Not Even a Mouse: A Rona Shively Short (Chapter Three)

This is what woke me from my slumber: The smell of cookies baking. I heard a knock at my door and sat up with a jolt. I shook my head and then looked across the room at my clock. It was midnight. Who the hell would be at my door at midnight and why did I smell cookies?

I got up and walked over to my door to look out the peephole. Rolling my eyes, I unlocked the door and opened it.

“Can I help you?” I said crossly.

“Hey, babe,” it was my friend, Trey. Well, to be exact, he was my ex-boyfriend from a while back.

“Trey, what are you doing here at this hour?” I asked, “Don’t you know that normal people sleep at night?” I had a lot of nerve putting myself in the same category as normal people.

He must have thought the same thing. “Who’s normal?” he said, “I hadn’t talked to you and I wanted to see what you were up to.”

“You’ve heard of the phone?” I asked.

“Aw, now, let me in,” he said, moving past me and walking into my kitchen.

“Come on in,” I said.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he said, looking around my apartment.

“You’re just weird, you know that?” I said.

“You never know,” he said. Then he grabbed me and planted a kiss on my cheek.

Instead of letting go of me, he attempted to pull me in closer for a real kiss but I put a hand up to stop him.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What?” he said, “I can’t get a kiss from my favorite girl?”

“Oh, now I’m your favorite,” I said, “What happened to your girlfriend from the other day, what was her name, Tina?”

“Oh, that,” he said, “That’s over.”

I marveled at how quickly Trey jumped in and out of relationships. I had to admit, it almost made me jealous. I fancied myself somewhat of a contender in the area of romantic conquests, but he made me look like an amateur. The sad thing was that if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the thought of cookies, I might have kissed him back.

“What happened there?” I asked.

He shrugged, “Nothing, really, she just wasn’t you.” He grinned and I had to smile at him, the big dummy. He was so damned good-looking.

“Hey, do you smell cookies?” I asked him.

“Well, yeah, I thought, and I don’t know why, but I thought you might have been making them,” he said.

“What would ever make you think that?” I asked. “I was just having a really weird dream about cookies and then you knocked at the door.”

“Was it a kinky cookie dream?” he said, still grinning.

For this, I slapped the top of his head. “No, ass,” I said. “I was actually dreaming that I was watching someone make a bunch of cookies. It was really stupid.”

“You probably just dreamed that because someone on this floor is making cookies somewhere,” he said, “too bad you’re not friends with your neighbors or you could get in on the cookie action.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, “Whatever.”

We both sat down on the couch and Trey flipped through my channels. He stopped at an episode of the Rockford Files and we watched for a while without saying much. I only had to slap his hand away from my knee three times while we sat there together. After that, I got up to go to bed.

“Need some company?” he asked.

“Nope, need a blanket?” I replied.

“Yep,” he said.

It was difficult to leave him on the couch, but I knew that we couldn’t keep having these little interludes if I was ever going to move on. We could be friends, but that was going to have to be it. Besides, I wasn’t going to make things that easy for him.

When I woke up the next morning, Trey had folded his blanket and left a note on my kitchen table. “Missed you out here last night, see you tonight.” Evidently, I’d see him later. I took a shower, got dressed and then grabbed the stuff from my desk that I’d put together for my fake presentation to Santac. I found a manila folder in my desk drawer and stuffed all of it inside to keep it from getting wrinkled. When I had finished my morning routine, I grabbed my purse and the folder and headed to the car. I was off to Santac for my meeting with Mrs. Clos.

When I got to the address that she had given me, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Instead of a manufacturing plant, as I had expected it to be, I drove up to a large house that was situated in the middle of a large lot. The building was surrounded on all sides by parking lots, but there wasn’t a car in sight. I checked my watch to make sure I hadn’t arrived too early. It was about 10:15 a.m., yet no one appeared to be here. I drove around to the back of the house and there, I saw a large, red Suburban parked at the rear of the house. There was also a row of what appeared to be large dog kennels lining one side of a fenced area along the back. This was just creepy. It was almost exactly the same as what I had seen in my dream last night. Except for the fact that there was no snow and that I hadn’t actually seen any animals.

I parked the Jeep and got out to look around. I quietly walked across the parking lot and took a peek inside one of the windows of the house. Another feeling of weirdness crept over me as I looked inside. There were about fifteen people inside, standing around a table and they appeared to be decorating cookies. “Wow!” I heard myself say. “What is up with all of the cookies?”

I heard a door open and I quickly jumped away from the window so that I looked less like I was spying and more like I was trying to find a way inside.

“Can I help you, Miss?” a woman asked. She was about four feet tall and she was wearing a bright, red velvet dress that was trimmed with fake white fur. This was suspicious.

“I’m here to meet with Mrs. Clos,” I said, digging in the manila folder to retrieve a card.

As I handed her the card, she looked at it carefully. “Do you have an appointment, Miss Herman?”

“Yes, she’s expecting me,” I said, crossing my fingers behind me.

“Right this way,” she said, leading me into the house.

Christmas music was playing softly from somewhere. The same music I’d heard in my dream last night. I wanted to turn around and run back to the Jeep to get the hell out of this place, but I remained calm. Maybe I was just extremely intuitive, though that wasn’t something I’d been plagued by in the past. The woman disappeared into another room and when she came back, Mrs. Clos appeared behind her. She smiled at me and then walked over and extended her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Herman,” she said, “We can talk in here.” She pointed to a room off of the kitchen in the opposite direction of where she had just been. She didn’t say anything else until we were both sitting at the table together. She looked over at me and asked, “Would you like some hot chocolate, dear?”

“You do remember talking to me yesterday, right?” I asked.

“Oh, of course,” she said, “Will you need to look at our inventory today?” She winked.

I tried to think of why I would need to do that. I guessed that it might be helpful to get an idea of what kinds of products we would be pretending to promote. “Sure,” I said, “I guess that’s a good place to start.”

We didn’t get any hot chocolate. Instead, she led me out to another room in the house where I could see about a hundred different stations had been set up in a large open space. There were about ten tables set up and behind each of them were stackable crates full of parts and pieces that I guessed were used to make whatever it was that Santac manufactured. Mrs. Clos showed me the first station and indicated that this one was where dolls were made. She pointed to the other side of the room where a large conveyor belt had been set up. “One of our stockers comes around and collects the things that have been made at each station and puts them on the belt so that they can be sent down to be packaged,” she explained.

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “What is your most popular product?” I was hoping she knew that I was asking about the product that had been coming up missing.

She walked a couple of stations down to a larger station that had a variety of parts stacked along the wall behind it. The parts included all kinds of cogs and wheels and other things that I didn’t quite recognize. “What is this?” I asked.

“This is our most popular product, the Move ‘N Shaker,” she said proudly.

“What’s a Move ‘N Shaker?” I asked. I admit, I have little to no knowledge of what kids are into these days.

“It’s a video game that kids can play by using special virtual controllers,” she said, “it’s like they’re in the game.”

“Oh, really,” I said, still trying to figure out why this would be so great.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked out of the room and she took me into a smaller room where a large screen television had been set up. In front of it, there was a console that had all kinds of wires hooked to it. She flipped the television set on and then reached for a headset that was lying on top of the console. She put the headset on and then hit the switch on the console. The screen lit up and the television showed what appeared to be a large field covered with snow. This just kept getting more and more strange. She pulled another item from below the console and I could see that she now had a set of handlebars in front of her. They were tethered to the console and there were all kinds of different buttons on them.

“Watch,” she said. I watched as the front end of a vehicle appeared on the screen.

It was a snowmobile, but I was looking at it as though I was sitting on the thing. Mrs. Clos pushed some buttons on the handlebars and the snowmobile started moving across the screen. It was pretty cool actually. She “rode” the snowmobile around for a while and pointed out the changes in scenery. This was the Move ‘N Shaker. It was a virtual reality game console and evidently, it was the hot ticket this year.

She started putting things away and we headed out of the room and back towards where we had started out. When she had closed the door, I waited until we had gotten settled back in at the table to ask her any questions about the game. “So, about how many of these things can you make in a day?” I asked.

“We are supposed to produce at least three hundred each day here at this location,” she said, “but our inventory has been coming in at about two hundred and sixty every day.”

“Are you sure that three hundred are being made each day? I noticed that you don’t have any cameras up or at least none that I can see,” I said.

“Oh, we’re sure,” she said, “There are enough parts for three hundred consoles given to that workstation every day. Each shift is to make one hundred consoles during their eight hours here.”

“Is anybody lagging behind or are all three shifts pretty much doing the same number?” I asked.

“First and third are doing fine, it’s the second shift that seems to be having trouble,” she said. “But I hate to think that she’s doing anything wrong, she’s been with us for years.” She went on to explain that the assemblers work in tandem with the stockers to move the merchandise from the assembly line to the warehouse.

“I’m going to need the names of all of the workers associated with that station, can you get me that?” I asked.

She nodded and took a pad and pencil from her apron. That was odd; I hadn’t noticed she was wearing an apron before. In any case, she wrote down five names and beside those, she wrote down which shift they worked. She handed me the slip of paper and said, “There are only two stockers who work twelve hours a day. Like I said, I don’t think it’s either of the two ladies who are working assembly. It’s the other three I’m suspicious of.”


Come back later today for another chapter of this story...

Until next time...

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The only time I get sentimental...

There's something about the holidays that brings out my sentimental side. Most people wouldn't believe that I listen to Christmas music in my car, that I always try to put up my Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving, that I like to watch the same sappy Christmast movies over and over throughout November and December or that I look forward to seeing all of the lights and decorations go up each year. I just don't seem to be that way in real life. The truth is, Christmas has been the most consistent thing in my life over all these years and for this, I have set aside a special place in my heart for all things Christmas.

The earliest memories of Christmas I have are of my father being on the road working and my mother and I spending most of the season alone. There were always lots of presents back then because I was an only child for six years. One year, I remember getting a guitar which I promptly broke. How did I know that tightening up the strings would cause such a catastrophe? I was only about five years old and I really had no idea how to approach the instrument. Needless to say, I never learned how to play.

Just a few years later, when there were a couple of sisters added to the mix, Christmas was always time to visit relatives and eat pies and candies that were brought in by relatives we only saw a few times a year. It was the time when everyone enjoyed being together and things didn't seem quite so complicated.

There were some Christmases when things weren't so great, but I always remember feeling good about this time of year because people made an effort to be together. Whether that came from guilt or holiday spirit didn't matter, the point was that we were together. Now, years later, as everyone has either divorced, moved away or both, it's harder to get together. Members of the family have gotten older, some have strayed from reality, some have just disappeared altogether, some are sick, some have passed away. Though this time of year could be a time of sadness, I can still find contentment in hearing the same old songs each year, watching the same old movies, and looking at the same old lights.

I'm not sure this makes sense to anyone but me, however, I think my point is this: Though families may change or go through difficult times, the fact remains that every year we have the opportunity to make things right again. Actually, every day we have this opportunity but most people don't think of it until the holidays roll around. That's okay. Every little bit helps. Even if there are those whom we can't change, we can still enjoy what the season is about and appreciate that it means something to most everyone.

So, as I sit here in the dark (except for the lights on my Christmas tree), writing this, I hope you can think back on your Christmas experiences and find reasons why this is a great time for just enjoying life and being hopeful. Good things can still happen and most likely will. And if you can't believe that, just turn on your radio and find that station that plays all Christmas music all the time. If that doesn't make you smile, then you're not trying hard enough.

Until next time...


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Anxiously awaiting November...

but not for the reasons you might think. Sure, all of the political crap will be over and we won't have to hear about how terrible Palin is or how inadequate Obama is. We'll have discovered our fate shortly after the first of the month, so we can enjoy the rest of it. What I'm referring to is the release of the new Madagascar movie! I just can't wait to see it. The truly funny thing is that my daughter, who will turn five in November, tells me that she doesn't want to see the movie. Hilarious. She would rather listen to my Lisa Scottoline audiobooks in the car while we're driving to daycare. Could it be that something is wrong with this picture?

It's been a stressful year for everyone. November will be great for lots of reasons. Aside from the election, it will bring the start of the holiday season. It's my favorite time of year. I get to have a birthday party on the 9th for my daughter and then plan for vacation around Thanksgiving, and then start shopping for Christmas. Obama and Palin will be the furthest things from my mind at that point.

We get so caught up in the politics, the economy and all of the crap, that sometimes it seems like there will never be any more fun. November is a time when I can get centered again and remember how much I enjoy seeing my daughter's face light up when she opens her birthday gifts and hearing her rattle off an endless list of things she wants for Christmas. I get to spend more time with family and see people I might not have seen in a while. They tend to come out of the woodwork during the holidays. And then there are the parties. It's just such a happy, festive time.

What are you looking forward to? When it's all said and done, what part of the year makes you the happiest?

Until next time...


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And the merry bells keep ringing...

or so they say. It's the holiday season once again and I find myself feeling happy that they are here, but at the same time plagued by a sense of sadness and uneasiness. I'm not quite sure what is causing my dismay. Things are good. People are doing ok. There have been some ups and downs this year, but for the most part, it was ok.

I guess this feeling might have something to do with watching my little girl get older. Her personality has really started to show over these last few months and I can see for sure that she is truly my little girl. She has the same attitude, the same sense of humor and the same flair for the dramatic. I'm enjoying seeing her figure things out and really grasp how to do things. I'm also dreading watching her go to school in the next couple of years. Luckily, I have an extra year before she starts kindergarten because she is a November baby.

I might also be feeling this way because each Thanksgiving, I visit both of my parents for dinner and I always get to see people that I haven't seen for a while. For some reason, this makes me sad. I'm happy to see friends and family, but it also hurts a little to know that you have no control over the passage of time. Watching some of my relatives grow older is difficult for me. I don't do well with loss and any time I lose someone, I find it very hard to recover. Although we haven't lost anyone this year, the feeling hangs over me like a weight that is ready to drop on my shoulders when I'm not expecting it. It's tough, but like everyone else, I have to deal with the inevitable. At some point, I will lose someone else I care about and there will be nothing that I can do to stop it. Depressing, but what can I say.

Though I love the holidays, I always have this little nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach when it comes time to put up the tree or buy gifts or do anything that is remotely festive. This is my favorite time of year and I am not sure how I can be so happy yet so sad at the same time, but I do it every year. I am hopeful that this will be a great Christmas and that we'll all get to 2008 in one piece. But, in my heart, I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess for now, I will have to take some pleasure in listening to my favorite Christmas songs on the radio when I'm out looking for that perfect gift. I'll observe happily as my daughter watches some of my old favorite Christmas cartoons. I'll thank God that I've made it this far and I'll pray that the next year will be even better. For now, I'll turn up that radio and listen as Happy Holidays floats past my ears.

Until next time...