Jerico’s School Of Secretarial Correspondence

Edge of Humanity Magazine

1 year ago

Loanie never told anybody what she wanted. She figured she’d jinx it. She’d heard Hazel tell anybody who’d listen she wanted to go to Washington DC and be a secretary. Hazel took a correspondence course. There wasn’t any way she could go to school out where they lived, out in the country where the mud was a foot deep after it rained.

Loanie watched as Hazel sent letter after letter out to Washington D.C. asking for job interviews. Getting out of the holler to the bus station in Charleston would be a trick, but she’d manage. She figured her brother, Arthur, would take her in his truck. She’d got as far as the diploma, she had to go farther than the swinging bridge past the mailbox where she waited for the mailman on the hard road every day. She’d make it to Charleston, then on to Washington DC. She’d do just fine.

Then Cyril came rolling into town, passed the mailbox, and saw Hazel waiting on her letter from the government offering her a job. He was tall and dark headed. He’d come to start a restaurant in downtown Clay, if you could call one street with a stop sign, a bank, and a funeral home downtown. He needed a bookkeeper. Wouldn’t she consider helping him out for a while?

Hazel’s correspondence school covered bookkeeping. She could help him out for a spell, at least until her letter came.

Loanie knew better. She watched Hazel’s dream of leaving the holler vanish when Cyril drove up to the mailbox that day. If Hazel’d kept her mouth shut, she’da gone to Washington DC and been somebody instead of a bookkeeper for a husband who owned a burger joint just past the holler in Clay.

Text © Devonne Parsons