It only took one whack with a hammer to bust the case and two more to mangle the cd completely.

Well. That felt better than a bataka bat on a pillow. She dumped the pieces into the garbage can.

A couple of hours later she forced herself to stop smiling because her face was actually beginning to hurt. She wished she knew how to whistle. Lauren Bacall had made it sound so easy.

"How was your day?" Anthea buckled up and started the car, immediately pressing the control for air-conditioning. The car interior was searing hot after sitting in the sun all day. Shay smiled her answer as she buckled herself in, wincing as the heat penetrated her thin T-shirt. She resisted the temptation to close her bleary eyes.

She could easily let the heat relax her muscles and drop off to sleep. Anthea handled the car so smoothly and competently that Shay had often been able to sleep on the way to work without a single disturbed moment. The extra half hour or so was keeping her alive. But sleeping on the way home, too... well, that seemed rude and it made her groggy at the pizza parlor. So she held her eyes open wide and watched Anthea's hands on the wheel, not gripping too tightly or too casually. Smooth, controlled. She wondered if Anthea was always that smooth.

Shay blinked several times and realized where her silent musings were drifting. She had promised herself that she wouldn't do this. It just wasn't appropriate, nor did it have any chance of coming to fruition. Still, Anthea was easy on Shay's tired eyes. She tried to remember why she had initially disliked Anthea.

She hadn't had a lover since Kuwait — a tempestuous affair with an engineer who, after the job finished, had gone back to the girlfriend she'd finally told Shay existed. Shay hadn't really been upset. Her father and her career had absorbed all her time. Maybe that had been the wrong thing to do. Without her father, it had all just slipped through her fingers.

And for months now, she had been spending two hours each day with, in Shay's humble and lustful opinion, this womanly-soft and attractive person. Still, Anthea was not her type. She was a Yuppie for starters. And not in the least political. And not possibly a lesbian, something that really was key to a successful affair. She was only thinking this way because they spent so much time together — it was inevitable, yet inappropriate. Besides, Shay told herself sternly, she had other things to think about.

Like the two paychecks in her fanny pack. Shay sighed. Her libido catalyzed from a helium isotope to lead. They totaled just over twelve hundred. Somehow, when she'd taken this job, she'd thought the pizza parlor would be just temporary. Just a few more months. Well, it had been a few more months. She'd even worked Memorial Day. She tried to add up her finances and make the reality come out differently. Four hundred for rent, fifty for water and utilities. Eight hundred left. Two fifty for the car payment, one hundred for food — peanut butter and jelly was her staple — about one hundred for gas and insurance. That left three hundred.

And that was fifty bucks short of what her first-of-the-month pay had to contribute to the middle-of-the-month checks for the hospital and funeral bills. Her tip money would probably just cover the gap as usual, but that meant no movies or paperbacks, which is what her tip money usually went for. She went over the numbers again in her head. The bottom line remained unchanged. A couple of hours of overtime at the refinery would have made all the difference, but there had been a month-long moratorium on that. She chewed the inside of one cheek and tried not to resent Anthea. The Legend's hubcaps would probably cover a month's rent.