Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Read Online Free Page B

delivery date for the following Thursday.

What the Hell is Cute, Anyway?
    Fifty tubes of hand cream for the Mystery Train Lady. Check. Extra bottles of Skin-So-Soft for Wild Dog Nana. Check. I entered the product numbers into my Avon computer account and clicked “save.” I did the math in my head, figured out my profit and realized the eighty bucks or so I would earn wouldn’t allow me to sit on my butt the remainder of the campaign. Rats. I restocked my backpack, applied fresh lipstick and smoothed the creases out of my kilt. I noticed a smudged dirty paw mark on my right pocket and tried to wipe it off with a warm washcloth. Damn dogs , I thought. Not sure they’re worth the six dollars . I called the troops, pointed our new route, and we hiked across the street and into the canyon sprawl.
    I delivered brochures along the short streets of the old neighborhood behind the elementary school. I never canvassed here before, never saw these hundred homes hidden by eucalyptus and palm, a hundred older homes still untouched by recent years of rocket-crazy real estate investors. I handed the boys handfuls of books at a time, and they ran ahead of me, trading houses back and forth, leaving books on faded wooden door steps and cracked driveways.
    I wasn’t in the mood to knock on doors. I wasn’t in the mood for Avon, period. I should have been in the mood. Gas is expensive and children are expensive and I had but three days left in the campaign. But I couldn’t shake random memories from my mind. I thought about what happened twenty years ago – another lifetime. I was so young. I remember the doctor speaking to me.
    “Can you describe the rape to me?”
    I was silent.
    The hardest thing I ever went through was those nine months. I was alone in labor. I was alone for hours, and the nurse called me weak when I asked for pain medication.
    I wanted time with the baby after birth, but they wouldn’t let me have it. I only had a glimpse of her - dark eyes so green and alive like mine, dark wavy hair - before they snatched her away and sent her to live with a foster family until the adoptive parents signed the papers. They put me in the worst room of the maternity ward, a room cold and metallic, purely functional, without comfort, and I felt like I had done something terribly wrong. I was just a kid. I didn’t know I could ask for something better.
    The next day I lay still in my steel bed and they wheeled me into a cozy and cheerful room with another new mother. Friends and family came to admire her baby, bearing flowers and baby clothes, and candy. My stay was a secret from my family. They lived many miles away and my tongue refused to say the words when I talked to them on the phone. I lay alone. My body ached for my baby.
    A hospital worker in pink and blue came into the room and announced it was time for us to have our babies’ photographs taken, and I was too grief-stricken to explain. She kept telling me it was ok, it was free. She thought I didn’t have the money for the photographs, I looked so young and poor.
    I yearned to explain it, over and over again, to everyone I saw for weeks afterward. I had two stories: the real one, and my cover story that the baby died during birth. Retelling the rape each time I explained why my belly now appeared flat and why I had no baby in my arms tore at my heart and I was silent.
    I watched those brochures fly through the air and land on pebbles, stopped to pet a skinny yellow cat and walked the boys to the playground behind the school, did all of these things without thinking, a zombie momma trapped in another dimension. And all I could think and remember, when my brain finally reopened, while my boys swung higher than the trees, was that I had to keep moving forward. One brochure here. One sample there. Keep peddling my Avon. I could manage my business, and the summer, one lipstick at a time. I called my boys down from the equipment and gave them more samples and brochures to