Chapter 3

"Tas..." called Luciana, waking me up from the trance about the two handsome customers. "Laura is calling you."

Laura. Our terrible cashier and inspector of the night shift. She was a bitter woman who always had a closed face, whose face always seemed frown in an expression of disgust. I was impressed that she was married to a policeman well known in the city for her good humor and kindness, virtues that her cruel wife had no idea what it would be like. It was common knowledge that they had been married for more than twenty years, and that they never had a child. No one knew yet if Laura couldn't, or didn't want to, but in the opinion of others" and I include myself in this ", it should be a deliverance not to have a mother of that kind.

Laura always said that she considered her team of cashiers as her children, and the experience was too traumatic to think of a child being subjected to that. Nobody knew very well why she was like that. The few bags that could rise in the woman's esteem were also as angry and unnecessary as she herself, and almost never mentioned Laura's name so that she would not listen and think it was some offense. There was a private employee that no one could stand. Her name was Elisa. She had at least forty years on her back, married to one of the butcher's employees, and lived in the corners gossiping with Laura about the younger girls in the supermarket. She always seemed very offended to see that some of them had cut her hair or done her nails, and did everything to make Laura find a reason to scold the girls.

Every year, in commemorative times, she said goodbye to each of these girls she kept talking bad about, apologizing for anything and wishing them to have good parties. Thanks to the speed with which the gossip ran around the supermarket, these same girls always knew about Elisa's falsehood and returned the congratulations, closing their faces as soon as she walked away. At the moment when I was heading to the supermarket reception, which was nothing more than a counter in front of the volume store and facing the basic appliances sector of the establishment, it was Elisa who was stretching at the counter to gossip with Laura.

She was looking around, in order to make sure no one was listening, but she didn't notice that I was coming, and was scared when I simply materialized next to her. "Ah, Tasha! "She screamed with exasperation. "What a fright, girl. Oh, I got out of the way, go. I need to take care of my plants."

Elisa has always been a cashier, but having direct and personal contact with Laura gave her some privileges, and one of them was simply not to stay at the cashier. She spent her seven hours of work taking care of the flowers sold in the hortifruti, because everyone said that there was no one more careful and responsible than her to have that function. What, in fact, everyone agreed was that she was always unbearable and having her as a co-worker was something that everyone avoided. So, as clear as her privileged life was inside the supermarket, no one dared to complain. Not least because no one wanted Elisa to be sniffling in her cangot every day. And life as a cashier was already complicated and reason for therapy, no one needed to pay for more anxiety medicines for having Elisa talking all day in our heads. She happily passed through the boxes with her water sprayer, testing the patience of each colleague on her way, and headed to the pallet that stood with small pots of flashy flowers.

"Did you call me, Laura? "I asked obediently. When I approached the reception desk, the three employees who stood there inside "the cashier, the receptionist, and the inspector's assistant" stopped laughing at some internal joke that was certainly said by Elisa before she left, in what I suspected it was from some cashier. I wouldn't be surprised if they were talking about me, because despite no longer being a newcomer to the job, some people closed in small groups and always belittled those who didn't fit. I never fit in, never wanted to be the standard of friendship for them, and I refused every time I could avoid going out to fraternize with those people.

At that moment when they noticed that I was very close, the conversation abruptly changed the subject, and Laura looked at me from head to toe, looking disgusted. It was not a reaction that took long, however, I knew that she had seen from my nails with peeling nail polish, to the strands of hair that loosened on the back of my neck.

"I called," she said in a tone of false sympathy. "The manager wants to talk to you."

I swallowed it dry. I was hardly called in the manager's room, in fact, I was never called if it wasn't for a group meeting. Alone, that was the first time, and I couldn't help but feel tense as Laura guided me to the small muffled room, which was next to the delivery room, where I sat in a chair in front of the corpulent man's table.

The manager was talking on his cell phone when we arrived, and hung up quickly, rushing to store the device in the pocket of his dress shirt. He had gray hair and light eyes that only made them judge, and at that moment it took a long time to just look at me and tell Laura to close the door. I began to feel a wave of alert spreading through my body, in which the strange sensation remained in my stomach, as if I had eaten some damage.

The manager lasted with that look on me, analyzing me, wanting to know who I was only with that indiscreet inspection. Laura sat in the chair next to me, and just like the manager, she went down and raised her gaze towards me, in a silence full of uncited accusations. So I understood that I was there to be cornered. I didn't know the reason yet.

"I'm going to talk bluntly, Tasha," said the manager, taking off his glasses to clean them on the gray dress shirt. He leaned back on the swivel chair, and the backrest popped against his weight. "You are one of the best employees we have here. Since its integration we already knew that we would have no problems. And we will always value people like that, who want to grow up. But you may also already know what happened on Sunday of this week, during office hours."

I anuí with my head, without daring to show that I was afraid. "They found fake notes among the cash withdrawals," I murmured. Arnaldo, the manager, agreed. He glanced at Laura's direction, and I also looked at her, noticing a conversation that the two were having only with gestures.

The manager cleared his throat, and my attention returned to him, who had already finished cleaning his glasses and now watched me with the enlarged vision.

"Yes, we found false notes at a very high value, and you know that we cannot let this case reach the board and that we have to solve it internally."

"How?"

"Someone has to pay for that money. And it won't be me, because I wasn't at the cashier. It won't be Laura, because she wasn't at the cashier. Do you know who it was?"

"I" replied dry.

"You," he repeated, crossing his hands on his lap. "It's a complicated situation, Tasha. Your cashier was the last to be closed... You see, if it had happened yesterday, on your day off, we would have no reason to blame you, but we didn't have any similar events last night, and coincidentally, it was the night you weren't there. Besides, you don't have that much experience... It's easy to get confused in that anxiety to leave, you know?"

I understand that you are a great son of a bitch, I wanted to scream, but I simply agreed with my head, knowing that the whole theater had been armed since I arrived for work that afternoon. They needed an idiot to take the blame for their own mistakes, and I was the one chosen one. Because I was always the idiot chosen in the stick game to get screwed. My whole life was like this, and there it wouldn't have to be different.

"You may be two years old working with us," Laura began, forcing a friendly voice, but the disgust in her face could not be hidden. She was even avoiding looking me in the eyes, because lying looking into the eyes was not something anyone knew how to do. It had to be too cold to be able to manipulate someone without breaking eye contact. There was only one person in that room who could do that, and it wasn't Laura or Arnaldo. "But it's easy to end up making mistakes. I also always do something wrong and I have to bear the consequences."