Permanent solution to a temporary problem

This my latest effort in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. I challenged Kelly Garriott Waite  with the prompt "Nothing is as refreshing as a cold drink of water from a hose on a hot day."  Her excellent reply can be found here. I was challenged by Xtinabosco with the prompt "If I had a nickel for every time I..."  This is my take on her prompt.

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“Greggy, take out the garbages, then come see me, have to tell you something.”

I still don’t know why Tony always called me Greggy, but I took it as a term of endearment.  He and his wife had a daughter of whom they were very proud, the first college graduate in the family, but I always got the feeling he wished for a son and thought of me as the next best thing. 

As for the “garbages,” that’s what they were to him.  Not trash, garbage, rubbish or refuse, always “garbages.”  The translation from Serbian to English was imperfect, I suppose. 

I found my boss sitting at the tiny desk in his cramped storage closet-cum-office, puffing incessantly on his cigarette, shuffling papers. 

“Sit down, Greggy, sit down.”

I nodded and took a seat, leaning my head out into the hallway to take as deep a breath of what passed for fresh air as I could before turning to face Tony and the cloud I was sure would have him stirring the restaurant’s chili with the aid of an oxygen tank one day.

“You’re a good boy, Greggy?  Eh?” He replied to my nod with a half-hearted attempt at a smile, but I could tell something was troubling him. 

“It’s Shelly. Shelly mother call me just a little while ago. She tell me terrible, terrible news. Greggy, Shelly kill herself.”

Tony choked out the last few words, tears filling his eyes.  I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly, heck, whenever he was stressed his accent got so thick I’d start looking around for subtitles. 

“Wh-what?”

My grandfather had passed away of a massive heart attack when I was four, and I lost an elderly great-aunt to bone cancer at nine, but sixteen is too young to lose a peer, especially to a suicide.

“I…..no more, Greggy, start prepping the salad, please.  Close office door.  I’m sorry.”

Tony’s head was in his hands as finished his instructions, and I complied, a bewildered stare on my face as I wandered into the kitchen and began separating heads of lettuce.

I could hear sobs through the door I’d left closed, even over the traffic in the alley behind the restaurant.

Milinka arrived as I chopped carrots, rushing through the kitchen to console her father, who had yet to emerge from his office in the nearly 30 minutes since our brief conversation. 

A morose Tony dismissed me from salad prep with a wave of his hand, taking over so that I could check the dining room to make sure every table had ketchup, salt and pepper, menus, and so forth.

Milinka joined me, offering the first explanation of my co-worker’s shocking demise.

“Greg, I don’t know what my dad told you, but I spoke to Shelly’s mom earlier.  She came home from church yesterday afternoon and found Shelly hanging in the closet.  I guess she’d just broken up with her boyfriend and had some other personal stuff going on.  It’s so tragic.”

My confusion was amplified, as breaking up with her drug-dealing boyfriend should have been cause for celebration rather than suicide.  If I had a nickel for every time I watched Shelly get dropped off at work with makeup running down her cheeks in tearful rivulets, slamming the door of that scumbag’s Trans Am, I could retire before graduating from high school. 

There was beauty somewhere beneath the cheap clothes, badly bleached hair and hard-partying life Shelly led, but you had to look hard to see it. She butchered English almost as badly as Tony did, despite the benefit of having lived every day of her 17 years in Ohio, rather than Novi Sad.  Through it all, she seemed full of cheer.  A dirty, dingy caged bird singing, indeed. 

I thought back to the last time I’d seen her, Friday night, and I stopped in my tracks.

Rather than her boyfriend car, Shelly’s sister picked her up from work that night. I told her to have a nice weekend and that I’d see her on Monday. 

I remembered being confused by her reply, which included the first and last hug I’d ever received from her, but I didn’t linger too long on it.  The weekend had arrived and my friends were waiting for me and my paycheck.

“You have a good weekend, Greg.  As for Monday, I don’t know if you will, but I hope so.”