Take 2

This was almost what I was going to hand in for my next writing assignment - a rewrite of assignment 3, with dialogue. When I reread,or carefully read (damn ADD) assignment 4 I realized that this wasn't what the teacher had asked for but I thought it was good practice for me who is dialogue challanged. I prefer the first draft after all though.Please bear with me or just skip this. Thank goodness tomorrow is Joke Friday.


The Cleaning Lady

Did she hear me asking my son to help me look for ‘Product 409’? It was as if she welcomed the opportunity to extol on its pros and cons. “No I don’t think that’s the best thing to use on wood furniture, who told you that?” she said.
{Well actually, another stranger I met walking the aisles of Home Depot}, I thought to myself but replied instead, “Oh, one of my friends is a cleaning lady, you guys are truly amazing-how do you know all this stuff?”
We traversed that aisle, darting from one product to another, while she rattled off the virtues of all of them. Then she told me that she was on husband number two and also that she worked as an EKG technician. “Do you work at Emerson Hospital? Is that why you look so familiar?” she asked as I caught her glancing at my scrubs.
“No I work at North shore Health,” I shot back offhandedly not wanting to talk about work as I quickly steered the conversation back to cleaning products. “What about dusting, I never know what to use… Pledge, Endust??” I queried her as I found myself staring at the vertical lines around her mouth, imagining her puffing on a butt while slugging down a beer on a Friday night or Sunday afternoon at the local pub, maybe even with a chaser of blackberry brandy. All of it aimed at numbing the brain, clouding the judgment, making it possible for her to go home with yet another stranger from the bar.
By the end of our discussion on cleaning and the medical field, we were on agreement on one thing anyway- we had both made a lot of people, other than ourselves, a lot of money.
“Good luck” she called, as she headed down the next aisle of cleaning products.