The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil #2) - Kristen Ashley Page 0,23
time and a half.
It’d only be an extra seven fifty to a thousand bucks in the next month, but that would mean Christmas for Brooks and I’d still be able to push out my cushion until April. I’d also be close to a raise at the store, since I heard they gave you one after a year if you had a good performance evaluation.
Still.
Even with a five percent raise, that’d only be maybe fifteen extra dollars a week.
But the store had good health insurance.
And being in Matlock meant I was close to Izzy and Brooks’s support network.
But the bottom line was, I just simply could not afford my current situation and give a decent life to my child working at that store, even after I got a raise.
There was no way around it.
I was fucked, any way you cut it.
Until Macy said that.
She’d handed me fifty dollars from the cards she’d sold, took the entire stock I offered her, asked for a load more Christmas cards by Monday and finally, she’d suggested Etsy.
How much did people make on Etsy?
I could make cards, sell them online, drop them off at the post office during lunch.
I’d probably have to sell a ton of cards.
And thus make a ton of cards.
But I’d made ten since Wednesday.
And I might be able to do other stuff, like place markers or something.
I needed to get on Etsy and suss this out.
“And Carol, who owns Gifts ’n’ Goodies in Bellevue, told me to tell you to swing around,” Macy continued. “She was in this week and said she loved your stuff. Said she’d be thrilled to put some by the register. People are beginning to think it’s hip to buy local. It’s becoming a big thing, thank God.”
It’d take more in gas to drive to and from Bellevue than a few cards by her register would earn.
“I have a full-time job and a baby, Macy,” I reminded her. “I’d need that to be worth my while to drive all the way out to Bellevue.”
“All the way out to Bellevue” was maybe, at most, twenty miles.
This was probably one of the reasons Macy got that look on her face a lot of people got when they looked at me after I hit Matlock radar and within weeks my son had been kidnapped.
A look that was even worse than the look I’d catch Mom getting all those times she took us out, clean and dressed and groomed, but it wasn’t like you had to be a buyer at Bergdorf’s to know our clothes and shoes were cheap and our haircuts happened in our kitchen.
Macy snatched up a piece of scrap and offered, “I’ll jot down her number. Give her a call. I told her how popular they are. Maybe she’ll make a large order.”
I wondered how popular my cards actually were at Macy’s.
Or if she told them that poor Adeline Forrester girl who worked at Matlock Mart and had her baby kidnapped right out of the daycare center had made them, and people bought them because they felt sorry for me.
Right.
So they did.
And I made a buck fifty off some card I spent forty-five minutes on and they took it home and threw it in the trash or gave it to that cousin they didn’t know very much or like very well.
That buck fifty paid for over a half a gallon of gas.
Whatever.
She handed me Carol’s number, I took it on a muttered, “Thanks,” then promised, “I’ll be in Monday with more cards.”
“Thanks, Addie,” she replied. “Now give your little boy a snuggle for me.”
“Will do, Macy.”
I left, posthaste, mostly because I was in a foul mood, only had a half hour for lunch, of which probably twenty minutes was gone, and I needed to down the half-priced nearly expired salad I bought from the produce section and get back to my register.
I headed down the sidewalk, hunched into my jacket that was over my highly unattractive burgundy smock, which had yellow stitching over the breast that said Matlock Mart, mentally inventorying the bits and pieces and paint and cardstock I had and wondering if it was enough to start an Etsy store as I hustled back to work.
I’d crossed the street to the next block and was nearly to the store when I jerked to a halt after I heard barked at my side, “I said yo.”