2024-08-17 “Unexpected” by Emmah

Today jus’ proves you never know what to expect. I went to work, normal and ever’ thing. Just when the matinee ended things got interesting.

I looked up an’ there in the theater was Hannah Madison from Merritt’s work. She saw me an’ waved.

“I saw part of your performance. You really know what you’re doing there.”

I thanked her and she said some more nice things.

“Well,” she said next, “NYC SysCo has been hired by the theater. The owner, Tom Jenkins, hired us to do some work on the special events stage and to improve the fire exits.”

“Yeah, I heard we was gonna do some work.” I said.

“Can you introduce me to Mr. Jenkins?”

I said I did and took her ‘round to his office. They talked and he asked me if I’d show her around, so ‘course I said yes.

The next big surprise came when I was showing her the emergency exit to the alley. We went out there an’ this boy was leaning on his car. He seemed surprised and happy to see us come out. He waved and took a few steps our way.

“Hello… I was wondering if you’d let me go use your bathroom.”

Hannah looked at me, then at him. “Look, you have no business inside.”

“I promise all I want to do is use your bathroom. It’ll save me from using up gas to go somewhere else.”

“You just want to use the toilet?”

“Yeah…” He came closer holding out his keys. “You can hold my keys till I come back.”

Hannah was looking at him and at his car. “You live in your car?”

“I do now… What about the bathroom? Please? I need to know or else I gotta waste gas I can’t replace.”

Hannah looked at me. “What would Tom say?”

I said I didn’t know, but I went ahead and took his keys and let him go to the toilet. He must ‘a’ been bad off on account of how long he took. He come out an’ I gave him his keys an’ he said thanks and left.

Well, after that, Hannah looked ‘round the theater some. She took some pictures and wrote some number in her iPhone. Same what Merritt tells me about his work.

Then she left. That was a little ‘fore Merritt showed up to walk me home.

I tol' Merritt about the boy in his car and we went back to the alley to see if he was still there. He was.

He was sitting on the ground 'side one of the tires. He saw me an' stood up.

"Hey, thanks for earlier."

"It's okay," I said.

We talked a little bit an' Merritt asked him his name. He tol' us it was Devon Collier.

I'd say more about that talk, but Merritt said he'd tell it tomorrow.

Thanks for reading all this.