Shantel was a middle-aged black woman who for some reason developed a sort of matronly affection for me. She always told me that I was her favorite person to work with, but I don’t know why and the feeling wasn’t mutual. I didn’t dislike her, but she was a lot less fun than the employees who were closer to me in age and/or maturity (most of the middle-aged men who worked there were just overgrown teenagers). Frankly she kind of gave me the creeps.
There was a huge ice machine in the back room that occasionally spat out batches of frozen cubes into a giant vat. Once per shift, every employee was supposed to shovel the ice into plastic bags, tie them off, and wheel them up into the front to stack them in a display cooler. It was one of the most hated tasks in the store because it was boring, repetitive, and relatively hard physical labor. Usually you needed to hack at the ice with the metal scoop because it all got frozen together, then you had to spoon heavy scoops of the stuff into a bag whose opening was barely larger than the scoop itself. After a few bags, your fingers would be too stiff with cold to tie a good knot, so from time to time a big would spill and then you’d have to clean that up too.
Once Shantel was bagging ice when I heard a loud crash. I stuck my head back there to see what had happened. She was on her knees in front of the machine with one finger in her mouth wiping up blood from the floor with her other hand. “Are you alright?” I asked nervously.
“Yeah. Lid of that freezer slammed on my finger. It got a piece of my meat.” She proudly displayed the finger, which was indeed missing a chunk the size of a sunflower seed and streaming blood.
“Do you want me to call someone?”
“No, I’m fine.”
I had customers, so I couldn’t really argue with her. Eventually she emerged and again displayed the finger, telling me several times how she’d lost some of her “meat”. She’d secured a piece of napkin to the wound with a rubber band, but from time to time she had to replace it when the blood soaked through. I suggested several times that she go home, but she brushed me off, only to arrive at this conclusion herself about half an hour later.
What really made me uncomfortable, though, was when she asked me to cover for her with her abusive husband. She was getting ready to leave him, she told me, and was going to tell him she was working while she went out looking for a new apartment. If he happened to come by looking for her, I was to tell him that the manager had sent her to another location but that I didn’t know where. It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I was completely unprepared to handle the situation if the guy got angry, which it sounded as if he were prone to do.
Thankfully, it never came up. Given the worry that merely imagining such a situation caused me, I sincerely hope that she did successfully leave him. No one should have to live in constant fear of provoking violent anger from a loved one.