Five-hundred hand-made invitations, Part II…

After the initial twenty invites, I did twenty more… and then I swore my hand was going to fall off. I drove to a Kinko’s (don’t you love how they’re twenty-four hours?!) and showed them the invites… and the precise way Chloe wanted the calligraphy done. And then they the nice man behind the counter said the magic words: “We can do these.” I couldn’t remember the last time I was this happy… until he added, “By Saturday.” Um… that was the end of the week. Not overnight like Chloe wanted. Fuck. I asked him if I could get a stamp made, instead. I spent the next hour saying, “Not quite,” and “Close, but…” – none seemed quite calligraphy enough. Several fonts later, I landed on one that looked pretty damn good. Manny, the Kinko’s guy, was understaffed, so he said he could get it done by 4 a.m. I decided to go home and sleep ‘til five (I know, splurging!)…

I woke up at 6 (oops) and raced to Kinko’s to get the stamper. It was perfect… or nearly perfect… Until, in my quite sleepy state, I started stamping crookedly and accidentally smudging the ink as my hand would rest on said invite… Believe it or not, stamping is exhausting… it’s an art in and of itself.

By 9 a.m., I was not nearly done and Chloe started calling and texting up a storm. At first, I didn’t answer… you know the old trick – ignore it and it’ll go away. But, in this case, Chloe does not go away. I finally answer… she asks me to come right over. I say I was just finishing the last few (209, cough, cough) invites. She says I can finish them at the house, she needs me to watch Spring and Summer for the morning… as she has an audition. (Finally! I think… but don’t say this aloud, of course.) I say no problem and head over… 

I arrive and Chloe races out of the house in next to nothing… what kind of audition is this? But I don’t ask; I figure she’ll tell me later, whether I want to know or not. As she’s getting into one of the Lexuses (Lexii?), she asks to see the invites. All of them? Shit… “Just one,” she says. I show her… and it happens to be one of the crooked ones. Fuck. “Oops,” I say, quickly snatching it back. I show another, one of the ones I actually did by hand…

(By the way… Why didn’t I just tell her handwriting all 500 in one night was impossible? What was I afraid of… that she’d fire me? And what was a new boss going to do, get mad at me when I told him the reason for leaving my last job was, “Couldn’t handwrite five hundred invitations in roughly eighteen hours”?)

She looks at it, says she doesn’t like it (“But it’s my fault, not yours”), and that she’d like me to use colorful puff paints on each one, instead. WTF? Puff paints? Did she just turn into her eight-year-old daughter?… Or maybe the six-year-old one…?

Now, do I tell her I still had a good two hundred-ish to finish – and we could do those in puff paint, leaving the other 291 alone? Hmm… But then she’d know I didn’t finish the job… “May as well re-do them all,” she says as she drives off. “Tell me to break a leg,” she yells as she’s down the driveway. “Break a leg,” I mutter to myself, wondering when I signed up to be in this horrid arts and crafts class…