Mark regretted his lunch almost immediately after he ate it. The meal had been forgettable: a dull-tasting barbecue sandwich on a soggy bun; limp, under-salted fries; Coke that didn’t taste like Coke. And the place was dirty. The tile needed a good scrub twenty years ago. But Mark was hungry and in a hurry, so he ate anyway. It was Saturday and he was on break from the dealership. He didn’t have time to go somewhere else.
When he buckled his seatbelt in the new Altima, a pain knifed through his stomach and his gut groaned.
“Aw, shit.” He clutched his abdomen, bent over his steering wheel. Trying not to crap his pants, he wove through traffic back to work.
DeShaun, Mark’s manager, wouldn’t be any kind of understanding if he was late, and would be a total asshole about it if he tried to leave for the day. They were behind on their quota for the week, and Saturday was the day they had to make it up. No room to be sick, to have an emergency, to need a little time off.
“You work or you take a hike,” DeShaun was fond of saying. He’d say it with this little titter that set Mark’s teeth on edge, as though he was joking when everyone knew he wasn’t.