***
Violette moves toward the light before answering Esther. She doesn’t know where they are, only that they are in the part of the city that has been long forgotten by industry. The neighborhood where they skulk the darkness had at one time boomed with textile manufacturing, now it is mostly filled with abandoned buildings that horse dust, rust, and rats.
In here. Violette says leading Esther toward a doorway that leads to a hallway. The floor lets out loud groans as they move over it and in the hallway, they see doorways to abandoned offices that are dark inside. At the end of the hallway, they see the source of the light leading down a dimly lit corridor.
We go down to the first floor and find a door out. Violette says.
But what about those guys? Esther asks.
They’re probably still stuck in that alley. Let’s get outta here quick so we can make sure we lose them.
Esther is nervous again but moves as fast as Violette for fear of losing her. On the steps down to the first floor, Esther shrieks loudly when Violette’s leg suddenly falls through one of the wooden steps. Esther grabs her and helps her up and they gingerly make the rest of the way down. At the foot kid the stairs, Esther tries to inspects Violette’s leg. There was blood soaking the pant leg.
We don’t have time for this. Violette says as she hobbles toward the door outside.
Sit down! Esther screams. Let me look at it!
Violette smiles and relents. Esther gingerly rolls up the pant leg to see that there is a long gash down Violette’s shin. Esther rips Violette shirt to clean and tie the wound to stop the bleeding.
Violette likes that Esther cares so much about her, but she hates that Esther is obviously worried.
This will be worth it, I promise. We’re gonna be Ms. Doris rich soon enough.
Esther doesn’t take her eyes from Violette’s leg. Yeah, I bet.
3.
Doris had owned her business for many years and though she had been doing her job at the print shop for almost half a century, she loved it because it was her business and she had built it with her own two hands and her own hard work. The nature of the work provided a creative outlet for her illustration skills that she had maintained decades after completing her academic career as an artist when she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine art. She had always loved comics in the Sunday newspaper and she would draw the strips when she was young and bored. The shop made the bulk of its profits making signs, T-shirts and uniforms for local businesses and schools, and occasionally, though definitely not often enough considering Doris’s talent, patrons of her store just off main street in Rock Hill would find one of her illustrations printed on a shirt or framed on the wall and fall in love with it.
Doris fought hard for her business that she opened when she was twenty two. It was difficult for her to raise the money she needed for the lease on the shop, but she was determined after high school because she managed to make extra money when she was still in school making signs for the restaurant she worked for. She realized that there was a hole in the market for printing services and she inquired at every school and business she could drive to on the weekend to offer custom, professionally designed signs and t-shirts. She was often met with rejection, there were plenty of businesses that didn’t need what she offered, but she relished the interactions with local business owners, the ones who were nice enough to talk and offer advice. Doris persevered and gathered the clientele that allowed her to open her shop and she would eventually have the opportunity to study art in her free time.
Doris didn’t trust banks; she only had a personal account and one for her business because it made things like paying bills much easier. But she could not stomach the reality of most of her personal wealth tied up in banks and she would squirrel away huge rolls of cash in a basement safe.
When Doris died, none of her relatives were aware of that basement safe. She’d thought about which of her relatives to tell her secret for many years but she would never get to chance because she died suddenly one afternoon when she walked into traffic while distracted.
Doris had four children and they all gathered at her house after her death to hear the reading of her will. The safe had been excluded from the will and it wasn’t until they were cleaning the woman’s house that they discovered the basement safe.
“What should we do with this?” Doris’s oldest son Gus asked his sister Dorette when they found it.
“I don’t know. Mama did leave a combination of anything for it.”
They brought the safe to the attention of their siblings, and maybe it was because they were all well provided for in their mothers will or maybe they were all in a rush to attend to lather matters, but no decision was ever made about the safe and it was eventually hauled away into storage with all the other furniture from Doris’s house that her children intended to sell right away.
***
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