He sat down behind his desk and watched her take a sip, saying nothing.
“So,” she said, grimacing at the taste of the coffee. It tasted like something scraped off the bottom of the oven. “You were in the Olympics?”
He hesitated. “I swam backstroke in the relay. Though just in the heats.”
“But you were on the team that got the gold?”
He turned his attention to his computer, put his hand over the mouse. “Impressed?”
“Sure.” Bev loathed hard-core athletes. People who devoted themselves so intently to their own bodies were seldom concerned about anyone else’s. “Go ahead and tell me what you wanted to tell me. We’ve run out of time.”
He didn’t turn away from the computer. “Just a minute.”
She took a deep breath. At school, she had a responsibility to redirect children to polite behavior, and she knew a delaying tactic when she saw one. “You don’t know why he left it to me any more than anybody else.” She got to her feet, put the cup on his desk. “Whatever problem you have with my aunt, you’ll have to take it up with her directly.”
“It’s not my problem with Ellen. It’s everyone’s problem.”
“Look, I’ve heard she can be difficult. Believe me, I’ve heard stories. But there’s nothing I can do.”
“‘Nothing’ is exactly what you should do. Don’t sign anything.”
“She said the whole building has come to a halt since my grandfather died. Nobody has the authority to do anything.”
“What she means is they’re not letting her fire people anymore.”
She studied him. “Like you?”
His eyes flickered with surprise. He picked up a pen and flicked the cap off. “Not just me.”
“But she would if she could?”
“Oh, I imagine she would.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked down at him. “I think I see.”
He scowled. “No, you don’t. Please. Sit down. This isn’t about me.”
She stayed on her feet. “So, the big secret is that my aunt is difficult to work with so my grandfather left it to me. Is that right?”
“He began to doubt your aunt’s long-term commitment to the company. She was looking to sell out.”
Bev shook her head and looked around the office. “Well, given she’s worked here for thirty years, she has the right. Listen, could you call me a cab? As soon as I sign those papers I’m off to the airport myself.”
He got to his feet and was now the one looking down on her. “What’s she offering you?” The corner of his mouth curled up. “Come on—how much?”
She felt guilty for even considering the fifty thousand dollars Ellen promised, but her mother thought she was being taken. “None of your business.”
He snorted. “Thought so. Everyone has a price.”
Her face flooded with heat. She blinked at him, struggled to stay polite. “You are totally off base. I might not even take it.”
“Might? Your lawyers don’t have a problem with that?”
“No lawyers. This family doesn’t need a legal battle on top of everything else. If she wants to offer me money, I’m happy to consider accepting it.”
“Happy?” He gaped at her. “Just like that?”
“Call me Switzerland. The rest of my family loves to fight. I don’t.” Giving the company to Ellen might help mend a few rifts, but if not at least her hands would be clean.
“Some things are worth fighting for. Some people are worth fighting.”
“I’m a preschool teacher. We teach peace.” She looked at her watch, suddenly angry she’d given him any time at all. “It’s late. First you're going to show me where a bathroom is. Then Richard’s office.”
He stared at her silently for a moment, then stood up. “Well, can’t say I didn’t try.”
Without another word, he led her out of the office down another drab hallway and into the factory proper. “The bathrooms are around the corner. I’ll wait here.”
She walked past a dark storage area filled with a row of racks stuffed with clothes, through a creaky door that was labeled with a hand-drawn sign. The bathroom was a tiny space with two stalls, one occupied. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and perfume and Pine Sol.
When Bev finished and was washing her hands, she heard a sniffle from the other stall, then a stifled sob that triggered every overdeveloped nurturing bone in Bev’s body. After another sob, she gave in and asked, “Are you okay?”
The sobbing quieted. Bev felt bad for intruding and turned on the water. When she was reaching for a paper towel, the woman in the stall cleared her throat and said, “I just needed a minute.” She sniffed loudly, and Bev remembered something her aunt had complained about at the funeral, how everyone at Fite acted like babies.
Perhaps her aunt responded to babies differently than she did. Bev unzipped her purse and dug through for something, anything, to offer. She took out a half-unraveled green roll. “Would you like a Lifesaver?”
The woman blew her nose. “The candy, right? Not drugs or something?”
Bev bit down a laugh. “Candy.” She tore the wrapper apart in a spiral. “Wintergreen.”
A long, delicate hand with chipped red fingernails appeared over the top of the stall. “You must be visiting.”
Bev handed her the entire package in case she didn’t want Bev’s skin touching the candy itself. Some of her preschoolers would turn down a cupcake if they couldn’t pluck it out of the plastic box themselves. “Yes. Just visiting.”
She snorted. “Thought so. Nobody here would give a shit.” Her hand appeared over the door to return the package, and she muttered thanks again before falling silent. When it was obvious she could do nothing more, Bev went back out into the cluttered storage area.
Liam leaned against the wall, long legs crossed at the ankles. He pointed to a glass doorway past a drinking fountain. “The finance guys are through there. Think you can find Richard yourself?”
She was surprised he was letting her go. “Sure.”
“I’ve got to get upstairs for a meeting.”
“Of course.”
He stood there, more relaxed than he’d been, then drew a card out of his pocket. “Here. If you need to reach me.”
She just stared at him, disturbed by the faint smile growing in the corner of his mouth, the smile of a German shepherd.
“I won’t—” she started to say, but he tucked it into her jacket pocket himself and strode away. “Hey!”
He was gone. Something about him disturbed her more than the cup of caffeinated sludge he’d given her. She reached into her pocket to feel the card but didn’t take it out. It didn’t matter how he made her feel. She wouldn’t be back.
She walked through a swinging door into a carpeted, air-conditioned corridor, past the row of cubicles to the large glass-walled office at the end with the CFO’s gold nameplate on the door.
It was dark. Closed. Empty. And affixed at eye-level, a folded-over yellow Post-It note with her name in all caps. She peeled it off and unfolded it.
Richard the CFO had left for the airport after waiting until one-thirty and wouldn’t be back until Friday.
Bev frowned at it, confused, then groaned.
Liam.
She wrote an apologetic note to Richard on the Post-It and stuck it back on the door. Then she took Liam’s business card out of her pocket, crumpled it in her fist, and threw it into the blue recycling bin near the copy machine.
She’d have to come back, just like he wanted. And worse for her, she’d have to delay it past Friday, since she couldn’t call in sick at her job like corporate people. She’d already used up all her limited personal time on the funeral, helping her mother cope, visiting the lawyer. The next available time she would have was over a week away when the school was closed for the summer.
Liam Johnson thought she’d be easy to push around, just like her mother, her aunt, infant receptionists—everyone.
I will take th
e money, Bev thought, striding through the dark corridors, past Liam’s empty office, out to the lobby.
She would call Ellen, reassure her the deal was still on. She’d convince her mother to reconcile with her sister now, the best chance in decades to get talking again. And she’d use that fifty grand to jump-start her career at the school.
One thing she wouldn’t do was let one grouchy, sweaty jock get in her way.
Chapter 2
“Sign it.” Liam slipped a single sheet of paper onto Ellen’s desk. “You made your point. HR won’t let us keep Wendi on unless you revise this stupid performance review.”
Ellen didn’t look away from her computer. “I gave her the scores she deserved.”
“You put down negative numbers. It’s on a scale of one to five. It’s not a thermometer. You’re not allowed to go below zero.”
Ellen glanced over without moving her head. “Not allowed?”
Tactical error. Liam shrugged and sat down. “Why the blood lust?”
“She totaled my Lexus.”
“That’s it? She scratched the bumper driving it to get your dry cleaning,” he said. “You got off lucky. Wendi doesn’t even have a license. She could have sued the company for pressuring her.”
“What kind of loser doesn’t know how to drive?”
“She grew up in the city. She takes MUNI everywhere.”
Ellen, whose idea of public transportation was Southwest Airlines, scowled at him. “She’s a loser.”
“Sign it. This will get HR off your back. And me.”
She gave him a disgusted look. “She’s the worst assistant I ever had.”
“You say that about all of them.”
“And always true. A downward spiral.”
He leaned forward and picked up her pen. “Well, now she works for Darrin. Not your problem.”
“Everything here is my problem.” But she took the pen, made a face at the column of three’s he’d typed up under Wendi’s name, and signed her ornate signature with its E filling half the page before shoving it back to him. “Tell her not to get too comfortable. The new people might have higher standards.”
He forced himself to give her threat a lazy, unconcerned smile. The new people. So she did intend to sell. “I hear your niece wasn’t able to sign those papers the other day.”
Her eyes narrowing, Ellen hauled up her orange, metal-studded, moose-sized purse and dumped it on the desk. “Richard didn’t wait for her. The girl just inherited his ass and he didn’t bother to stick around, the dumbshit.”
“She coming back soon?”
Apparently not considering Liam might have a different opinion on the matter, she exhaled loudly and pulled out a lipstick. “God, I hope not. We just FedEx’ed the papers down to her. But she has to find a notary and, quite frankly, it seems clear she is just as lazy as her mother. My big sister got pregnant at seventeen just to avoid homework, then made a career out of marrying for money.” She exaggerated the “marrying” with air quotes.
Liam knew better than to swallow Ellen’s character judgments, but he felt a surge of panic at the thought of one selfish stranger’s signature standing between Fite and disaster. “Wendi set the line meeting at one.” He kept his tone neutral.
She jerked the cap off a tube and twisted the bottom until a stump of her signature crimson lipstick appeared. “Meetings should never be so close to lunch. You thought you were nice rehiring that loser, but it just hurts the rest of us.”
“You’re going out?”
“Hitting the stores, but maybe I’ll make it back in time.”
If she did, she’d just confuse everyone and push out the deadlines—revising and deleting and chasing new ideas—then contradicting herself next week. Most of the team could withstand her withering contempt for their choice of footwear, but her unstable, inconsistent management was torture. “All right, maybe we’ll see you.”
Ellen disappeared behind the swing-arm mirror clamped to her desk and lifted the lipstick to her grimacing mouth. Familiar with her method of dismissal, Liam left her and went to find Wendi.
He found her with the men’s sample patternmakers holding up a bolt of thin, black stretchy fabric that, to his alarm, she was instructing be cut into shorts. “Liam! Check out this sick sample yardage. It’s got 3D stretch or something, totally new.”
He nodded hello at the patternmakers, who drew back in fear and got busy at the opposite ends of the table, and took Wendi’s arm in one hand and the fabric in the other, guiding her out of earshot. Ignoring her disappointment, Liam shoved the roll back onto a storage rack.
“Too shiny,” he said. “Our Fite guy can't look like he's running down the street in Victoria’s Secret.” If Darrin, her new boss, saw what she was doing, Liam would never be able to convince him to keep her.
He strode past the cutting tables, nodding but not speaking to the staff. “Move the Spring meeting to eleven,” he called over his shoulder, knowing she had followed. “I want everyone there with whatever they've got so far. We’ll be quick so it doesn’t spill into lunch.”
At five-foot-barely, Wendi was having to jog to keep up with his six-three stride. “But you said one.”
“Now I'm saying eleven. Just whatever they've got. I realize it's a surprise.”
Wendi's brown eyes widened under her Tina Fey glasses, her mouth dropping open. He watched her struggle to hold back her whining that the designers and their assistants were certainly not ready, had planned on cramming through the lunch hour, and would tear her apart when she delivered the summons. “That's in fifteen minutes,” she choked out. “And Ellen just went out for lunch, and she’s usually gone for hours.”
Liam raised an eyebrow and looked at her.
“Oh. Right.” Finally understanding him, she broke into a full run in her kitten heels and tore off past the patternmaker's tables on the far side of the floor. She threw open the door and clattered down the stairwell.
Design assistants couldn't afford to wait for the elevator. An irony, given the ridiculous shoes they liked to wear. Even at a fitnesswear company, the young fashion graduates teetered around in sexy stilettos or whatever they thought was sophisticated and hot, no matter how impractical for a person who was going to be doing thinly disguised manual labor for ten hours a day.
If Ed hadn't liked looking at the young pretty legs so much, he would have let Liam outlaw the heels. Everyone should wear athletic shoes or something they could move around in. They were a fitness company, for God's sake, not a New York cut-and-sew house. They stood for something.
But he wasn't quite in charge, was he? Not then, and not now. No, he was just responsible for the final result. Everyone came to him and he told them what to do, but ultimately it had been Ed behind every policy, every rule, every hire in the building.
And now it would never change. Ed had died and left the company to his spoiled descendants who would finally sell out Fite, take the cash, and leave Liam at the whims of whatever transnational holding company swallowed them up.
Just because Ed had wanted to leave it to a blood relation. As if Liam hadn’t loved him more than his family ever had.
“Liam!”
He turned to see Wayne Woo, the men's new production patternmaker, waving at him from behind a rolling rack. Liam kept walking. “Can't stop. Late for a meeting.” Which almost cheered him up, knowing how desperate the designers would be for him to be very, very late. It was cruel of him to move up a big meeting like that, but he was pissed off. At Ed, at the company, at himself.
But Wayne didn't give up so easily, chasing him down near the row of humming sewing machines outside the stairwell. “I've been working on this all night.” Wayne shoved something on a hanger at him. “I resolved the chafing problem in the Fite the Man shorts. And the seams are flat along the hem, though we can't press these goods too hard or they'll shine—”
“Wayne.” Liam gave him his coldest glare. “Not now.”
The young man in the bicep-baring tan
k top didn't seem to hear him. He continued to hold the shorts out to him. “And if we change the reflective embroidered logo to a screen print, we can afford an iPod pocket—”
“Wayne!” Sally, a senior patternmaker in a Tinkerbell sweatshirt, ran over to rescue Liam. Or Wayne, really, since Liam was glaring at the well-built young guy, silently questioning Ed's hiring judgment again. Ed had loved the good-looking talkers, male or female and regardless of their talent. Though at least this guy looked like he knew the difference between a squat and a deadlift.
“Sorry, Liam. He won't bother you again.” Sally pulled the guy away and whispered furiously into his ear.
Liam nodded and kept going, satisfied but wondering when he'd become the type of boss who couldn't bear to have the little people talk to him directly.
Wayne continued complaining to Sally. “But Darrin won't listen to anything I have to say either. He told me thinking is above my pay grade. Well, duh de dum, how fucking boring is that?”
She shushed him. “Not now!”
Liam turned around and saw Wayne shaking his head with the deflating enthusiasm of a new employee who’d just begun to realize Fite wasn’t as cool as its ads. “Wayne, hold on. Come back.”
The young guy lit up and hurried over. “Yeah?”
“Show me.” Liam held out his hand, and Wayne thrust the shorts at him. With a practiced touch, Liam unclipped the hanger and ran his fingers along the inside seams, judged the fit of the waistband and studied the small inside pocket. “Darrin wouldn't look at it?”
“Just told me to save a couple bucks on the make so it could retail under thirty,” he said. “But going cheap on the stitching makes it chafe, and taking out both pockets doesn't give you any place to stick your keys or music when you go out for a run.”
“And what'd he say to that?”
“He said our customer isn't going out for a run. That he just wears the shorts to lie on the couch stuffing his face, and doesn't need a pocket for his remote control.”
Biting back fury, Liam looked away and ran his hand through his hair to stay calm. “He said that?” That snotty weasel.
“When I argued with him, he threatened to go to you.” Wayne smiled, exaggerating the silver stud through his lower lip. “But I figured I'd save him the trouble.”
Love Handles (A Romantic Comedy) Page 2
