Quoted By:
“You know why I need this dress? Because father wanted me to be at his wedding, and more importantly, he wanted me to be there as guest, like family, not as a servant. But if I abandon one deception, I need to embrace another. So if I am to attend, then I need to accommodate the sensibilities of these sanctimonious rabble-rousers by pretending to be one of his distant cousins – and to that end, I need a ‘tent of a riding habit’.”
“That is all I do. Accommodate. That is my entire fraying life. And when I die, I am going to be stuffed in some unmarked grave to accommodate all of the snobs in the whole world, lest acknowledging my existence somehow impugn their honor. Why, I even accommodated you, for all the good that it did me. I waited until closing yesterday, and made sure that no other customers were in the store before I set foot in here before I made my order.”
“And when I had the impudence – the cheek! – to come back during the day to check on the progress of the dress, because I was not sure if I was going to be able to pick it up at closing today, I ended up accommodating that ass of a doorstop you have down there who told me that I have ‘more inches than sense’. I went around back, and then waited fifteen, no twenty minutes, all for the privilege of being dragged in here and interrogated like some shoplifter.”
“Now, the next word out of your mouth is going to be ‘sorry’. Then you are going to tell me when the Hell my rush ordered ‘tent’ is going to be done. And if the answer is ‘never’ or any time after the close of business today, then after the wedding, I’ll see to it that father accommodates you with a suit.”
After as flash of inspiration, you spin around and storm over to the dressmaker that brought you into the room, who cringes as you approach. You grab her right hand, the one that is holding the slip, with both of yours, and you slam it against the door, just like the Cleansers slammed you against the … whatever they called that water-wagon pump-thing. Shocked that you would lay hands on her, it is trivial to pluck the slips out of her hand as she blubbers. You round back on Cassandra, brandishing the slip as you stalk towards her. She is clearly scared right now, and you are surprised, and maybe even a little bit ashamed at how good it feels to see her shrink into that chair as you draw yourself up to your full height and then lean over her desk.
“I am no fool. This slip is not just a courtesy provided to your customers. It is a receipt of commission. A contract. One that you cannot break without cause. And unfortunately, discovering that the commissioner is a bastard is not sufficient cause. Nor is a set of rapped knuckles, not when they belong to an employee of one of the parties who took it under patently false pretenses!”
