Laura Caldwell - A Clean Slate (Red Dress Ink)

H ave you ever had a moment when youve knownI mean, logically known in your headthat youre a fantastically lucky person, that youre truly fortunate to have an education, to live in a nice place in a great city, to have friends who care about you and all that, but you just cant get yourself to actually feel it?

Well, I was having one of those moments on the day it all started. I stood in the dry cleaners, where the temperature was about a hundred eighty degrees from the pressing and steaming machines.

Sorry, sorry. No clothes for you, the tiny Asian woman said as she came back to the cracked linoleum counter for the third time.

I clicked my nails on the counter and expelled a massive breath of hot air, trying to maintain rational thought. Can you please look one more time? I brought in a whole bag of clothes last week. I tried not to think of my favorite black pantsmy skinny pantswhich had been in that bag.

You have ticket? The lady waved a pile of pink slips.

No, I told her. I never saved those pesky things. Never had to before.

She shrugged. I look again. Wiping sweat from her eyebrows, she turned away. As she disappeared into a sea of hanging, plastic-covered clothes, I tried to guess her size. Was it possible that she had stolen my black pants and was wearing them on the weekends?

I felt one of my temper tantrums coming on, but I forced it down. I am lucky to be alive, I told myself as I leaned on the counter, fanning my face. I am lucky because I am now losing weight at an average of a pound a minute. I am lucky because I have a great town house and a nice boyfriend who is soon to be my fianc, and a decent job and lovely friends. Ive really got the world by the tail.

The problem was thisI wasnt buying a word of it. My nice boyfriend soon-to-be-fianc, Ben, was at my great town house, true, but he wouldnt be so nice when he learned that his favorite French-blue shirt had been destroyed by the dry cleaners from hell. And the decent job I hadas a research analyst at an investment bank called Bartley Brotherswas starting to look like a ticket straight to nowhere-ville. Id been toiling for years, digging up information on retail stocks so that my boss could pass on my recommendations and then take all the credit when we made money, or blame me when we lost it. After almost eight years of promises that I would soon be considered for partnership, it still hadnt happened. Finally, my best friend, Laney, my sanity advisor, was off at some marketing conference (read: company boondoggle) in Palm Beach.

Sorry, the dry cleaner said, emerging from the plastic sea, looking even more red-faced and sweaty. We have nothing for you. She gave another helpless shrug.

Can you please keep looking, and Ill stop back later in the day?

Okay, okay.

I stomped out of the sweltering store, a crisp Chicago breeze hitting me blessedly in the face. As an El train clamored to a halt on the tracks over my head, I trudged up Armitage Avenue, muttering obscenities about my missing clothes and the incompetence of the dry cleaners. The street was full of couples doing Saturday morning errands hand-in-hand, along with the post-college baseball-hat crowd searching for hangover grub.

I took a couple of deep breaths, but they brought no relief from my cranky mood. Ben rarely, if ever, held my hand and did errands with me on the weekends. Saturday mornings were his time to run with his marathon group or train for one of the other races he was constantly entering. It didnt bother menot really. Because Ben worshipped at the Church of Holy Workouts he had an amazing body, something that benefited me as well as him. Yes, sex was fine. More than fine, actually. But if I were forced to lodge one complaint about Ben, it would be thiswe no longer had any of those couple-y, sappy-eyed rendezvous, such as candlelit dinners or surprise weekends at a log cabin. Romantic interludes just werent his thing these days, or at least thats what he told me, what I told myself to make myself feel better when I saw other couples having picnics in Lincoln Park and horse-drawn carriage rides down Michigan Avenue.

Ben was sweet and funny and wonderful in his own way, though. He would cheer me up by singing show tunes in a falsetto voice, and when it was time to carbo-load for his next race, hed cook huge pasta dinners for the two of us. And last January when my sister, Dee, died, Ben was amazingan absolute rock. I couldnt have gotten through it without him.

At Bissell Street, I took a left and walked along the sidewalk, crunching over a golden bed of fallen leaves, moving past the rusty autumn trees and stone three-flats until I hit the stretch of brick town houses, one of which was mine (something I was inordinately proud of). Id saved all my paychecks from Bartley Brothers, and this place was the first home Id ever owned, the place Dee used to love to stay when she came to visit, the place where Ben and I would live when we were married. The sun was peeking through the red curtain of trees, making an X-like pattern on the town homes. Normally, I would have loved to take photos of thatI liked the way the rays made crosshairs on the brickbut I was too annoyed by the dry cleaning debacle to think about getting my Nikon.

Before I went inside, I stopped at the bank of oblong silver mailboxes in the little courtyard located right behind the town houses. I stuck the key in the third one, my box, and tried to turn it to the right as I always did, but it wouldnt budge.

I screwed my face up tight and tried again. Maybe the eager-bunny mailman had stuffed a stack of magazines in there, jamming the lock. I tried over and over, but the key wouldnt turn.

I took it out and jiggled it in my hand, as if that would help. I was looking back at the box, lifting the key to try again, when I noticed what was wrong. The tiny black plate with white letters affixed to the box, the plate that should have said my name, KELLY M C GRAW, instead read BETH & BOB MANINSKY.

What the hell? I moved down the row of boxes, peering closely, reading each one: LILY CHANG, SIMON TURNER, MILLER/SAMSON, and on and on, but no KELLY M C GRAW.