Red Herring ✔️

23. Cat Fight

"Are you still being a grump?" Miss Dawn inquired with a quirky grandmotherly smile when Mazie wheeled the empty book cart behind the circular front desk at the entrance to the library. 

"I'm doing my job. What else do you want from me?" Mazie grumbled, unable to make herself smile. A frown permanently etched on her face from the moment she arrived; thus far, she couldn't remove it. 

Miss Dawn, the local library coordinator and a sixty-something widow with gorgeous white grey hair and dazzling green eyes, peered at Mazie over the rim of her reading glasses attached to the beaded string around her neck. "Not enough coffee today?" She asked, flipping through a non-fiction new arrival. 

As nice as Miss Dawn was, Mazie couldn't pretend to share any sort of kindness at the moment. "Would you get off my back?"

The only other employee on duty right now, Catherine, or Cat for short, leaned back in her desk chair and propped her feet up on the chair beside her. She also skimmed through a new arrivals book. "Why do you let her work here with an attitude like that?" 

Mazie scrunched up her nose at Cat and slammed a stack of books down behind the counter to gather everyone's attention. "Well, we let you work here and you have a giant stick up your - "

Miss Dawn quickly interjected. "Mazie Elizabeth."

"Still not my middle name," she corrected coyly. Miss Dawn had been guessing Mazie's middle name since she took her under her wing when she first started this job and tended to get in cat fights - pun intended - with Catherine. They were the same age, attended the same school, and still couldn't seem to get along. 

"The intention still stands," Miss Dawn stated, keeping her eyes glued to her book so as not to engage with Mazie's crassness. 

"I'm capable of playing nice. She is not," Mazie pointed out.  

Cat glanced at Mazie out of the corner of her eye. "You're so bitter for such a young girl."

"We're the same age." Mazie rolled her eyes. 

"Still bitter."

"Still annoying." 

Cat slapped the book closed and kicked her feet off of the chair to straighten her spine and look at Mazie in the eye. "I'm a confident young woman with morals of high standing. And it really hurts my heart that you would say that about me, woman to woman. We should be lifting each other up instead of tearing each other down. There's already too many women comparing themselves to one another and competing in a race I don't particularly want to partake in. Can we just come to a truce, Mazie?"

Did she always have to drone on like this? 

"Woman to woman, you should take your own advice." Cat was the pot calling the kettle black. 

Huffing, Cat returned to her righteous, holy roller astuteness. "You didn't hear anything I said."

"I'm going back to my island before Kitty Cat whips out her claws," she informed Miss Dawn, pivoting away from the desk to hide away for the rest of her shift which had so far been fairly calm and quiet. 

From time to time, the library bustled with kids and families on Sunday nights before the start of a new school week when they became too busy to carve out time to return their books and check out new ones in the middle of the week. However, this Sunday, the moms and their babies must be tucked away at home next to a fire and a good movie, where she would rather be, because she helped all of three teens find a specific book and two kids locate their mom when they strayed too far. To make matters even better, all five of those individuals created a monster mess, leaving books lying around, destroying the shelves, and wrecking the place in general which was all her responsibility to restock, realign, and reorganize.