by Sarah Dessen
Margo cleared her throat. “It has come to my attention that certain employees are not showing the proper respect for other people’s foodstuffs.”
“Foodwhat?” Rebecca asked.
“All drinks, snacks, and lunches in the office kitchen area brought from home,” Margo replied. “As I’ve reminded everyone here multiple times, they should be labeled with the owner’s name, to be removed and/or consumed by that person only.”
My mom sighed. “Is this about your coconut juice?”
“It’s coconut water, Mother, and no, it isn’t,” my sister snapped. “It’s about the simple concept of respect for other people’s property.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Her drink vanished,” my mom said. “She thinks it was you.”
Of course she did. “I don’t even know what coconut juice is.”
“It’s coconut water,” Margo said. “And it was clearly labeled with my name when someone took it from the fridge. It’s not the first time, either. Clearly, the issue needs to be addressed.”
“And it has been. So move on,” my mom said, waving her hand. Then, to me, she added, “What’s in that box, anyway? It smells fantastic.”
Rebecca nodded. “It really does.”
“It’s a biscuit from Last Chance,” I told them.
“Bacon and egg?” my mom asked. I told her yes, and she sighed. “I knew it. I could just tell.”
“Item number two,” Margo continued, loudly. “New staff uniform guidelines.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Not this again.”
“I thought we tabled this?” Rebecca said.
“We did. Until now.” Margo cleared her throat. “Now, I’m aware that this is not a popular issue. But the core of uniformity is uniform. It’s important that we as a staff are always easily identified by our clients.”
“If you start talking about khaki pants and denim shirts,” I warned her, “I am walking right out of here.”
“Emaline,” she shot back, “I am sick of you always trying to bully me out of making needed changes. As my employee—”
“I don’t work for you,” I said. “I work for the office.”
“I am the office!”
“Girls,” my mom said, in a tired voice. I couldn’t really blame her; Margo and I butting heads was a part of just about every meeting, if not every day. Despite the fact that I was the youngest, we’d always argued with each other more than either of us did with Amber, mostly because she was too lazy to get that riled up. We’d both gotten a work ethic; the stubborn gene was just a lucky bonus.
“Khaki and denim is the perfect combination for a beach rental office!” she said now, pulling a glossy catalog from her stack of papers and waving it at us. A picture of a woman in black pants and a white shirt balancing wine glasses on a tray was on the cover. “And there are options here that are practical for every department, from us all the way down to the service contractors.”
“The service contractors?” I said. “What, you’re going to make the cleaners and maintenance people wear them as well?”
“Anyone who interacts with our clients on our behalf is representing Colby Realty. If they are in uniform, there’s no question who the person is who suddenly appears at your rental house to clean your pool. He’s easily identifiable, not some shirtless, barefoot stranger.”
“Shirtless?” my mom asked. “Who’s shirtless?”
I was pretty sure I knew. I looked again at the to-go container, feeling sick.
“Here in the office,” Margo was saying now, “we’ll be in khaki pants or skirts, with denim shirts in long or short sleeves, embroidered with our logo. Contractors will wear shorts and polo shirts or, in certain cases, T-shirts.” She folded back a page of the catalog, then pushed it towards Rebecca. “Everyone will know all the options available to them before they’re asked to purchase them.”
“What?” I said. “We have to pay for these out of our own pockets?”
“Emaline,” she said, looking tired, “I think you and your boyfriend can afford a couple of polo shirts.”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” I muttered. “And anyway—”
And that was when I realized two things: what I’d said, and that it was too late to take it back. Hearing this, my mother literally jerked in her seat, as if this news was an electric charge, straight from me to her.
“What did you just say?” she asked.
I closed my eyes, silently cursing myself. There were probably worse places for me to announce this than right in front of my mom, my nosiest sister, and Rebecca, who spent most of her time at work gossiping with her friends. But right then, I was hard-pressed to think of any of them.
“Nothing,” I said, reaching over to grab the catalog from Margo, as if looking at the available options of button-down shirts was the most crucial thing at that second. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Wow,” Margo said, her eyes wide. “I figured you’d probably break up in the fall, at school, but—”
“Hush,” my mom told her, then turned to me. “When did this happen?”
I shook my head, knowing I couldn’t even begin to talk about it. Just saying this out loud had made it more real than I was ready to acknowledge.
“Oh, my goodness. Is it Friday already?”
I looked up to see my grandmother in the conference room doorway, car keys in one hand, her purse in the other. Once again, she was saving me.
“It is,” Margo replied. “We’ve only just started, though.”
“What a relief,” my grandmother said, in her classic way that made it impossible to tell if she was being gracious or sarcastic. “I’ll be right back, just let me put this stuff away.”
She disappeared down the hallway, where we could hear her turning on lights in her office and pushing her creaking chair back from the desk before going into the kitchen for something. Meanwhile, we all just sat there, with everyone looking at me while I pretended they weren’t. Finally, my grandmother bustled back in.
“Okay, I’m here.” She sat down at the other end of the table, her regular spot, then plunked a bottled water in front of her and twisted off the cap. “What did I miss?”
“The short version?” I said. “People are stealing food and we have to buy our own uniforms.”
“The talking points are in detail here,” Margo added, shooting me a look as she pushed an agenda to Rebecca to pass down to her. My grandmother squinted at it over her reading glasses.
“Uniforms,” she said, taking a sip of her water. “Didn’t we already decide against this?”
“We tabled it for further discussion,” Margo said slowly. “Is that … are you drinking a coconut water?”
My grandmother glanced down at the bottle’s label. “I don’t know, it was in the fridge. They’re pretty good. Would you like a taste?”
Rebecca bit her lip, then looked down at the table. My mother said, “Margo is of the mind that the subcontractors should also be in company-chosen attire.”
“You want the pool guys in uniform?” my grandmother said. “We’re lucky to get them to wear shirts.”
“They wear shirts,” I said, a bit too defensively.
“Not usually,” she replied. “And who’s paying for all this?”
“Employees will be asked to purchase their own work ensembles,” Margo told her. She sounded uncommonly flustered, although whether by the water issue or this one was hard to say. “It’s standard business practice.”
“Maybe so, but it’s a bad one,” my grandmother told her. “We’ll be breeding resentment among the people who have the closest contact with the clients during their vacations.”
“Those same clients need to know who they are dealing with when someone shows up at their rental house,” Margo said, rallying a bit.
“Then we order T-shirts with our company logo and make them the uniform. Cheaper and easier.”
“This is a professional environment,” Margo argued. “We can’t
be wearing T-shirts.”
“But maybe we wouldn’t have to,” my mom pointed out. “I mean, we’re here at the office. There’s no question who we work for. Margo’s right, there should be no confusion who is at the properties. So we do T-shirts for everyone who is making house calls, and we just continue as we are.”
This, in a nutshell, was how every Friday meeting went. Margo came in swinging with some Big Idea and she and I got into it. Then my grandmother shot her down, and my mom worked out a compromise. You’d think we would have figured out a shortcut, but for whatever reason, we still had to do it like this, every single time.
“So it’s decided,” my grandmother said, downing a bit more of Margo’s water. “Let’s get a quote from that T-shirt place we like. You know the one that we used for those give-aways last year.”
“Threadbare,” my mother said. “Over on Plexton.”
“Right. Margo, you’ll get some logos together for them?”
Margo nodded, but she didn’t look happy, the expression on her face the same one as when we were kids and me and Amber picked on her. Which was pretty often, if I was totally honest. Then, like now, she just made it too easy.
My mom and grandmother had already moved on, discussing some plumbing issue with one of the properties. I leaned over to Margo. “You know,” I said, as she sulkily crossed something off her agenda, “personally, I’d like having a required T-shirt. Then in the morning I wouldn’t even have to think about what to wear.”
She eyed my tank top. “Are you saying you do that now?”
And there you had it. No good deed—or kind word—goes unpunished. “Forget it,” I said, moving back again.
“Hey, I’m kidding.” She smiled at me, barely, then added, “I’m sorry about you and Luke.”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
“You think it’s really over, or just a fight?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “It’s just really weird.”
She gave me a sympathetic look, then reached over and squeezed my hand. Say what you would about Margo—and I said more than anyone—she was still my sister.
“Margo,” my grandmother said now, “can we go ahead and move through the rest of these items? I’ve got to be at the building department at nine thirty to make nice with that inspector about walkway setbacks.”
“Right.” Margo shuffled her papers, back in charge. “Next item: the new additional linen inventory system. If you’ll flip over your agenda, you’ll see that I’ve incorporated a new process for managing and documenting client towel requests. If we can all look at diagram A, I’ll …”
She kept talking, going on about towels and allotments and overhead. I tried to listen, but my mind kept drifting, back to the events of the night I’d gone out with Theo. What if that text had gone through? Maybe he would have called that girl, but it wouldn’t have gone any further. And what was one stupid phone call, really, in the grand scheme of things?
Well—a lot. I knew that. And trying to break it down this way, to minor and major offenses, maybes and what-ifs, was like arguing over the origin of cracks in a broken egg. It was done. How it happened didn’t matter anymore.
When the meeting was finally over, my grandmother left for the building department, Rebecca returned to reception, and my mom and sister started talking about some home-owner who was unhappy with a bill he’d been sent. Well aware that at any moment they’d be descending on me for more details about Luke, I took advantage of this diversion and left for the storeroom, biscuit box in hand.
My first job of the day was to run items to whatever properties had requested them since end of business the day before. I grabbed the list from where we kept it, on a clipboard on the door, and got busy getting what I needed.
As always, lots of people wanted more towels. Someone needed a bathmat. A smoke detector was beeping for new batteries at one house, multiple light bulbs had blown out apparently simultaneously at another. In other words, nothing very surprising until I got to the end of the list, where I saw this:
Functioning, high-end brand-name toaster oven with temperature-adjust feature and varied toast doneness options. Only new from box acceptable. ASAP!
Even before I ran my finger across the page to the column listing what houses requested what, I knew what I would find opposite this item. Sure enough: Sand Dollars.
Sighing, I propped open the back door, stuck my bag and biscuit in my car, then doubled back for the towels and everything else. Then I went to my mom’s office for further instructions. I found her on the phone, sipping at her fountain drink.
“No, she wouldn’t tell me,” she was saying. She listened for a moment. “Of course I did. But—”
“Mom.”
She clapped a hand over the receiver, a guilty look on her face. “Oh, Emaline, hi. Yes?”
“That’s Amber,” I said, nodding at the phone. “Right?”
“You know what, it is,” she said, like this was such a crazy coincidence. “We were just touching base about, um …”
I held up the list, mostly to spare us both whatever excuse she was scrambling to come up with. “What’s the story with the toaster oven on here?”
“Sand Dollars?” she asked. I nodded. “I have a call in to the owner. If it needs to be replaced—”
“It’s brand-new,” I said. “I unpacked it myself.”
She shrugged. “Could be a lemon. It happens. On vacation, people need their toast.”
“I’ve dealt with this client plenty,” I told her. “I’d bet you big money it’s just not up to her standards.”
“Well, she is paying ten grand a month,” she pointed out.
“Then she can afford her own high-end, temperature-adjusted, varied-doneness toaster oven. We shouldn’t have to cater to her every freaking whim.”
Through the speaker of the phone, I heard Amber say, “Someone’s in a bad mood.”
“I’ll send maintenance over to check the current machine,” my mom said, sliding her hand to cover the receiver. “Okay? And then we’ll go from there.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, turning on my heel. “It’s just stupid, is all I’m saying.”
“You know,” my mom called out, as I walked away, “maybe you’d be happier doing reception today? I can send Rebecca to—”
I waved her off, shaking my head. Dealing with Ivy and her appliance standards was in no way ideal. But being stuck at a desk, a sitting target for everyone’s curiosity, would be much worse.
I got into my car and cranked the engine, then pulled out onto the main road, headed towards the Tip. I’d gone about a block when I saw a familiar figure loping in a very familiar way down the shoulder ahead. I pulled up slowly, waiting until I was right behind Morris before leaning on my horn, hard. Anyone else would have leapt right from their skin, but true to form, he didn’t even jump.
“Hey,” he said when he turned and saw me, all casual, like it was common for people to try to scare him to death during rush hour on a weekday. “What’s up?”
“You want a ride?”
He considered this, like he actually preferred walking, before saying, “Sure.”
I unlocked the passenger-side door, he slid in, and I eased back into traffic, neither of us saying anything for a moment. Finally, as we came up to a stoplight, he noticed the take-out box, sitting in the center of the dash. “That yours?”
“Luke’s,” I told him. “A biscuit from Last Chance.”
“Huh.”
Another silence. Traffic was really moving slowly. I said, “We broke up this morning.”
I felt him look at me. This seemed to warrant actual surprise. “For real?”
“Think so. There’s some other girl, apparently.”
He directed his gaze forward again. “From here?”
I shook my head, then swallowed. “Nope.”
We drove on a little farther, then had to merge left around some construction cones. As we did, the biscuit box slid a bit down the dash, the Styro
foam making a squeaking sound. Morris and I both watched it until it hit a vent, which stopped it.
“I’m so stupid,” I said, embarrassed suddenly by the catch I heard in my throat. “I don’t know why I’m still carrying that around. He didn’t even want it. I need to just throw it away.”
Morris considered this as we pulled up to a yellow light that was turning red. Then he reached forward and grabbed the box, unwrapped the biscuit, and stuffed the entire thing in his mouth, dispatching it with about three chomps. After swallowing, he crumpled the paper back into the box, threw it onto the floor at his feet, and said, “Asshole.”
For some crazy reason, it was this—not the breakup itself, not the shock afterwards, not even Margo’s kind words—that finally made me cry. The tears just came, blurring all the brake lights ahead. “Morris,” I said.
“Cheating, no-shirt-wearing loser,” he added, looking out the window. “He’s a punk.”
“He went out and met her at Tallyho,” I managed, my voice breaking.
He made a disgusted noise. “Punk,” he said again.
Now I was really crying, which would have been embarrassing had it been just about anyone else. But this was Morris, who had seen me bawl plenty, the first time being when we were eight and I fell out of the tree that bridged our two yards, breaking my wrist. He was the one who had sat with me in the back of my mom’s car as she sped to the hospital in Cape Frost, his face stoic as I sobbed from the pain. Morris was not the type to offer a hug or even hold your hand. But there was something in his quiet indignation at the universe then—and Luke, now—that was just the kind of comfort I needed.
I was still blubbering, but trying to stop, as I saw the bridge up ahead. “I’m such a mess,” I said. “We’re almost off the island and I didn’t even ask you where you were going.”
He shrugged. “No place. Wherever you are.”
I felt that lump in my throat again, swelling, and turned back to traffic to try to regain my composure. Meanwhile, Morris settled into his seat with his signature slouch, neither knowing nor caring where I was taking him. Like destinations, in general, were vastly overrated. And maybe they were. As long as you were moving, you were always going somewhere.
