Read Online Decorate My Palm Tree by M. Garnet - Free Book Online Page A

she stopped crying. She gave up on several things—Christmas, church, men, any type of holiday, and smiling. The last was the easiest of all.
    The transfer from the large corporate insurance office to the little branch office in Sarasota, Florida made life easier for her. All the bad economics happening everywhere meant the corporate office had problems. They had to cut back so they had to layoff people, have some people take early retirements, and move people to branch offices. Most people grumbled, complained, and looked for help wherever they could find it. For Gigi, the escape from memories was what she was looking for. She didn’t care where they had wanted to send her: Alaska, North Dakota, New Mexico, it just didn’t matter. She sold the house, being told she lost money due to the market and paid cash for the first thing the salesman showed her in the outskirts of Sarasota.
    She only wanted a roof and a garage, but she made a mistake. She found out within the first month that she should have moved into a condo. But she had never lived in an apartment, had even attended college from home. She had just not thought about living with people under her or over her, so, without hesitation, she took the small older home in the past-it’s-prime neighborhood.
    The company allowed her one week before she had to report to work. One of the reasons she wasn’t laid off was that she was an organizer. She used the week to outfit her small little home and moved in. She bought just enough furniture from the local box stores that delivered and set up so that she had a couch and lamps, dinette set, new kitchen appliances and only the one bedroom. She didn’t expect to have company. The first flyer in her mailbox that was from a lawn service was the right one that got hired.
    When the small shipment of her things arrived, she unpacked towels, dishes and blankets, and light clothes, and put the rest of the boxes in the small garage. The garage was dry even if it was full of little chameleons and spider webs. She heard that the little chameleons ate bugs, so she let them wander over her boxes. It didn’t snow in Sarasota so she didn’t need to park her car in the garage as she did in Michigan. Besides, the door was a bitch to raise as it didn’t have an automatic opener attached to it. Someday, she would have one put in, maybe. She wasn’t sure she wanted to make a home here or anywhere.
    Gigi chose a light plain dress with a jacket, not sure what was appropriate for office wear in Florida when she went to work on her first day. She put on her standard mid-heel pumps with light-colored panty hose and tied her hair up in a tight knot at the back of her head, using a clip. She no longer wore makeup except for some pale lipstick to keep her lips from chapping. She just didn’t care how she looked as long as it was presentable for the office. This was similar to what she wore every day afterwards except she decided that she could forget the panty hose in this tropic zone.
    The office was one of several offices attached to a bank on the corner of a pleasant center. The layout didn’t take her much time to get used to as she drove past to find an entrance to the parking area that separated the clean-looking business buildings in front from the long strip of small shops, restaurants, and bars that were in back of the large clean parking area. The landscaping was neat and tropical so this area had a slightly foreign feeling for Gigi, but she did like it. No, it wasn’t Michigan, but she was beginning to understand why so many came down here to visit.
    It took her only a short period of working in the small office to get the lay of the land. First, all the work was identical to what she did in the corporate office. The computers were the same since ninety percent of the customer’s work process was done online. Her job was to process the processor’s work. Well that was a mouthful, which meant she checked the work of the people who