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With a groan she put her head on the counter. She had not set out in this world to be an advertising executive. But she was one. A damn good one. And the only place in the world that she wanted to be was Arsenal.
Her childhood had been filled with a hundred moves. A thousand little changes over that span of years that made Anna feel as though her whole life was built on quicksand. The only concrete thing, the only real thing besides her sister was Arsenal. Ten years of work and steadfast devotion to the woman who gave her a chance to build her life and the odd twenty dollar bill when things got tight.
She had just gotten to a place with Goddess that would ensure Arsenal would always be in her life. It was all she wanted, something real to keep her going.
“Oh, come on,” Marie laughed. “You know, I still remember the day when you told Mom you weren’t going to move away with her again.” Marie was leaning against the counter again. Anna sighed heavily hoping to push away the pain that always accompanied that particular memory.
“She had that crappy car, that…” Marie paused, trying to remember.
“Hatchback,” Anna supplied, her voice muffled as her head was still on the counter.
“She had gotten fired again, remember? And we were going to go south…some relative that we hadn’t already hit up….”
“Her aunt in Arizona,” Anna said.
The memory was there, no point in trying to push it away. Anna, Marie and their mother, Belinda had lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment off Haight-Ashbury—an apartment that smelled constantly of fried chicken and wet dogs. But they had stayed in that place for a year. Anna finished her whole senior year there. She made friends. Sort of. She fell in love with California. With staying put. When Belinda had come home and said they were moving again, Anna felt sick. And she felt very mad. Her mother was so lazy, she would rather leave than do what it took to keep a job and stay. There was always a free lunch someplace else.
“It’s the last time,” Belinda had told them and Anna knew her mother believed it. Belinda if nothing else had faith and that faith had kept them going for years. Through small towns and big cities, East Coast and West Coast. Endless “uncles” and “friends.” Endless crappy one-bedroom apartments.
Belinda fed them faith and, hungry for anything, Marie and Anna ate it.
But that day when Anna and Marie walked out of the dumpy apartment into the cool and sweet-smelling California air, Anna took one look at her mother who was so willing to destroy the fragile roots she had put down, and Anna set down her bag.
She had no more room in her stomach for faith.
“I’m eighteen and I’m staying,” she had said.
Anna lifted her head from Marie’s counter and found her sister smiling at her. “I thought you were nuts then,” Marie told her quietly.
“Well, you got in the car with her,” Anna laughed, though the memory felt like rocks in her stomach.
“But I came back a month later,” Marie whispered.
Anna’s smile was wide and real and she reached out to pat Marie’s head. “The best day ever was when I opened my door and there you were sitting on your old suitcase.”
“What did I say?” Marie asked, because this was an old game for them. As two women against the world, they traced their connections.
“Arizona is hot,” Anna repeated. They both smiled.
“You are the woman who found us places to live when we had no money.” Marie reached out and twined her fingers with Anna’s. “You got me through high school and yourself through college. You kept us in oranges and peanut butter cups. There’s nothing more you have to prove, Anna. Take a break. So, you take some yoga classes, you meet Camilla for tea. Big deal. This has nothing to do with your worth as a person. This is about you relaxing. You can do anything you set your mind to. This is a cakewalk to someone like you.”
Set your mind to it.
She sighed heavily as she understood Marie was right. She had certainly survived worse things than getting a life. She would just have to put her mind to it. The heart was a messy organ, tears and hummous everywhere. Anna’s brain, however, was well used to cleaning up the mess.
Put your mind to it. Exactly.
“What I need,” Anna said, slowly realizing that this wasn’t a complete disaster. It certainly wasn’t going to be as hard as creating Goddess Sportswear out of a crazy woman’s daydreams. It wasn’t going to be as hard as paying her sister’s way through culinary school. It wasn’t going to be as hard as watching her mother drive away for the last time. “Is a plan,” she said, dusting crumbs off her hands.
She thought hard for a few moments trying to create a todo list. She tried to give herself a clear objective. A task. But there was nothing there. Just day after day of tea and yoga.
“It’s going to be okay, Anna, you’ll see.” Marie slid a plate filled with tart and salad in front of her.
Anna shrugged and dug in. She felt better. Not great, but better. Part of her still believed she was very small in this world and the sky was, in fact, falling.
ON THE FIRST DAY of unemployment Anna was staring up at the ceiling over her bed at 5:30 a.m. There were thirty-two cracks in her ceiling that she had never noticed before and if she stared at them long enough—which she had been doing since five o’clock—the cracks started moving, making shapes, spelling words.
Right now the cracks were spelling “get a life.” It was better than the “loser” she’d read there at 3:00 a.m.
She flopped over onto her stomach and closed her eyes trying hard to fall back to sleep.
You’re unemployed, she thought. You can sleep all day.
After a few moments of trying to call up sheep to count, Anna gave up and flopped back over on her back, considering as she had been since yesterday evening, what exactly “getting a life” entailed.
She still lived in the first apartment she’d moved into after she could afford to get her and Marie out of that smelly one-bedroom up on Haight. Marie had just graduated and Anna had gotten a promotion from receptionist to Camilla’s assistant. Marie, instead of sticking around, had decided to go to Texas. Or was it Minnesota? Anna wondered.
Well, whichever it was, Anna was still rattling around in an ancient, one-story, two-bedroom condo close to University of California at Berkley because she’d had no time to even look for a new place. But the apartment suited her. She was very rarely here anyway.
Maybe it’s time to move on, Anna thought. Maybe I should buy a house. The soft pastel houses of Sausalito lit up her brain for a moment, but Anna quickly got rid of that idea. A house meant commitment and upkeep and responsibility. Maybe she’d think about it when this sabbatical was over, but right now she simply wasn’t ready to make those kind of long-term changes.
No matter what Camilla wanted.
Cosmetic changes, that’s what she was looking for. She liked her life as it was and she would jump through Camilla’s hoops long enough to get back to that life, while giving the appearance of change without really changing. Smoke and mirrors. Anna smiled just thinking about it.
Looking around, she realized she didn’t have one single thing on the wall. Not a poster or a picture, not even a bulletin board. Nothing. She should get some home decor. Camilla had a modern art collection with some kind of weird chrome sculpture in her living room. Camilla had, at one time, tried to get Anna to care about the crap she had up on her walls but Anna had been occupied with Goddess Sportswear’s quarterly numbers and, if she remembered correctly, she couldn’t be bothered.
Anna grinned and decided she would take some time, which she had plenty of, and buy some crap that Camilla might like and put it on her walls.
“Step one,” she told her ceiling. “Get crap.”
See how easy this was going to be?
Camilla had long been telling Anna about the inherent relaxing and mind-expanding properties of “having a hobby.” For Camilla a hobby was something entirely creepy, like pottery and Tai Chi. Those were two of the things on Camilla’s list.
Anna grimaced at the idea of all those weirdos in the park swaying in the breeze. And pottery? Who was Camilla kidding? A bunch of middle-aged women sitting around playing with mud. Anna would rather take up dentistry. She looked up at the ceiling. The hobby question would require more thought.
Anna let out a big sigh and reluctantly turned her mind to what she was sure was Camilla’s big hang-up.
Don’t you want a family?
A boyfriend. In Camilla’s eyes Anna needed nothing more than a boyfriend to marry her and give her babies. Camilla had said so only about four million times in the years Anna had been at Arsenal.
“If I get a boyfriend—” Anna jabbed her finger at the cracks in the ceiling “—it’s game over. I win.”
A boyfriend. Anna didn’t particularly want one. She certainly wouldn’t mind some of the naked benefits that came with having a boyfriend. She wouldn’t really even mind having someone to drink Sunday morning coffee with. In bed. And then some being naked.
That would all be fine. It was the other stuff Anna didn’t want. She and Jim had had a fun and happy relationship for about a year. A year that she had thought was pretty normal. They went to movies, out to dinner. They laid on a blanket in the park on Sundays. She had felt normal, and while not exactly in love, she did like Jim. But as she got promoted at work, her job demanded more time and things between them fell apart and everything about Jim began to bother her.
He used to clean his ears and then put the Q-Tips in the toilet, but he wouldn’t flush the toilet. It made Anna crazy. The sharing of space. The family obligations. The arguing over the amount of work Anna did. That was the stuff she could do without. That was the stuff she didn’t have time for.
Poor Jim just didn’t understand what Arsenal meant to her. And so Poor Jim had left. And that had been mostly okay with Anna.
Anna looked up at the cracked ceiling and frowned. Poor Jim had been really good with the naked stuff.
But Anna was looking for smoke and mirrors, not a relationship.
“Nope,” she told the cracks in the ceiling. “A boyfriend at this point just isn’t in the cards.”
3
AT 6:30 A.M. ON THE FIRST DAY of her unemployment, Anna was eating one of the oranges from her office while she stood in front of her shut closet door, contemplating what was going to be behind that door. Two months ago her washing machine had broken down and she had stopped doing laundry except for the things that could be dropped off at the dry cleaners. Which was why she was now wearing a dark blue silk suit.
When the machine broke, she had called for someone to repair it, but that required her being home to let the guy in. Which, of course, had been impossible in the middle of the week. And considering her sometimes twenty-hour days, she could forget about hauling herself to the laundry room. So, for two months, instead of washing her underwear, she’d bought more on the internet.
Behind that closet door Anna guessed there might be close to a hundred pairs of dirty underwear. And blue jeans, Anna thought suddenly remembering that she actually owned some of those.
Anna popped another segment of orange in her mouth and considered getting a cleaning woman. After all, Camilla had one. And, Anna realized this morning as she looked around her place for the first time in what was probably months, there were things in her apartment covered in a thick fur of something that might be dust. She remembered that she had contemplated a cleaning woman a few months ago, but she just never had the time to straighten up before someone could come over to clean. Besides, Anna was not a big fan of a stranger being in her house, touching her things. So she had put it off and put it off, until like most things in her private life, she had forgotten all about it.
Perhaps she should invite Camilla over to watch her sweep the dust out from under her bed. Surely, that was life-getting at its best.
Putting the last segment of orange in her mouth she threw open the closet door and stood still in the small avalanche of dirty clothes that rolled out onto her feet.
“I wondered where those went,” Anna said, looking down at a pair of khaki pants that she hadn’t seen in months. “I thought I threw that out.” She picked up an old U.S.C. sweatshirt that was stiff with whatever was growing on it. “Gross,” she muttered and quickly dropped it.
Standing ankle-deep in clothes that had been stagnating in her closet Anna guessed that her first real effort in getting a life would be laundry.
She had a small plastic hamper, which was ridiculous in the face of all of her dirty clothes. Even her gym bag was too small. With a resigned sigh, she pulled her giant roller suitcase off the top shelf, put it on the floor and began shoving clothes into it. Halfway through, Anna started breathing through her mouth.
When all of her clothes were in the suitcase, she felt pretty good and decided there was nothing wrong with a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup for breakfast. After all she was unemployed. She didn’t need to worry about getting a healthy breakfast.
After laundry, she would have to tackle the grocery store.
In the back of the closet, Anna found some laundry detergent. So, with her suitcase, a mouthful of chocolate and laundry soap that hadn’t seen daylight in two months, Anna set out to find the building’s communal laundry facility. She had been given a tour when she moved in. That was the last time she had seen it.
Before walking out the door she remembered quarters and grabbed the jar she kept on her dresser that was filled to overflowing with change.
Anna’s apartment complex was huge, much bigger than she’d ever realized. There were pathways that seemed to go on for miles. Buildings she never knew existed were nestled in small hills and valleys that were actually quite pleasant, or would be if Anna wasn’t wandering around in high heels dragging a heavy suitcase filled with dirty laundry. Her hand was beginning to cramp around the change jar, so she switched hands with the laundry soap and tried to drag the suitcase in her soap hand. For a few minutes it was okay, then that hand started to cramp. So she rearranged everything again.
Anna walked around lost for fifteen minutes, but finally she found the laundry room. After the bright sunlight, stepping down the small cement steps into the basement facilities was like stepping into a cave. It was cool and smelled like every laundromat she had been in with her mother and Marie over the years. That strange combination of detergent, fabric softener and cigarettes.
Anna looked around and noticed that all of the washing machines were open.
“Excellent,” she mumbled. She unzipped her suitcase and began filling the washing machines with armloads of laundry.
Whoever lived in the apartment directly above or perhaps to the right of the laundry room apparently loved Celine Dion and seemed to have a hearing problem. Anna could hear the singer clearly through the wall and as she dumped soap and clothes into every washing machine she started bobbing her head in time. She wasn’t a huge fan of the woman, but she played on the radio every ten seconds.
And she recognized the song currently playing and sang along—Celine Dion style, adding some chest pounds for the hell of it. And for the moment, Anna didn’t mind at all being unemployed. She was busy, she had some tasks, there was an agenda and it was early. After the day she had had yesterday she would take what she could get.
Walking back to her suitcase and the jar of coins, she saw a sock she had dropped on the floor and she bent to pick it up. She twirled with a little flourish in time with the music and pitched the sock toward the last open washing machine. It went in and because she was in a good mood and the air smelled clean and no one was in the room, she lifted her arms turning her silly dance into a victory dance.
“Excuse me?”
Anna screamed, startled and whirled toward the deep voice behind her. “Holy…” she breathed, her hand at her chest. “You scared me.”
A man was standing on the step leading into the small laundry room. He was backlit by the bright sunshine and in the relative darkness of the room she couldn’t see him clearly. But she saw he was big. Tall and wide. Not fat.
“Sorry,” the man said and though Anna couldn’t see his face, she guessed he was smiling. He sounded like he was smiling. He was a big, wide, smiling man. Anna felt her day improve a little more.
“No problem,” she said as her heart rate went back to normal. “I…well, I thought I was alone.”
“Obviously,” the guy said.
Obviously? Anna thought, her brows snapping together before she reminded herself that he could see her. What the hell does that mean?
“The dancing gave it away,” he said and Anna ridiculously felt herself blush. He should have ignored that. Pretended he didn’t see her dancing around to some teenager’s music. Polite people pretended they didn’t see people do embarrassing things. “The singing, too,” he added with a chuckle.
Wow. He’s laughing at me. A few choice words about spying and the difference between polite and rude rose to her tongue. Then, tall wide man stepped out of the doorway into the laundry room and Anna’s brain shut down.
Oh. My. God. Anna thought. He was easily the most handsome man Anna had ever seen in real life—short blond hair, green eyes that even in the darkness of the laundry room seemed to glow. He looked down at his laundry then up at her and his eyes seemed to touch her and she felt the strange chill of awareness creep up her back and across her chest. He was still smiling and she could see it all there in his green, green eyes.
Her heart, usually so strong and steady, went ka-thunk.
All the rest of him—the bones, the skin, the stubble across his chin and cheeks, even the veins on his arms that every woman on the planet absolutely adored—combined to create some kind of Prince Charming. This man was what her mind would conjure up when she was a little girl and her mother read fairy tales to her and her sister. When the hero came cruising up on a white horse he looked like this guy.
She had forgotten all about that, but as she looked at him it all came back to her and she smiled.
His eyebrows lifted and the look in his eyes changed from merry to uncomfortable. “Hi.”
Oh, God, stop staring, Anna told herself. “Hi.” She smiled stiffly and turned away, feeling dumb.
Great, she thought as she grabbed her jar of change. Prince Charming. Wonderful. Fairy tales, what is wrong with me? The man laughed at me.
“Are you using all of the machines?” he asked as Anna shoved quarters in the washers. Anna shut the lid on the last one, put in a small fortune in coins and glanced around the room at all the washing machines quietly chugging away.
“Looks like it.” She walked over to her suitcase and threw the detergent and the jar of coins into it.
“You didn’t leave one open?” he asked and Anna looked up sharply at his tone. That tone was not a Prince Charming kind of tone and the look in his eyes was not nearly as merry as it had been a moment ago.
“I’ve already started all of them,” she told him. “You could come back in—” she looked at the digital read out on the first machine she had started “—fifteen minutes.”
“Since I’ve never seen you here before I am going to guess that you didn’t see the sign.”
He gestured with his thumb to a sign on the wall that she hadn’t seen.
“Of course I’ve seen the sign,” she huffed.
“Well, then you know.” He obviously didn’t believe her. Smart-ass, Anna thought. “You should leave one machine open.”
