J. finally called me a back a couple of days after her little incident.

She was suprisingly eager to talk about what had transpired at Wal-Mart. Her version of the events went a little something like this...

According to her, some guy in the parking lot came up behind her and said that he had a list of things for her to steal. He handed her the list and told her not to turn around. When she came back out, he explained, he'd get the stuff from her. If she didn't comply, of course, he'd be waiting for her by her car and he'd kill her. Since he came up from behind she never saw his face.

Look, you have to give the gal a couple of points for creativity. The story falls apart pretty quickly, though. I mean, the cops asked her why she didn't just find a security guard. Her answer? What was she going to tell them? She didn't see his face, remember. Where the scenario really becomes laughable is when you look at what she was stealing:

*makeup
*hair squunchies
*a mini skirt
*candles
*lotion
*a Matchbox 20 CD

That certainly would seem to be a pretty odd list unless you were, well, an eighteen year-old girl. I never was very clear on how she was trying to hide things. All she said was that they "had her on camera."

I should add that the day after she was caught was her 19th birthday. When I moved to Connecticut I found a box of stuff that I had bought her for her birthday. Anybody want a VHS copy of Grease?

When J. was fired I really wanted to believe her that she was innocent of the misdeed. Really. I knew, though, that she probably wasn't. This time she really wanted me to believe. I, of course, couldn't believe it for even an instant. It made me think about her little side venture buying clothes for her co-workers. She always seemed to get them at Sears. Sears doesn't really seem like a place for an eighteen year-old to buy clothes, does it? I have to imagine that they just had the most lax security. I doubt that even crossed the mind of her customers when this news broke. Hell, for all I know they could have been in on it from the beginning.

I pretty much stopped seeing J. after this incident. Well, not entirely. I'm not proud to say that some parts of our relationship seemed to withstand her sticky fingers. She wasn't able to visit me anymore. She really wanted to come see me but her parents had now taken away her car because she hadn't paid them for her deductible from the accident. Yeah. She now had no way to find a job and no transportation until she found one. Really bright, these people. Their solution was to have J. work for her mother who was a sales agent in a crappy neighborhood. So her mom would shuttle her to the sales office while her she basically drove all over town. It wasn't a nice neighborhood and unsavory characters would always drop in when they saw an attractive girl working there. Not a good situation. Of course, I was often one of the unsavory characters...

One day J. stayed home while her mother went to work because she "wasn't feeling well." I, too, called in sick. In all of this time I had never been to J.'s house. I never understood why. Soon I did and the end truly began in earnest.