Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Forgotten Kindness

I should have known last night
when she called me at nine o’clock
and told me that she wanted to come see the house this morning
that she was a flake.
Instead I got up at eight and spent the next two and a half hours
vacuuming, mopping, scrubbing,
washing, polishing,
and Windexing everything.
I even drove to the grocery store and bought a four dollar bunch of white daisies
for the kitchen table.
Then she had the nerve to call my machine
at ten twenty and tell me that her buyers had decided on another house
and that they weren’t coming for their ten forty-five appointment.
I couldn’t believe it.
I had been stood up.
I felt rejected.
Horribly rejected.
They hadn’t even bothered to come see my house
after I worked on it for over two hours.
I wanted to call her back
and tell her off.
I wanted to tell her the least she could do
would be to come and see the house
even if they didn’t want to buy it.
I wanted to call her bosses
and tell them she was a phony bitch.
But instead I stood there and looked at my perfectly clean house
and tried to justify how I had spent my morning.
“the tub needed scrubbing anyway.” I whispered, like a forlorn child.
But tonight I am still hurt.
What kind of person does that?
Calls someone up,
puts them out,
and then doesn’t come twenty minutes before they are due?
I am not so cynical as to believe
that business is business.
There still must be kindness and manners in this world
even if we have all forgotten.