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“You seem like you’re tense. Let me give you a neck rub.” In a flash, he was around his desk and behind me, his hands massaging my neck.
My eyes drifted shut for a moment, then snapped open. “What are you doing?”
“Helping you work out the kinks.” His voice was low, thick, the kind of voice I was sure he used with his girlfriends in bed.
“Okay, okay.” I stood up and spun around. “Is this a joke? Seriously, this is unbelievably cruel if it is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My VP office! And—” I pointed at him, unable to find the words “—you, acting like this.”
“Sorry.” A confused expression. “That was inappropriate, wasn’t it?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Geez, what is with me?” He shook his head. “Are you all right? Is it tension in your lower back? Here, let me work on that.” He moved forward, his muscled arm slipping around my hips.
“All right, I’m out of here,” I said. With a nervous laugh I headed for the door.
“Want to get lunch?” Evan said, looking like a child left behind on the playground.
“I’ve got plans.” Odd. It was the response he usually gave me.
Back in my office, I climbed into the chair, and with my feet on the phone book, let my eyes sweep the room. All my stuff was there—no doubt about it—and everyone seemed to think I was a vice president. But it felt surreal, having it just happen like that. I wanted a party, maybe a cake with Congrats Billy! on it in pink frosting. I wanted someone to say, “You deserve it.”
I needed my mom. She would ramble and rave; she would make me believe this was real and I had earned it. I slid the phone closer and perused the speed dial buttons. There it was. Mom.
Two rings went by, then three. I knew her machine would pick up on the next ring, and I’d hear the message, “Sorry we can’t come to the phone. We’ll call you back.” My mother hadn’t changed the message since Jan died, and so it still sounded as if he were running around town with her, about to head home and check voice mail.
The answering machine clicked on, and surprisingly I heard something new. Tinkling piano music in the background, then my mother’s chipper, “Hello! I’m not here right now. I’d love to phone you back. Just leave your number. Ta ta!”
Ta-freakin’-ta? She sounded like Joan Collins on Dynasty. “Mom, it’s me,” I said. “Nice message. Give me a call as soon as you get in.”
I put the phone back on the receiver. What to do now? Work, I supposed, but it seemed I might have a different role now, one I was unclear about.
“Hello, Miss Billy.”
I looked up and saw Gerald, the elderly black man who ran the mail office at Harper Frankwell and personally delivered everyone’s mail each morning.
I greeted him, and waited to see if he commented on my new office.
“Have a lovely day now.” He handed me a stack of mail. He turned and left, whistling an aimless tune.
I flipped through the envelopes—letters from clients, one from a TV station in Dallas, where we’d been trying to get coverage for a new product. And then there was a shiny lacquered postcard. The photo on the front showed a multispired white building. I flipped it over and looked at the printed words on top. The Duomo, it said. Milan.
Below that, in my mom’s tiny, perfect penmanship, there were three lines: The collections are surprisingly tedious! The Trussardi stuff—particularly stale. Love, Mom.
I flipped it back and looked at the front. I turned it again and read the lines a few more times. It appeared that overnight my mother had transported herself, by herself, to Milan and the fashion district. My mother adored fashion. She was always decked out in the latest, and she’d always talked about going with Jan to the shows in Milan, but when he died, so did that dream. Until now. If this postcard was legit, my mother had a real life, something I’d been hoping for her for so long. And if it was true, then she’d gotten over Jan, and in a much shorter time than it took her to recover from the loss of my father.
With that thought, I noticed something different inside myself. Deep inside me, where there was usually a space for wonderings about where my father was and worries that his abandonment might somehow have been my fault—or his disappointment in me—was empty now. Those wonderings and worries were gone. I could remember the pain, the longing, the sadness that used to reside there, but I didn’t feel it any longer. Like reminiscing about a distant love affair, the emotions had vanished.
I took a breath. There seemed to be more room in my lungs now, more room in my head, too. The hours with Blinda must have taken hold. I’d broken the reverse Oedipal thing, and I was free of him.
I smiled to myself in my new office. I felt lighter, happier. Not only had I gotten over my dad, but I’d had a wonderful morning with my husband, I’d been promoted and Evan had flirted with me. Even my mother had begun her own fabulous life. I had no idea how it happened, but in one night I’d gotten incredibly lucky.
I thought of my visit with Blinda last night and the frog she’d given me. Could they have anything to do with this? Intuitively, I answered yes! but that seemed entirely illogical. Yet either way, it didn’t matter. I’d gotten everything I’d wished for. And I was going to enjoy it.
chapter four
When Evan made VP, I had pumped him for every bit of information he possessed about the perks of the promotion. He’d gotten a new computer and cell phone, ditto for new office furniture, and there were no longer limits on client lunches and entertainment, the way there were for the non-VPs.
I rubbed my hands together at my desk now. Time to spend some company money. Then it occurred to me—maybe I had already done that, somewhere in the yawning chasm between my today and my yesterday.
I hit Lizbeth’s button again.
“What’s up, Billy?” she said cheerily.
I still hadn’t seen the girl, and I supposed I’d better “meet” her now so that I didn’t run into her in the hallway and give a blank stare. “Can you stop by my office for a second?”
A moment later, a woman in her early-twenties appeared in my doorway. Her sandy brown hair was worn in artful waves about her very round face. She had wide, startled eyes and a rosebud mouth shellacked with cotton-candy pink gloss.
What’s going on?” she said, taking one of my visitor’s chairs.
“When I made vice president…well, maybe I should say, do you remember when I made vice president?”
“I got hired right after, so I don’t remember the exact day, but yeah.” She looked at me oddly.
“Sure, right. And when was that? I mean when did you get hired?”
She laughed wryly, as if this were an easy question, but then she scrunched up her shiny mouth and looked at the ceiling. “Gosh, when was that?” She looked back at me with a stumped expression. “I can’t remember.”
Just like Evan, I thought. Everyone seemed to assume I’d been in this position forever, but I knew different. It made me feel as if I were playacting. It made everything unreal.
“Billy?” Lizbeth said. “Did you want something?”
I shook away my thoughts about the strangeness of it all. No sense fighting a good thing, I told myself. “What I really wanted to ask you was if you remember some information I got about furniture and technology stipends.”
“Yeah, I think it was in that packet of material from Ms. Frankwell.”
“Great, great. And where do I—I mean we…keep that?”
“You told me to file it at my desk, remember?”
I made a big show of snapping my fingers. “Right! That’s right. Could you grab that for me?”
A few seconds later and she was back with a stapled set of papers, headed New Vice President Information Packet.
“Thank you, Lizbeth. And can you find out for me where the firm buys our computer equipment?”
I leafed through the packet while Lizbeth trotted off down the hallway. The terms were the same that Evan had received. Perfect.
Lizbeth soon buzzed me with the name of a computer dealer we used. Five minutes after that, I was on the phone with one of the salesmen and browsing their Web site for different computers and monitors. I finally settled on a sleek, flat-screen monitor and a top-of-the-line computer that had tons of memory and would allow me to burn my own CDs and download lots of music. Not that I knew how to do that. Not that I even owned one of those cute MP3 players. But then maybe that was different now, too. I’d gotten what I wanted overnight, and I’d always wished I could be one of those iPod people. It might all just flow from my hands as soon as I got the new computer.
When that was done, I buzzed Lizbeth. “I’m going to look for new office furniture,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Don’t forget about your 1:30 lunch meeting.”
I looked at my watch. It was 12:00. “No problem.” I clicked the intercom off, and sat staring at my watch for another minute. It had a large mother-of-pearl face and a burnt orange leather strap. My mother had given it to me for Christmas last year, and she’d selected it carefully. Was she now selecting dresses and skirts from a runway in Milan?
I knew where the company-approved furniture store was because I’d been there with Evan. Outside our building, I fought the tourists for a cab and headed to the intersection of Ohio and Franklin.
The showroom was a loft space with brick walls and high ceilings. I found a salesman and told him I needed a new desk and chair, explaining that I already had a pine credenza I planned to keep.
The salesman, a short, balding man in a suit, clearly saw a purchase ready to happen. He practically clicked his heels together before whisking me around the showroom, pointing out various styles of desks.
“You know, maybe I should just focus on the chairs,” I said after a few minutes. Who knew how ridiculously expensive desks could be? And my stipend wasn’t that large.
The smile on the salesman’s face dimmed a little, but he gave me a pert nod and began showing me chairs. All of them seemed to be black leather—black leather with chrome bases, black distressed leather, shiny black leather with buttons.
“These are all so—” I searched my mind for the word “—typical,” I said at last. I thought of the wine-colored chair in my office. It was entirely too huge but at least it was a little different. Maybe I should stick with that.
But then I saw it. Across the showroom, next to a mod, curved desk was a small, butter-yellow leather chair. I quickly made my way and sank into it. The chair hugged me like an old, comfortable sweater, yet it was stylish and sleek.
I glanced at the price tag. One hundred dollars more than my furniture stipend, but I could pay that out of my own pocket. “I’ll take it.”
When I got back to the office, I called Chris. “I have some news.”
“What?” He actually sounded excited.
“How about dinner tonight and I’ll tell you?”
I waited for him to “cry swamp,” as I called it—I’m so swamped with this merger, I’m swamped with my billing statements, I’m swamped with this deposition. But to my surprise, he said, “Absolutely.”
“How about Spring at six?” Spring was a restaurant in Bucktown where Chris and I first started talking about getting married. We’d been giddy that night with our plans for our future. For some reason, we’d never been back.
“Perfect,” I said.
“I’ll make the reservation.”
Just then Lizbeth buzzed me. “Your meeting is about to start.”
I grabbed my purse from under my desk, patted powder on my face and swiped lipstick across my mouth. Ready. I ditched my purse again and looked at my watch. One-thirty exactly. I felt a rush of nervousness. I’d insisted for years that I was cut out to be a VP, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the role.
In the conference room, a long thin space with an oval glass table, Roslyn was studying a file and silently munching on a plain green salad.
“Hi, Billy,” she said, glancing up. “You prefer Caesar, don’t you?”
“Um…yes, I do.” Had I ever told Roslyn that? I couldn’t ever remember discussing my favorite books or movies with Roslyn, much less salads.
I moved to the sideboard and picked up a Caesar. A second later, Lydia Frankwell swept into the conference room, filling the place with the scent of Chanel No. 5. She was a very well-preserved woman somewhere in the age range of fifty to seventy. Twenty years ago, she’d started the firm with Bradley Harper. Rumor had it that she and Mr. Harper had been having an affair while at their previous firm, an affair that continued when they started Harper Frankwell. Mr. Harper died eight years ago, right before I’d joined the firm, leaving Ms. Frankwell at the helm. I’d always found her a bit flighty. Not that she wasn’t business savvy, but she seemed more of a figurehead, a yes-man who schmoozed clients around the country while Jack, and now Roslyn, ran the real show.
“Roslyn. Billy,” Lydia said. I watched her, ready for a Congratulations on your promotion! but nothing came.
Roslyn murmured a greeting. I paused a moment, debating the use of first names versus my usual “Ms. Frankwell.” I must have paused too long, because both she and Roslyn looked at me strangely.
“Afternoon, Lydia,” I blurted out. I held my breath.
Roslyn looked back at her file. Lydia gave me a serene smile that barely lifted the corners of her heavily BOTOX-enhanced eyes, then headed for the remaining salad. I sighed internally as I took a seat.
“All right,” Roslyn said when Lydia was seated as well. “Let’s discuss Teaken Furniture.”
“Mmm, good,” Lydia said. I was unclear whether she meant the salad on which she was now munching or the Teaken Furniture account. It was an account we’d had forever, and one I’d inherited from Evan. They were an old-school Chicago furniture business who’d been running the same advertisements for years. There was really nothing new about their products, and therefore very little that we could get decent PR on, but the owner was friends with Lydia and so we worked with them year after year, begging magazines to write about their Frank Lloyd Wright look-alike chairs and their design team.
Roslyn launched into a discussion of the Teaken budget for the next six months. Lydia asked a question or two. I tried to do the same, but I found myself with little to contribute. It wasn’t just that I was new to budgets and these types of meetings. I was, quite simply, bored.
This surprised me. I’d always spied on Evan in such meetings, walking by the open door at frequent intervals, trying to eavesdrop. It seemed so glamorous—meeting with the owner, coming up with the budget for some large account—but now I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Okay, that’s done, isn’t it?” Roslyn said at last. “Lydia, anything you need?”
“Hmm?” Lydia said. She was fiddling with a paper napkin. “Oh. Well, I should mention that I’m going to be in New York again for most of the next month. If there’s anything you have to discuss with me—personnel issues or such—we should do it now.” She made it sound as if she were going to the Antarctic instead of the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan.
Roslyn frowned at her for a second, then gave a slight shrug. “Well, there is Carolyn.”
Lydia lifted her eyebrows, or at least it seemed she was trying. “Who?”
“Our receptionist,” Roslyn said, as if talking to a five-year-old. “She’s been here for two years and keeps asking for a raise. Frankly, I think she deserves it.”
“Fine,” Lydia said. “Anything from you, Billy?”
I was about to say no. I’d been a VP for all of five hours, so what personnel or other issues could I possibly have? But then I thought of one. Alexa. I saw her smug face. I heard her voice say, Oh, I’m not suggesting that you handle this on your own…God, no. I heard her condescending laugh over and over.
So I said her name. “Alexa Villa.”
Roslyn frowned. I was about to do a U-turn and say there was really nothing wrong with Alexa, it was just a mistake, but Lydia sat straighter. “Ms. Villa, yes,” she said. “Tell me about her.”
“It’s just…” How to put this? I hadn’t officially formulated anything about Alexa in my head, I’d just stewed internally about it for years.
“Yes?” Lydia said with an encouraging nod. “Go ahead.”
And it all began to spill from my mouth.
I told Roslyn and Lydia exactly what I thought—that Alexa was constantly pushing off work on other people, that she didn’t respect authority, that she was rude and patronizing and very difficult to work with.
Roslyn looked a little troubled, and I wondered if I’d overstepped my new boundaries. I pushed salad around on my plate. The conference room was silent.
“I might be mistaken,” I said, about to take it all back and head for the hills. No need to screw up my new position by bringing up Alexa.
But then Roslyn spoke again. “I suppose I have noticed some of that. I just didn’t realize it was so bad.”
