping take care of her mother, writing her papers and doing her reading in the wee hours when her mother finally fell into an exhausted sleep.
Her mother had been very proud of her and one of her last outings had been attending Nicole’s graduation. They’d gone out for Cuban food after and her mother had managed a couple of bites of fried plantains.
One of the last conversations her mother had had been an argument with Nicole’s father over their daughter’s future. Nicole had been sad about that. She hadn’t wanted her mother to waste even a second of her precious life worrying about her.
“Once a mother, always a mother,” her mother had said to her when Nicole had protested that she could argue on her own behalf.
“A mother till the day I die,” she’d added, and then she’d laughed.
Nicole had laughed too because that was her mother, refusing to succumb to self-pity, taking refuge in black humor and a rock-ribbed faith that had never failed her, though the chemotherapy had.
To get her father off her back, Nicole had taken the Civil Service exam, breezing through it, and then taken a job with the post office. Her father hadn’t been pleased by the choice.
He persisted in referring to her as a “mail man,” which was just hateful, pointing out there were lots of other Civil Service jobs she could have taken.
`He did have a point, Nicole had agreed, and that mollified him some. She didn’t feel like telling him the real reason she’d taken the blue—that some of the other jobs had sounded interesting enough that she might have been tempted to sink into them like a hot bath, only to emerge 30 years later with a gold watch and a sense that life had passed her by.
She was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to be a letter carrier for life.
Mainly because the post office was coming apart at the seams; it wouldn’t last another 30 months, much less 30 years.
In the meantime, she had a route she liked—not too many apartment buildings—and a salary that covered her bills, and she had time to plan her next move.
She liked that it was easy to leave the job when she took off her uniform. She had friends who were killing themselves to climb up the corporate ladder and were still living on credit cards because they owed so much money in student loans.
There hadn’t been a lot of money left over after her mother’s bills were paid, but what there was went to Nicole. She’d resisted the urge to throw it away on a vacation or on new stuff and had paid off every single debt she had.
