It all started when I told Alejandra that I was going to check the mail.
I didn’t have the key to the mailbox anymore, having surrendered mine to Philip the night before I went on vacation last fall because he lived on the west side and drove past the post office on his way to work. Philip was out of the branch today, though, downtown at a banker meeting that would have been just as effective and far less time-consuming if the material had been shared over email. Alejandra had the other key, though I was fairly certain she had never actually gotten around to using it. One of these days, I would send her to get the mail, but not today, because she had a client coming in to apply for a boat loan in twenty minutes. If it was approved, it would be our fourth one this quarter, a fact I was greatly looking forward to lording over John-John Milanovic, the manager at the East 43rd Street branch. We had a bet going on whose team could book the most boat loans in Q2, and the loser had to buy the beer for the Deschutes River trip we took with our families every Fourth of July. I was winning, and it was with the delightful image of myself lounging in a raft on a hot, high desert afternoon, drinking the expensive small-batch IPAs John-John was so fond of, that I went to Alejandra and asked to borrow her key for the mailbox. She looked up from the spreadsheet she was using to calculate different payments, interest rates, and term lengths for the boat loan to respond to my inquiry with “Oh yeah, sure.” After glancing over her keys, she handed me a small brass one that probably had our PO box number etched into it years ago, but had been worn smooth with the passage of time. I took the key and bade her farewell, with the assurance that I would be back before her client arrived in case she had any questions.
On my way out, I held the door open for Mrs. Abernathy, an elderly woman who could always be counted upon to come into the branch the third Wednesday of every month to make sure her direct deposit for social security had gone through. She was not known for being especially pleasant, and responded to my greeting of “Good afternoon, Mrs. Abernathy” with a glare and a little jump. “Are you new here?” Mrs. Abernathy grumbled. “Why are people always leaving? This must be a bad place to work!” I had been there for two years and helped her several times, but, in her defense, I’d gotten a haircut six months ago. It wasn’t worth reminding her of this, so I wished her a good day with a smile and a wave, and left to carry on with mine. As I turned away from the receding figure of Mrs. Abernathy, my eyes fell upon another longtime resident of the bank that everyone tolerated out of habit: Puppy.
Now, Puppy was not a puppy at all, but a two-foot-long concrete turtle that had been gifted to the former manager by one of our clients who had a side business casting cement sculptures of animals for people to put in their gardens. He made his home in our parking lot island, between the flagpole and the Russian sage, and received the wildly inaccurate moniker from the head teller’s then two-year-old son shortly after the bequeathing. At the time, her son had been going through a phase where every animal he saw was either a puppy or a “gahraffe.” Since the turtle was clearly not a gahraffe, he became Puppy, and the name stuck, much to the amusement of the staff and continued embarrassment of the head teller’s son, who was fifteen now and an all-state wrestler. Puppy he was called, and Puppy he remained. This becomes important later, but for now, just let it be known that I never liked Puppy. I can’t really say why. It’s not like he was objectively ugly, or poorly made. He looked just like one of those giant turtles that are always at petting zoos, but if it looked at Medusa and was turned into stone. I used to wonder why my predecessor didn’t take him when she retired, if not for nostalgia’s sake then out of a sense of obligation, until the day I tried to move him myself without prior knowledge of the fact that concrete weighs about a hundred and fifty pounds per cubic foot. Puppy was here to stay, and so, much like Mrs. Abernathy, I found myself resigned to his existence. Just as well, I supposed. We were able to ignore him for the most part, and there were probably all manner of of worms, centipedes, and other denizens of the underworld beneath Puppy’s feet that were better left undisturbed. Again, much like Mrs. Abernathy.
I am afraid that my trip to the post office was rather anticlimactic. Whatever Alejandra’s key was meant to open, it was not the mailbox. Fortunately, the trip was not a total loss, because it gave me the chance to put up a flyer on the community bulletin board advertising the great rates we offered on boat loans. I drove back to the bank with a smile on my face, thinking of all the people who’d probably been hoping to buy a boat for a while now and just needed something like my poster to convince them to take the next step. As I crossed the apparently deserted parking lot to go back inside, fishing inside my purse for the keys, I remembered something: I might not have the mail key, but I did have the key for the flagpole’s lock box. Time was starting to take its toll on the faithful pennant proudly flapping in the breeze, and corporate had sent us a new one just a few days ago. I knew several customers who were involved with the Boy Scouts, and they could give the old flag a proper send-off. Since I was already outside, since I knew I had the key, and since one scoutmaster in particular was in the market for a boat, I reasoned that now was as good a time as any to take it down. Maybe we would close five loans before quarter’s end. I could practically taste victory, and it tasted like bullion hops.
By the time I traversed the short path to the flagpole, my dominant thought had shifted to wondering how I managed to keep losing my keys in my rather small purse. There they were, though, and there was the flag key, next to Alejandra’s mystery key. I stuck the key in the lock, turned, and immediately forgot about keys, purses, flags, mailboxes, boat loans, rafting trips, Mrs. Abernathy, and anything else of consequence great or small when my eyes fell upon the horror inside. For there, in the secluded shelter of the flagpole lock box, a spider had seen fit to lay her eggs and hatch her millions of eight-legged young, about half of which were now flying toward my face in the swift updraft created by opening the door. The scream that issued forth had to have come from me, but it felt oddly disembodied amidst my flailing arms and violently shaking head. My purse fell to the ground, followed shortly by my jacket, which would have to be burned after this because the arachnid horde had surely made it into the lining. I continued to howl and stumble backwards, hands swatting at face, hair, arms - anything they could reach - and then, I felt the back of my heel collide with something solid, immovable, and roughly the same height off the ground as a big turtle. Down I went, kicking and screaming, into the wood shavings and Russian sage. Falling into the bushes may have saved me from a cracked skull, but at that point I almost would have preferred that fate over thrashing amongst the shrubbery in hysterics. To this day, I still don’t know how I recovered my wits enough to pull myself out of the bushes, but I do remember the fury I felt and who was on its receiving end: Puppy. In that moment, I decided that I hated Puppy and everything about him, from the carefully-etched scales on his back to the tip of his tiny concrete tail. That stupid turtle was an accessory to attempted murder, to say nothing of my shredded dignity, and had long overstayed his welcome. He had to go.
I stomped into the branch, clothes torn and dirty, twigs sticking out of my hair, a spider swinging from one elbow, and murder in my eyes. “I am going to kill Puppy!” I announced. “I’m going to take him out in John-John’s boat, drive to the middle of the lake, shove him overboard, and watch him sink to the bottom! And I will laugh the whole time!”
The branch went completely quiet as every face in the lobby turned toward me. The head teller. The part-time teller. The customers each of them were helping. The three other people in the queue. Alejandra. Her boat loan appointment. And, for some inexplicable reason, the investment advisor and his manager, who I’m pretty sure weren’t supposed to be there until tomorrow.
Alejandra broke the silence with a small cough. “I thought,” she said in a tone of polite curiosity, “that you had gone to check the mail?”
