RoboNomics

Chapter 45

The next morning, the hot summer world swims in front of my eyes as I feel my stomach gnaw at itself. Austin and I get up as early as we can, leave the motel and walk straight to Chinatown. We need to buy some cheap food if we are going to spend another full day apartment hunting. We enter one of the few grocery stores left open. We head to the bins of produce in the corner.

“Austin?” A wiry blonde in a baggy button down and scrappy jeans calls from the bread aisle. She walks towards us.

“How are you, Christine?” Austin extends his hand to her but she hugs him instead. I look sideways at him and raise an eyebrow.

“Oh god. Terrible. You wouldn’t believe it.” A smile widens on Christine’s face. “I mean, I can’t believe I’m shopping here.” She turns to me and brightens even more. “Oh my god, you must be Andrea! I’ve heard so much about you.” She takes my hand.

“Oh, really?”

“Andrea, this is Christine. She’s one...I mean, she used to be one of the nurses at the neurosurgery clinic,” Austin explains to me. “But you lost your job long before I did,” he says to her. “How have you been?”

“I guess I did better than a lot of girls from the hospital. I mean, Angie got kicked out of her apartment and had to move back with her parents. And Fang got really sick. I mean, super sick. She’s in the hospital now. As a patient, I mean. I think she’s in a coma or something?”

“You’re kidding.” Austin’s voice matches the girl’s tone. “So what, did you get a job or something?”

“Kind of. I’ve done a lot of different jobs. You know, whatever I can get. Mostly casual. But money’s money, right?” She asks rhetorically. “Okay, well. I’m late. It was great seeing you.” She wraps Austin in a one-armed hug. She turns from us and begins to walk away. “Nice meeting you, Andrea,” she tosses over her shoulder.

“Yeah, great,” I say softly to myself. It’s been like this with Austin for a long time, ever since I was still a teacher. There were so many parts of his professional life that I never had access to. So many lesser colleagues who went unnamed. I was never deemed at important enough to know those details. Even when we were dating and he first introduced me to his colleagues, I always felt as though the doctoring crowd found me an inferior creature because of my chosen profession. But then neurosurgeons found even other doctors inferior. They were brain surgeons and occupied a strata above all other humans. And they made sure I knew it at every dinner party and hospital gala I attended. But now that we’ve both lost our jobs, now that we’ve both been brought so low -- I wonder if he feels the same way about brain surgeons when contrasted with elementary school teachers.

Austin turns back to the barrels of fruit. I look him full in the face. “Who was that?”

“I told you.” His frown grows. “Just one of the nurses.”

I lean in close to him and whisper, “do you think she’s an escort?”

“What?” Austin straightens and picks up a mottled apple. “No.”

“Oh, come on. She does casual work? What other work do you know that anyone in this city can get? Either she’s trying her hand at politics or being an executive or she’s playing with them.”

“Come on, Andrea. Be real.” He puts down the piece of fruit and heads for the exit.

“What do you care?”

“She’s just a nice girl. Why do you have to be so brutal about everything?”

“Okay, well I was just saying. She’s just some girl that you apparently knew but never mentioned to me. Whatever. It’s not like she’ll be able to keep down any work the ways things are going, even if she is a working girl.”

He glares at me over his shoulder and storms out of the store.