Read Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! for Free Online

husband suggested a move to a warmer climate, someplace where work was plentiful and living was cheap, some place where we could awaken our dreams with the heat of the sun and the healing power of gentle rains.
    We pulled up our roots and transplanted to a southern city. I didn’t know why we chose this city. I’d never lived in a city before, with its constant car noise and exhaust fumes. I spent my days studying computer code in an urban apartment. I imagined a career in technology, tried to touch and taste it. We lived on the top level of a five-floor building, and mixed in with the angles and concrete and asphalt outside were sky-high magnolia trees and a shiny green creeping veneer of kudzu.
    The apartments were once luxury accommodations, open and spacious, with an in-ground pool and exercise room, built in a garden setting close to the river. Now, thirty years later, the road slithered around more aging strip malls, car washes, mattress stores, and auto dealerships than the eye could see, a veritable tacky temple to capitalism. The apartments were home to lower middle class African American families and illegal aliens from Latin America. We were one of only two Caucasian tenants, and they stuck us in adjacent apartments in the back of the compound. The pool sat perpetually “closed for repairs.” The exercise room, graffiti initials sprayed on the door, stayed locked for fear of gang activity. Some families crammed up to twenty people in a one-bedroom unit, so poor that they kept the windows open instead of running the air conditioner, and tomatillos, onion and corn cooking smells and Tejano music invaded my senses, making it hard for me to sleep at night.
    My life seems so removed from that apartment, those days, yet it seems the same, full of unknowing and mystery and making ends meet, like it’s the same lesson, different teacher, and I wonder, think, grasp, try to figure out what in the world I am learning through Avon. I can’t find it yet. My Avon is like my dead marriage is like my patchwork careers is like my general unknowing, all going somewhere, who knows where, all vapor and dream specked with loud scary noises.
    Now I’m old and divorced and meeting mullet men for dates , I pondered. And selling stupid makeup for a living. I don’t even wear much of the stuff.
    The farmers’ market frames the city hall property of the next town north, metal stalls with cloth umbrellas and tables piled high with tomatoes, corn, tamales, crepes, and olives. The vendors move their wares from town to town in the county, set up in east location as the sun breaks behind the mountains, move to the western sands as the afternoon skies grow red and yellow beside the beach.
    I carried a rainbow tote bag to fill with produce and wore the heavy backpack with stamped Avon brochures and samples of Planet Spa mud mask and Goddess fragrance. The sky sat dark and moody all day, only smiled late in the afternoon when the day was too far gone to care. I walked through the mist and haze and fondled cantaloupe and dandelion greens, filling my bag with cherries and corn and the last of the season’s strawberries.
    I handed my brochures to anyone whose hand extended for fruit and vegetables, catching many by surprise. Most people were too polite to say “No Thanks,” and they shoved the brochure inside plastic bags filled with oranges or shrimp. I even snuck books into brown bags waiting on the ground while their owners opened purses and bagged their prey. A Tunisian man adding bananas and rum to a crusty French crepe caught my eye and he laughed and shook his head and cooked while I slipped a book into the open tote of his customer.
    I handed out ten brochures, then twenty, thirty, forty, forty-one. I was Stealth Avon Lady! Just nine remained, and I bought a Banana Rum crepe and sat on the grass near the fountain, watching a little boy with eyes like chocolate throw pennies into the water. It felt good to rest. What would I purchase