by R. R. Banks
Do they ever stop?
The door was standing further open than usual and I stepped up to it, glancing in before I entered. Josh was sitting in a chair facing the window, looking out into the darkness beyond it. I knew that somewhere beneath him was the courtyard positioned in the center of the building to offer employees a little piece of green in the midst of their corporate cage, but I highly doubted that he was able to see anything even though he was yet again sitting with only the meager lamplight in the space with him. I stepped further into the office and flipped the light switch, filling the office with the bright, unforgiving fluorescent light that I was sure wasn't the biggest mood booster.
Maybe it wasn't better than just sitting in the dark.
As soon as the light turned on, the chair turned around and I realized that Josh was holding his phone to his ear. I held up my hands and mouthed an apology, starting to back out of the room, but he shook his head, holding up a finger as if to tell me to wait. He turned back to the window again and I looked around myself, unsure of what I was supposed to do. Should I start cleaning? Should I just stand here and wait for whatever it was he wanted me to wait for?
I knew that I should be hurrying to get this done as fast as I could so that I could get home and finish getting ready for the onslaught of relatives that would be coming over the next day. It had taken all that I had in me to convince them not to come today, which bought me some extra time to make sure that the house was ready for them, but also meant that they were just going to be even louder and more enthusiastic when they actually did get there. I was going to need as much time as I could get to brace myself for that whole situation. As I stood there, though, my urgency didn't seem as important. I wanted to be there with Josh. It had been a couple of days since I had found him alone in the office and I had been missing the comfortable, if wildly inappropriate, rapport that we had formed.
I wasn't ready to go so far as to say that we were friends. That was just going a bit further beyond the line than I was willing to venture. But I would go ahead and say that we were getting familiar with each other and seeing him made coming to work at night a much more pleasant prospect. Of course, just putting up a life-size cardboard cutout of him would make going to work more pleasant, but talking to him was a bonus.
"What if I had plans? Did you even think of that?"
Josh was keeping his voice low, but I could still hear the angry rumble in the words and wondered who he could be talking to like that.
"No, it's not ridiculous, Willa."
Well, there you go.
"Does it really matter to you what I might be doing? You're the one who just left without even giving me more than an hour's notice."
At this point I decided that this was most certainly not a conversation that I was supposed to be listening to. I started poking around the office, doing some preliminary cleaning so that I would be doing something when he turned around rather than just staring at him.
"Fine. Happy Thanksgiving."
I could only assume that Josh hung up after that, but the absurd super phone that he had didn't have a "slam down the receiver" function.
Score one for the flip phone.
By the time Josh turned back around in his chair, I was extremely invested in wiping off the long table in the middle of the room. He gave a deep sigh and I looked up at him, hoping that my expression held enough innocent disconnection that he wouldn't think that I had been audience to his phone conversation.
"Last minute client?" I asked, carrying on with playing dumb like a champ.
"No, it was gloom. Gloom and despair. Gloom, despair, and aggravation. It was a conference call."
I walked back over to the door and turned the light off again.
"Thank you," he said.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "Not feeling in the Thanksgiving spirit?"
"I don't really have anything to have the spirit for," he said.
I looked at him questioningly.
"Is this a Halloween situation? You do know that tomorrow is Thanksgiving, right?"
He nodded.
"I do. But I'm apparently not celebrating Thanksgiving this year."
I was shocked and for a moment I didn't know what to say.
"What do you mean you're not celebrating Thanksgiving this year?"
"Well, for the last several years I've always celebrated Thanksgiving with the Sommers family. This year Willa has informed me that she and Wilton aren't going to be around."
"Why not?"
"They flew out yesterday to go check on some of the bigger stores of their chain to make sure that they are implementing the Black Friday sales plans properly."
"When did you find that out?"
From what I overheard I was going to go with he found out yesterday, but I was still trying to maintain the image that I still wasn't a corporate spy.
"She told me yesterday when she was packing."
"Oh. Wow. That's not a lot of notice."
"No, it's not." He sighed, then tilted his head slightly. "Where were you last night?"
"Last night?" I asked.
"Yeah. I went back to my office to finish up some work and then I came here, but you never came in."
"Did you have more work to do?" I asked.
"No," he admitted. "I just came in."
"Oh." I felt my lips twitch, but I tried to hold back the smile that was trying to form there. "I had to take the night off. Matteo was sick, and my mother was away, so I didn't want to leave him alone."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Is he alright now?"
"He's fine. He gets migraines, especially when he is stressed or excited about anything, and one hit him pretty hard last night. But he woke up feeling much better this morning."
"That's good."
I emptied the trashcan and looked back at him.
"You really aren't going to celebrate Thanksgiving?" I asked.
"I guess not," he said. "I just assumed that I would be having dinner at Wilton's house, so I don't really have a backup plan."
I thought about that for a moment.
"Somehow I just don't see Willa as the domestic type."
He looked at me strangely.
"She's not," he said. "Why would that matter?"
"I just assumed...I mean...does Wilton cook?"
He gave a mirthless laugh and shook his head, standing up from his chair and walking toward me.
"No," he said. "None of them cook. I don't think that any of them have ever cooked. Come to think of it, I don't know if any of them have even seen a kitchen. They give their staff the day off to be with their families, so they have the dinner catered."
"Catered?" I asked. "Like a restaurant brings Thanksgiving dinner to you?"
"Yes," he said. "Last year it was a turkey roulade with cranberry stuffing, potatoes dauphinoise, cranberry gelee, and sweet potato creme brulee."
I stared at him, blinking.
"Are you serious?"
"What?"
"I don't know what most of the words you just said mean. How is that Thanksgiving?"
He shrugged.
"It is what it is."
"It's not Thanksgiving," I said. "Thanksgiving foods are all easily pronounceable in English. And that's coming from someone who celebrates with a family half made up with people who speak a different language."
Josh laughed, and I saw some of the tension ease from his face.
"It definitely wasn't like that when I was younger, but it's been a long time since I've had anything even close to a traditional Thanksgiving. And it looks like it's going to be another year. But Willa did say that we can grab turkey sandwiches when she gets back."
That is the beginning of the most depressing Hallmark Christmas movie ever.
"Well, that's...lovely."
Almost the same thing.
"Are you going to see your family for the holiday? You have the day off, right?"
"I do," I confirmed. "The Sommers might not exactly have the holiday spiri
t for themselves, but at least they are letting me have the holiday weekend off with the rest of the employees here."
"That's good."
"I'm excited about it. My family is coming over to my house. We've all be working on different parts of the meal for a few days and tomorrow we'll bring them all together and finish up the main dishes."
"What's your favorite part?"
He seemed genuinely interested and I felt a glimmer of sadness.
"I love all of it," I told him, "but I make a peanut butter pie that I could probably eat by myself if I didn't have to fight Matteo and his cousins for it."
Josh's phone rang, and I felt myself tense. I didn't really want to bear witness to another of the awkward conversations between him and Willa.
"Sure," he said into the phone. "Top floor, all the way at the end of the hall. Thanks."
I looked at him quizzically when he hung up and he smiled.
"I forgot to cancel my standing Chinese food order."
"You have a standing Chinese food order?"
"Every Wednesday unless I call to cancel."
Suddenly all of the trashcans full of takeout containers made more sense. The delivery showed up at the door and Josh paid him. He took a bulging bag and carried it over to the table.
"That is a lot of food for one person," I pointed out.
He shrugged.
"I'm never sure what I'll want to eat, so I order all of my favorites. I end up eating a lot of cold Chinese food on Thursdays and Fridays."
I laughed. I would never have imagined him eating leftovers, and the image of him sitting around in his pajamas watching TV while eating straight from the containers made him even more appealing. He sat down and took the packaged utensils out of the bag, sliding them across the table toward me. I sat down across from him and accepted the utensils.
"My sisters would be so mad if they knew that I was sitting here eating this," I said as I took a bite of fried rice.
It wasn't as awful as I remembered the first bites of his takeout that I had eaten, and I willingly delved into another of the containers he had spread across the table.
"Why?" he asked, taking a bite of an egg roll.
"They fast for the whole day before Thanksgiving because they say that if they don't, they'll gain too much weight to fit into their clothes afterwards."
"Do they know that that makes no sense?"
I took a mouthful of beef and broccoli and nodded.
"I'd like to think that somewhere in their minds they do, but it won't change them. They've been doing it for as long as we've been adults."
I started telling him about my family and before I knew it, the food was gone and we had been laughing and talking for more than two hours. The sound of my phone ringing in my pocket startled me out of a retelling of one of my childhood Christmases and I pulled it out of my pocket. I saw Josh laugh when I flipped it open and I swatted at him. He grinned and started cleaning up the remnants of the takeout.
"Cristina! Where are you?"
My mother sounded like she was trying to find me as we escaped a war zone and the buildings burned around us, which probably meant that she realized she had run out of sage. She was not the most calming influence during the holiday season.
"I'm at work," I said.
Not a lie. I didn't say I was working. Just that I was at work.
"I thought you were going to be home early so that you can help me with all of this!"
"I'm coming, Mama. Just calm down. Drink some egg nog."
I hung up and stood.
"I have been beckoned home," I said.
"Oh. Is everything alright?" Josh asked.
"It's fine, she's just beginning her pre-Thanksgiving panic. I have to go help her finish getting the house ready and bake a couple of pies."
"This late?"
"I live a wild and crazy life." I laughed and rushed through the last few tasks to clean the office. "Thank you for the midnight snack."
"Of course. Thank you for keeping me company."
I smiled at him and started for the door.
"Have a good night," I said. "I'll see you in a few days?"
Josh nodded.
"I'll be here."
Chapter Seven
Josh
The hours were ticking by and Black Friday was getting closer. Knowing that Willa and Wilton had set up the live updates so that the information for both stores would be reported directly to the Sommers office, I headed there. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of spending hours watching as sales reports came in, but there was really nothing else for me to do.
I turned out of the elevator down the hallway toward the office and was surprised to see the light was on in the office. I knew that I had turned it off the night before when I left and there shouldn't have been anyone else in the building since. I was so concerned about the light that I was nearly to the door before I noticed the savory smells wafting into the hall. Pushing the door open, I glanced inside and grinned when I saw Cristina inside, placing a bowl in the middle of the table. She had covered it with a tablecloth that wasn't quite big enough to cover the entire table and arranged a variety of vessels and plates across the surface.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
Cristina looked up at me and held a finger to her lips.
"Shhh," she said. "Don't tell my boss that I used my building key for non-work purposes."
"My lips are sealed," I told her. "I thought you were spending today with your family."
"Well," she said, looking at the food on the table. "I spent the morning and afternoon with them, but I had other plans for tonight."
"You did?"
She nodded.
"I couldn't let you spend Thanksgiving alone. And I definitely couldn't let you order takeout again. You've had enough of that. And even more than that, I couldn't let you keep thinking that Thanksgiving comes from a restaurant and is all full of fancy food. This," she said, holding out her arms, "is Thanksgiving."
I walked the rest of the way into the office and sat down at the table. The smells coming from the containers were rich and heady, and I felt my lips turning up in a smile that was filled with the memories of Thanksgivings from when I was a child.
"How did you know that I was going to be here?" I asked.
Cristina piled turkey onto a harvest-themed paper plate and added a scoop of macaroni and cheese.
"I didn't," she admitted. "I was just kind of hoping that you would."
"And if I hadn't?"
"Then I would have been sitting here being bitter and eating a lot of leftovers."
I laughed and watched as she added mashed potatoes and dressing before offering it to me. I took a roll from the basket beside me and slathered it with butter.
"Thank you for doing this for me," I said, trying to fight the emotion that was tightening in my throat.
She nodded and sat down across from me. Her thick, glossy hair was usually tightly wound in a bun on the back of her head, but now she wore it loose, so it tumbled around her shoulders. She wore only a touch of makeup, just enough to bring out her huge almond eyes and the soft pink of her full lips. I found myself staring at her, lost in her rather than the food in front of me. It was only when she looked up at me, her mouth full of a truly impressive forkful of turkey, potatoes, and dressing, that I remembered that I should be eating the feast that she brought me. I scooped up some of the turkey and took a bite, immediately groaning at the savory, herb-filled flavor that took over my mouth.
"That's amazing," I said.
Cristina nodded.
"And it's not even rolled up with stuff in it," she said. I looked at her with raised eyebrows. "That's right, I can Google. I know what your fancy roulade is now."
I smiled and dove into the macaroni and cheese that had been calling my name since I first saw it. It was thick and creamy, the cheese on top crispy and perfect. We ate in silence for a few minutes and then I reached for a bottle of sparkling grape juice she had brought
with her. I poured some into a Styrofoam coffee cup and brought one over to her.
"Nothing but classy,"
"Well, it is the holidays."
"How was your holiday with your family?" I asked. "Did your mother get herself together?"
Cristina shrugged.
"As much as she ever does when it comes to the holidays. She only got the vapors and started screaming out prayers to the ancestors twice during the day, so I'm going to count that as a victory."
I had no idea what she could possibly be talking about, but she seemed completely confident about it, so I went with it.
"How much did your sisters eat?"
"All of it."
I laughed, thinking to myself that this was more than I had laughed in as long as I could remember. For the first time in recent memory, I wasn't thinking about work. I wasn't worrying about marketing or profit margins or phone calls. I was just enjoying being there with Cristina. We finished the towering piles of food that we had put on our plates, and then she turned her attention to the covered pie dish on the side of the table. She whipped off the cover and I saw half of a chocolate-crusted pie filled with a thick, rich filling and topped with swirls of chocolate.
"Is this your famous peanut butter pie?" I asked.
"Most famous pie this side of my living room. At least to me."
She cut a thick wedge and tipped it onto another plate. Before she handed it to me, she reached down and I heard her open something. She sat back up and I saw her holding a bowl filled with whipped cream. Scooping up a large spoonful, she dropped it onto the slice and handed it over to me. I watched her lift her hand and lick a bit of cream off of the side of her finger and my belly clenched. Trying to ignore the feeling and push it out of my mind, I looked down at the pie and picked up my fork. I dug it through the creamy filling and put the bite in my mouth. The flavor was rich and sweet, but a touch salty from the peanut butter. The chocolate finished the flavor, making it a perfect dessert bite.
