Only Uni (32 page)
Trish just wanted to use the toilet without fear of being smothered by a falling blanket of slime. Was that so hard? She groaned.
“Go online. Bound to be information there.”
I have lethally toxic mold in my bathroom!
Trish leaped from her office chair as she read the online article.
The janitor, used to seeing her at work so late, glanced up as he walked past her office, but didn’t stop.
There might be
Stachybotrys
mold on the ceiling. Causing all sorts of health problems and even death.
Well . . . she hadn’t had any of the symptoms listed in the article, but then again, she hadn’t been in the bathroom that often. And . . . it seemed to cause death mostly in infants and those sensitive to respiratory allergies, but
still.
Okay, so maybe she didn’t have toxic mold. She needed to get rid of it. She could get respiratory masks from work and borrow that coverall suit from the cleanroom again. She needed lots of bleach.
Even aside from the mold in the bathroom, home repairs would be massive in manpower and cost. The carpet removal would require major muscle and long hours of pure grunt work. She needed a ladder to remove the kitchen ceiling grease and the bathroom mold.
Did she want to do this?
Did she have a choice?
She wasn’t the neatest person, but even she couldn’t stand the disrepair and mess any more. The way her apartment hunting was going, she might be at George Choi’s Home Repair Hovel for longer than she’d like.
The scarcity of decent apartments amazed and appalled her. How could there be nothing suitable in three weeks? It was almost as if God was plotting against her.
Maybe He is.
Now why in the world would He want her to live in that miserable hole? Trish was doing her best to follow rule number three and persevere, but she couldn’t take much more. Hadn’t she prayed hard enough for housing? She had been in tears some nights as she begged God to deliver her from that Abyss of Abhorrence.
Then again, she hadn’t been praying for God’s will, had she? For a rescue, but not for guidance.
If He wanted her to stay and do the home repairs — more than she had intended to do, anyway — that meant she’d stop looking for apartments. Not even peeking at the online listings. Could she really do that?
Even as she sank into her office chair to pray, she started to whimper. “Oh God,
please
don’t make me stay there.”
Okay, that wasn’t very submissive.
“Oh God, do I have to stay there?”
The heavens were silent. Or it could be because it was close to ten at night.
“Lord, do you want me to stay there?”
Still silence — no rushing winds, no bolt of lightning, no voices in her head. But she did remember the unusual, inexplicable lack of apartments in an area famed for being rife with decent housing.
Only God could do that.
Trish blew her nose and heaved a sigh that blew air down the wrong pipe, causing a coughing spell. After recovering, she bowed her head and nodded to the empty room.
“Okay, Lord, if you want me to, I’ll stay.”
T
rish sat in church and wanted to cry.
Okay, Lord. You seemed to want me to stay in that wreck of a house, and I agreed to obey you. Don’t you think I deserve a little bit of good fortune at some point? Like about now?
Apparently not.
Blondie made a dramatic point of getting up and moving farther away when Trish sat down in the row in front of her. Then the little snob whispered to the older woman on her right, who shifted her ample bum a seat over while casting a wary eye at Trish. As if she would jump up and start waving her arms and prophesying.
She couldn’t lie — she felt like a leper in her lone seat with a small sea of empty chairs around her. She fiddled with her hands in her lap while her heart jackhammered in her chest. She supposed she was lucky no one could see her rapid pulse or the burning headache behind her brow bone, and hopefully her makeup hid the bags under her eyes.
Despite her non-magnetic personality at the moment, she wanted to cry for different reasons. Namely, the despair she felt this morning, seeing her dumpy house in the cold light of day and realizing the sheer amount of work ahead of her. She, who had about as much of a clue as Inspector Clouseau.
She watched the worship team setting up on the slightly elevated stage. They worked seamlessly, like a colony of ants or bees, each doing their own job. Even Spenser appeared every so often to check various cords and mics before returning to the soundboard on the balcony at the back of the sanctuary.
Where would she fit in here? Why had she given in to Spenser’s insistent recommendation for the worship team? First rehearsal for her would be Friday night. Not that she actually had anywhere else to go on Friday, which was depressing in itself. She’d get up there on the stage and totally suck, and then she’d look even more stupid than she did now, with empty chairs on all sides of her. She might as well have those yellow
Danger!
signs plastered front and back.
“Hi.” Griselle plopped into the seat next to her.
“Hi!” Her relief made that come out a tad exuberant. She toned it down. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, great.” Griselle adjusted her cream turtleneck sweater.
“Isn’t that stuff hot in the summertime?” Poor girl. But she honestly couldn’t see her exposing her cuss-word-laden shoulders to the congregation without causing at least one coronary.
“I wear light cotton stuff. When I get enough money, I’ll have them removed.”
“All of it?”
“Actually, I’ll keep some, partly because it’s expensive to have them all removed.” She leaned in closer. “I kind of have a lot of them.”
Trish was liking this chick more and more. “Cool.”
Griselle smiled. “I volunteer at a Pregnancy Crisis Center, and the tattoos make me more approachable to the girls who come in, if you can believe that.”
“I can.” Some of the girls probably had tattoos of their own.
“Oh, I found out today you volunteered for the worship team.”
“Well . . . I’ll try it. I guess I’ll have to give up Sunday school if I continue with it, huh?”
Griselle nodded. “But God really provided. One of the pastor’s nieces moved back, and she used to work the fours and fives. She called me yesterday. Now you don’t have to worry about Sunday school at all.”
Instead of relief, Trish felt kind of deflated. Unneeded. Like the church was just giving her things to do to keep her occupied. She mustered up a smile for Griselle. “That’s great.” The music started, saving her from having to think up other nice things to say about her replacement teacher.
“I will worship with all of me . . . I want to be a fool for you . . . Can I be any less?”
And she did worship with all of her, swaying and dancing in place, hands raised, offering as much of herself as she could. Who cared if people stared? Who cared if no one else joined her? She reached for more of Christ as she belted out the lyrics, feeling the words etch themselves on her heart.
Maybe the congregation would be happier to have her up front making a fool of herself rather than in the seats?
Stop thinking that way.
She didn’t know why, but somehow she knew God wanted her to serve on the worship team, for some reason, in some way. Because really, if He hadn’t wanted her up there, He shouldn’t have told Spenser three times to suggest it.
“Let me be Your hands and feet . . . Show me where . . . Show me who . . .”
Deborah.
The woman’s face flashed in front of her closed eyes and wouldn’t fade away. Scowling, alone, ignored. It didn’t seem right.
Okay, that was weird. Did God want her to help Deborah somehow? She couldn’t make her a nicer person or restore her hearing . . .
Wait a minute. Maybe she could.
“I don’t understand.” Trish pounded on the counter of the Katsu Towers nurse’s station, which had taken her almost twenty minutes to find. She would have thought it would be more accessible, considering the people who lived there.
The nurse’s face blushed an unpleasant purply-orange. “It’s policy — ”
“But this is stupid.”
The nurse frowned deeper, if that were possible. “I don’t make the policy — ”
“Deborah hasn’t had a hearing test in years — you said so yourself. Why can’t I take her? No one can talk to her because she’s deafer than a stone.”
“You’re not family — ”
She flung her arms out. “Well, I wouldn’t want to belong to her family, if only her nephew ever visits, and that’s only once every six months.”
The nurse pressed her lips together, obviously regretting telling Trish that piece of information. “Fine. Why don’t I have you talk to the director?”
“Uh . . .” Nurses she could nag, but what would she say to the director of the facility? “Isn’t that awful high up for this little teensy problem?”
The nurse smirked, then picked up her phone and dialed. After a brief exchange, she gave Trish a triumphant V-shaped smile. “You can head up to the seventh floor, room 702.”
Oh, man. She wasn’t equipped for dealing with these upper-management types.
But Venus was! She whipped out her cell phone and dialed as she headed into the elevator.
“What do you need?” Venus asked.
“Hello to you, too.”
“I’m a little busy, Trish.”
“Well then, why did you bother to answer?”
“Because it was you. Again, what do you need?”
Trish explained while waiting for the elevator doors to open.
“So what do you need me for?” A rapid
taptaptaptap
sounded in the phone — Venus rapping her pen against her desk.
“What do I say to convince him? I’m terrible with these official things.” She entered the elevator and pushed the button for the seventh floor.
“Just be logical.”
“Excuse me? You do realize you’re talking to Trish, here?”
Venus sighed, but it held a hint of amusement, so that was a good sign. “Tell the director that Deborah’s hearing can cause legal problems for the facility if she’s endangered in any way because she couldn’t hear something or someone. Like in a fire, or if there’s an accident with the wheelchair races in the hallway.”
“
Muah!
You’re awesome. Anything else?”
“Since you’re an official volunteer for the facility, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to run the residents to doctors’ appointments.”
“Oh, okay. Great.”
“But Trish, isn’t Deborah the crabby one?”
“So?”
“Are you sure she wants to get her hearing tested?”
“Of course she would.” Trish exited the elevator on the seventh floor. “Why wouldn’t she?”
