The Tower (Saints & Haints, Chapter 8)

 Listen to audio

In the days that followed my customer service experience with S, I began to suspect that there was a rumor going around, about me, at work. Other employees, whom I'd never talked to before, suddenly greeted me, or smiled at me. People were treating me differently. For example, one girl saw my nametag and exclaimed,
"Oh, you're Justa!"
I replied, suspiciously,
"Yessss.... I am. Why? What have you heard?"
To which she replied,
"Oh, nothin'," and quickly changed the subject. It was obviously something though, but it wasn't anything bad. She had smiled. They all had. It was almost as if they were treating me like a celebrity.
"Weird," I remember thinking to myself, but I didn't dwell on it.
The next odd thing I noticed was that people were coming up to me and talking about S. They would only mention him casually, but it was clear that they knew that we were affiliated in some way. I started to develop a clearer picture of what was going on. I still didn't know for certain, but I suspected that he had gone around telling everyone that I was his woman. Which, at the time, was fine with me, but, I was also kinda thinking,
"Damn, but tell me first!"
We hadn't even gone out yet!
Then, merely a few days later, on June 25th, I found out, from someone else, that S had been promoted, and was now a manager at the store.

Finding out that way --from someone else-- kinda broke my heart. For one thing, I could pretty well surmise that I'd been exactly right about why everyone was treating me like a celebrity; the topic of what would happen if he were to date an underling must have come up during his promotion proceedings. So, he had told people that we were together, or at least that we might be; but he hadn't told me that, and he hadn't even told me that he was going for a promotion. Yet, no one else seemed surprised by the news. They'd all already known about it, leaving me the last to find out, it seemed. He had treated me like less than a friend, less than a random coworker; and all the while, he had been telling people that we were an item. It didn't make any sense; and my hurt soon turned to rage. When he came strutting around trying to flirt with me later that day, I ignored him. I stomped around and acted as childish as he had. When he'd say,
"Hey... [something something],"
I'd respond,
"Yeah. Whatever," without even looking at him. I treated him like shit for about three days.

On the fourth day, another manager, Trevor, told me that he was cross training some people, and he needed to teach me how to do a different job at the store. As I was walking around with Trevor, working, and talking about work, I kept noticing S popping up somewhere close by. He'd be on the aisle beside us, eavesdropping; or if not that, one of his friends would be casually walking past us, craning their necks to see what we were doing.
"He's jealous?" I remember thinking to myself, "Is he fucking serious?!"

That night, S got off work three hours before closing time. I was a closing employee, and Trevor was the closing manager, which meant that when it was time for me to leave, Trevor had to walk me to the door, so he could lock it behind me. As soon as I stepped into the parking lot, I heard the rumbling of an engine starting, and as I looked up, I noticed S's truck, which had been parked near mine at the far end of the lot, speeding away noisily. I could easily surmise what that had been about too. He hadn't been waiting to talk to me; he had been waiting only to make sure that I did not stay late, locked inside the store alone with Trevor, and that I did not leave with Trevor. He'd seen all he needed to see.

The next day, I apologized to S, via text. Even though I didn't understand or excuse his actions, I apologized for my rude and childish behavior. He replied, saying,
"I'm just very busy, I'm not ignoring you. I've been working 12 hours a day."
I didn't know what he meant by "working 12 hours a day." He certainly didn't work that many hours at the store, that is, unless he had been counting the time he spent stalking me as work time. Still, only a few days later, he was in a relationship with another woman, some "Jessica Sanders." They even made it "Facebook official."

After that, for about six more weeks, I was still in a sort of limbo. I didn't know what to do, which I know sounds dumb. Normally, I would have given up on the guy a long time before that; but by then, I had become completely convinced, because of all those signs of seeming affirmation I'd received, that this was the man that God wanted me to be with. At the same time, however, I wasn't about to be anybody's second choice.

I wrote to my friend, Marie:
"I feel like a Victorian fiancee, which is really really fucking weird, considering that the first thing I ever considered writing to him, when I didn't know him yet at all, was a Victorian marriage proposal!! Why the fuck didn't I write him a synopsis of The Kama Sutra? Or a guide to courtly love? You know, with actual courting involved?!"