“Well that was graceful,” she said.
“If you’re going to kill me, do it now before I have to pick all this up,” I said.
Charley sat down on the floor cross-legged next to me, pushing aside some of the papers to make room. My eye twitched a little as I watched her casually sip her coffee and avoid helping me. Then I laughed. I couldn’t help but love her for everything she was and everything she had been since we were kids.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to Cousins & Cocktails last night, bitch?” she asked.
“Because I go every week, hoe?”
Our relationship was, at best, unorthodox. It sat on a foundation of quick-witted quips and harsh terms of endearment that to anyone else would sound offensive. By all rights she was my cousin, but my mom started taking care of her when we were little kids, so you wouldn’t have known her as anything but my sister.
“Let’s go get lunch,” she whined.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Mostly because the thought of eating anything right now makes me sick.”
“Fine, fine. Then just come outside and get some air with me. I have this coffee for you . . .” She taunted me with one of the cups she was holding.
Outside, the skies were clear and the sun was shining. It was dreadful. Sitting on a worn bench outside my office, I put my hand to my forehead to cover the exposed area above my sunglasses as I sipped on the coffee. It was cold and tasted like it was about as old as I was, but bad coffee was better than no coffee.
“I’m quitting my job,” Charley said, sitting down next to me and pulling her hair into a ponytail. She was unique, both in personality and beauty, and I always thought of both as soft and stern. Her feminine brown hair and devious smiles complimented the slant in her nose, and her strong stances surely intimidated others.
“Why this time?” I asked. “Did someone look at you the wrong way?”
“It’s not like that, butt face. I just fucking hate it.”
I took a long sip of my coffee and leaned back on the bench.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.
“We had exactly the same conversation last week. I think we were even sitting out here drinking coffee then too. So I was just waiting for you to remember what I said to you then.”
Like all of us, Charley was trying to make her way through the world, finding a destination without a map or even a clear idea of what that destination looks like. She tried college a few times without any success to speak of. She did a short stint in the military, until she realized that following rules wasn’t her thing and keeping her mouth shut wasn’t possible. Since then, she’s flit from crappy job to crappy job in search of something that would light a fire in her soul. She wanted passion, for something or someone, and just couldn’t find it. And she did nothing to hide her impatience with the whole process.
Just then, both of our phones starting buzzing uncontrollably. My sister, Sydney, had sent a message in our overused family group text and a sea of smiling and heart-shaped emojis followed. Her kids were like my own, and I loved seeing pictures of them even though I was with them several times a week. What I didn’t love seeing was the constant barrage of messages that group text produced.
Ten years old. That’s how old I was the last time I could remember not seeing or talking to anyone in my family for more than a day. Our mom used to send us to an overnight camp for a week every summer and that year Sydney was too old to go and Charley was too young. I spent five whole days without my family, and it hadn’t happened since.
“So cute,” Charley wrote back to the group.
“I thought the two of you weren’t talking,” I said.
The dynamic between Charley and Sydney was interesting to say the least. One minute they were best friends, not spending a moment apart. The next, they’d scream or send horribly blunt text messages to each other. The shift happened so frequently and so suddenly, that it was impossible to keep up. Maybe that’s what sisters are like.
“We weren’t, but then she called me because she got a flat tire, and I told myself to get the fuck over it,” Charley said.
And so it goes. Sydney calling Charley because she needed help invoked the Walker’s Golden Rule. It went something like this: take care of each other, no matter what and without question. Our family had plenty of rules, and even more expectations, but the Golden Rule was drilled into us in the womb. And it’s one you could be hung for breaking.
“So what do I do about my job?” Charley asked.
“I love you like a hooker, but I don’t think it makes sense for you to keep jumping jobs until you figure out what it is you want to do. Otherwise we’re going to be having the same conversation next week. Or tomorrow. You should spend a little time looking around, take a class or something, I don’t know. I just don’t think jumping to another job you’ll hate is going to help.”
Charley was silent, mostly because I was right. I knew she wouldn’t take my advice, but that wouldn’t stop her from asking the same questions again in a week or two. And it wouldn’t stop me from giving the same advice until she listened to it. She was vacillating in a perpetual cycle that only she could break.
Who was I to talk, though? I was in a job that tested the acceptable boundaries of personal dignity. I drank too much. I was totally addicted to coffee. And there wasn’t one thing in my life that brought me a sense of purpose. They say that those who don’t do, teach. Well, those that don’t have their shit together give advice to other people on how to get their shit together. At least I had that.
* * * * *
When I got back to the office, Father Time’s grandmother was waiting at my desk. She was some sort of real estate manager for Cartwright, with a silly nickname too juvenile for her age, and one that I intentionally never remembered.
“I went through your research on the Szela account,” she said, as she hovered over my desk. All she owned were pant suits from the eighties, with big shoulder pads and pants that were tight against her bony hips. Her suit that day was pea green and the overly narrow points of her blouse’s collar poked out of her jacket as she made robotic gestures with her hands at me.
“Uh huh,” I said, drinking what was left of my coffee and tossing it into the trash.
“I checked out all your numbers and they all came out perfect,” she said. She felt she needed to check every spreadsheet I gave her with her “trusty calculator.” She was old, so I tried to be easy on her; the transition to a calculator from the abacus was probably harder for her than I realized.
“Okay,” I said, breaking my own rule and finally making eye contact with her.
I often wondered why someone whose first vote was in the Herbert Hoover election would bother to get a face-lift. Her glossy skin covered her face much like a queen-sized sheet fits a king-sized bed. The constant surprised look she had from her eyebrows being raised two inches above their natural height made her difficult to look at, which is why I rarely did.
“I’m going to go type up some notes for the Board to review tonight. I think they will be very excited,” she said in her helium-inflated voice. When she said ‘type up,’ she literally meant on a typewriter.
“Wait . . . why would they be excited?” I asked, the words from her grating voice finally processing in my weary mind. “My research said that they shouldn’t put their processing plant there.”
“Manhattan, I reviewed it and everything will be fine,” she said. She had one of those old-person, permanent head bobs, where even when they weren’t doing anything their head naturally shook. She looked like a bobble-head, stuck to the dashboard of a Dodge Dart, driving up a dirt road.
No, it won’t be fine, you . . . relic.
My face started to develop what I liked to call “smushy mouth syndrome.” It’s caused when different parts of your brain f
ight for supremacy over your facial expression. One part wants you to flare your nostrils, roll your eyes and let a tiny “pfft” sound blow through your lips. The other part wants an insincere smile to mask your true feelings, accentuated by a subtle crane of the neck toward the recipient. After four or five milliseconds of being caught up in the battle between the two parts of your brain, your face ends with your lips inverting and a flat, forced line appearing across your mouth (smushy mouth). It’s enough movement to be considered a smile but not encouraging enough for them to believe you meant it.
“Um . . . I’m not sure it will be. Even if the local government will allow a plant that produces hazardous waste to be built in their town, the building Mr. Szela wants was declared a historical landmark last year. We’d have to look at it more, but I’m not sure that he can make the structural changes to the building he would need before it can be operational. The cost of the permits alone for the build-out will probably outweigh the tax savings of having it there in the first place.”
“I’m sure we can get them to speed up the permit process. Their unemployment rate is so high,” she said waving her hands like she was waxing a car.
Whatever. Ask the town to let you pollute their water too, I don’t care.
“Okay,” I said.
I picked up my desk phone and dialed a series of fake numbers. She waited a bit, but eventually got the point and walked away. I sighed and wondered why I couldn’t ever just say what I was thinking—what really needed to be said.
“Hat, buddy, what’s going on?” my boss, Graham, said as he breezed over to my desk later. He was just short enough to lean comfortably on the monitor of my computer as he looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes.
It shouldn’t surprise you that my job annoyed me in ways that sand in your underwear couldn’t, but for some reason, I could never take it out on Graham. I really liked him, and he made the sincerest effort to be a good boss to me and everyone else there. He was the CEO, a job he landed when he was just twenty-six. Even though I knew him to be smart, I never did understand how someone that young landed a position like that, and maybe I was a little envious of him because of it.
Graham rubbed his chin with a uniquely curved dimple in it, and asked, “Plans tonight?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s just a lay-low kind of evening.” As soon as those words came out of my mouth, I regretted saying them.
“That’s too bad, really. I have this friend that I’d love you to meet,” he said.
One of the joys of being on such good terms with Graham was his predisposition for setting people, namely me, up with other people. One of the joys of also being his employee was the sense of obligation when he did it. He was a self-proclaimed cupid and found it his life calling to ‘find me a good woman.’
Never say you don’t have plans until they explain why they are asking. You know better.
“That’s okay, thanks though,” I said.
Graham’s previous three (yes count them, three) fix-ups had ended badly. I think the last one’s name was something like Aubrey, or Audrey, or Jane; some name like that with an ‘A’ in it somewhere. Anyway, she was still leaving me messages three months after our alleged date. I say alleged because it was no more than a half-hour long, it was only coffee, and she spent the entire time rambling on about her pet tarantula. I don’t even think I got the chance to say another word after “hello.” I left by way of the emergency exit next to the men’s bathroom.
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
So would standing on my head and asking Cat to scratch at my face until I bleed.
Admittedly, I wasn’t the greatest dater, but I firmly believed that anyone who could use the words “baby,” “wedding,” and “spider,” multiple times in a short, thirty-minute conversation should have police caution tape conspicuously displayed around their person at all times.
“Thanks for the offer, but I really need a night in.”
He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and turned to walk away. I knew him too well to believe that he’d give up that easily, so I made a mental note to have amazing, couldn’t be canceled even if I wanted to, plans the next time he asked what I was doing.
“Wait,” he said, turning back to me but looking at his phone.
Quick, Hat. Think of an excuse. You can just say you forgot about it. Maybe someone is in the hospital. No. That’s bad karma. What about Charley? Maybe I can say she needs my help with something. How about . . .
“Bad news, my friend,” he said, reading through a message on the phone. “It’s our infamous friend, Ms. Monica. She needs me to send someone over tonight.”
I looked over at Talia’s desk and she was staring back at me with her pointer finger on the tip of her nose, and the other hand’s finger pointing at me, the classic “you’re it” signal. In response, I pointed a different finger at her.
“It’s okay. I can do it, I guess,” I said.
Ms. Monica, or so she preferred to be called, was the most demanding, demeaning, and dimwitted client we had ever worked with. Whenever she was short a server, she’d email Graham and one of us would have to suit up and be her server on-demand. And demand she did. The tips weren’t bad, but working for her while she treated us like indentured servants was. I had no idea how much she had to pay to have that kind of service from us, but it made me feel a lot like a prostitute. My body, my choice . . . except at Cartwright & Company.
Chapter 3
Ms. Monica’s restaurant was a classy joint. It was maybe a notch above bad diner food, but not by much. She tried to fix that by making it look upscale, but at best it looked like a themed restaurant, if the theme was Tacky ‘70s.
The servers wore extremely unflattering red, collarless shirts over red velvet tuxedo pants. My pants were a size too large and without belt loops to use to hold them up, they would constantly slide down my body and force me to hold them with one hand. That’s not ideal for a profession that requires balancing heavy trays.
In the company locker room, I rushed to get dressed. The restaurant didn’t start getting busy until well into the evening, but I think Ms. Monica enjoyed making us try to get all the way to Warwick in afternoon traffic. I finished tying my plastic-looking, non-slip dress shoes and looked in the mirror. In the full outfit, I looked a lot like an uncooked burger, one that a child ate and then threw back up.
Once, a man came into the restaurant after completing a gig as a clown for a child’s birthday. He still had half his make-up on and was swimming in the checkered, high-water pants that hung ungracefully on suspenders from his shoulders. He took one look at me when I came to his table and laughed . . . at me for looking ridiculous.
It was 5:17 p.m. when I screeched into the sequestered parking lot of the restaurant. I fumbled to pull myself together, digging through the messy backseat of my car for my apron, hoping that I was clever enough to leave my pens and name tag in there from the last time I was sentenced to a shift working for Ms. Monica.
“Ya late!” Ms. Monica bellowed to me from the hostess stand as I tried to slink into the restaurant unnoticed.
Ms. Monica was a large, obtrusive, woman with a loose grip on the English language and a tight grip on any biscuit within an arm’s reach. Her clothes were always much too tight, contorting around the unforgiving bulges of her body, and her lower lip was either naturally plump or grew to be that way from her incessant yelling. She was also utterly unaware of the megaphone-like volume with which she spoke.
“Sorry, Ms. Monica, it won’t happen again,” I said. That wasn’t true and we both knew it, but it always made her feel better about my tardiness.
“Fix ya nametag, it’s crooked.”
She said crooked like “crocked,” but in either case it was the least of my worries and should have been the least of hers. It looked especially nice with my name mistyped ‘Manhettan’
on the flimsy, fake gold plastic. The edges were curling, and the letters had a dingy yellow tint from too much time spent in a greasy kitchen.
I sighed. I never hated my name more than when I was working at the restaurant. It just invited too much conversation with customers for my own liking. Whether my parents had given me my name because that was where I was conceived or because it was my father’s favorite drink, both of which were possible, was unbeknownst to me. I had always made a conscious effort never to ask.
But neither of those stories went over terribly well with customers, so I resigned myself to use a made-up story each time I worked. The trick was to find something just boring enough that it wouldn’t spark additional discussion. “It was my great-grandfather’s middle name,” I said to my first table when they asked.
A shift at the restaurant always had a very predictable dance about it. I brought customers food, customers tipped me, and I pretended that the whole interaction didn’t make me want to end my own life with a slotted serving spoon. It was a slow night of hours that felt like days. By the time the TV above the bar was on the ten o’clock news, Ms. Monica had disappeared into her office to devour an unsuspecting cheesecake and I started my end-of-the-night cleaning with little fervor.
Only one more hour, I thought, trying to pep-talk myself into making it through the last bit of my day. You’ve got this, Hat. You’ve got this.
I was laying on the floor cleaning the cooler underneath the salad bar. The restaurant was emptying but the bar still had plenty of people waiting around for nothing. I was only half-listening to the overly starched and hair-sprayed reporter on TV talk about things I didn’t care about until she nearly shouted the word “Murder.”
It was loud enough to make me jump, which is a problem when you’re working under a dozen ill-fitted salad dressing containers. The containers slipped off their designated track and poured directly on my head. The smell of the night was Italian . . . oily, zesty Italian.
Customers stepped over me as they made their way to the exit, not stopping to wonder why a pair of legs sticking out of the salad bar were crying “uncle.” I sighed loudly and closed the cooler doors, leaving the mess hidden and pretending nothing happened.
Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1) Page 2
