Sarah tried to ignore him as she put on a T-shirt and cotton shorts.
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
Sarah didn’t answer. She found some socks in her drawer and sat down on the bed to pull them on.
“Sarah, I’m really sorry.”
“I didn’t mean anything,” she muttered, looking at the floor. “I was only trying to make you feel better.”
“I know.” He touched her gently on the shoulder.
“I always make things worse.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I don’t mean to, but I do. I always say the exact wrong thing at the worst possible time.”
“That has nothing to do with it. I just don’t like talking about my mother.”
“Okay.” Sarah thought for a moment. “But in the truck I wasn’t talking about your mother. I was talking about Mrs. Compson’s sister.”
“You were talking about people going away.”
“Oh, right.” Sarah turned to face him and gave him a small smile. “So let me make sure I have this straight. I shouldn’t talk about families, or people going away, or mothers—”
“We can talk about your mother if you want.”
“Please, no. Anything but that.” Sarah flopped onto her back on the bed and closed her eyes.
“You know, you really ought to give your mother a break.”
Sarah groaned and threw an arm over her face. “Please don’t start.” They’d had this discussion many times before, and neither one ever altered the other’s opinion. Ever since Sarah’s mother had started dating again, three months after Sarah’s father died, every conversation between Sarah and her mother had turned into an argument. Sarah’s solution was to avoid contact as much as possible, even though it was obvious how much this disappointed Matt. He probably thought that if not for Sarah’s attitude, they could all be one big happy family. If he only knew what Sarah’s mother said about him when he wasn’t there to hear.
Sarah sighed. “I won’t talk about your mother anymore tonight if you don’t talk about mine.”
Matt chuckled. “Okay. Deal.”
Sarah reached out for his hand and pulled him down beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder and breathed in his scent of grass and earth and sunlight.
Her family, Matt’s, Mrs. Compson’s—none had lasted. She searched her memory and concluded that she knew only a few families that weren’t obviously screwed up. And those few probably just hid it better.
She held Matt closer. He was her family now. They would make their own family, one that didn’t hurt.
Eight
As she worked in the library the next morning, Sarah tried to concentrate on reorganizing the bookshelves instead of worrying about her upcoming job interview with PennCellular. After sorting the last pile of books, papers, and loose pages, she carried the newspaper bundles downstairs. Later she and Matt could load them into the truck and leave them in the recycling bin near their duplex.
With most of the clutter removed, the library took on a more dignified air. Sarah looked around, satisfied with her work. If she and Matt ever bought a house, she would love to have a room just like this one, full of books, with comfortable sofas to curl up on and a cheery fire in the fireplace in the winter. Before they could buy a house, though, Sarah would have to have a job. A real job.
Sarah sighed and gave up. It was no use; every random thought led her back to the job interview no matter how hard she tried to keep busy. Working at Elm Creek Manor was fine for now, but she had to find something with a future. If only she had a relative or a friend of the family who could help her get her foot in the door somewhere. But she had no such connections, and it wasn’t likely that she’d make any in Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania.
At noon Sarah changed into her interview suit and went to the sewing room to tell Mrs. Compson she was about to leave. The older woman set her quilt aside and scrutinized Sarah’s outfit. “Stand up straight,” she admonished. “You want them to think you have confidence, don’t you? They won’t want to hire someone who slouches.”
Sarah wished all she had to worry about was her posture.
Matt dropped her off a good fifteen minutes early, which she thought was just about right: early enough to make a good impression but not so early that she seemed desperate. “Maybe you are desperate, but Brian Turnbull doesn’t need to know that,” Sarah muttered to her reflection as she pulled open the glass door.
A receptionist near the entrance greeted her and directed her to a small waiting room. Some of the men sitting there glanced up as she entered, then returned to their newspapers and magazines.
She took the last empty seat and tried to get a look at the other applicants without being too obvious. They were all men, which was odd enough in itself, but they were also in their late forties to mid-fifties, surely too experienced for the kind of work Sarah was qualified to do. They wore expensive and expertly made suits. Dismayed, Sarah fingered the hem of her off-the-rack suit jacket and felt her cheeks starting to burn. She could have sworn Turnbull had said the position was entry-level. This interview was going to be a nightmare.
The man in the next chair turned to her and smiled. “Are you here for the cost accounting interview?”
Sarah nodded. “Yes.”
“We all are.” The man shifted in his seat and rubbed his palms on his fine pinstriped slacks. The large rings on the fourth finger of each hand glistened as he gestured to the occupied chairs. “Look at all these folks, and the opening hasn’t even hit the papers yet.”
“I guess a lot of people want to work here.”
“A lot of people want to work, period.” He leaned back and rested his right ankle on his left knee. His hair and mustache were thick and dark, sprinkled heavily with gray throughout. “Did you just graduate from college?”
Sarah smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Actually, it’s been a while.”
“Oh. You look younger.” He let out a heavy sigh. “An accounting major?”
“That’s right.”
“There sure are a lot of you out there, aren’t there?”
Sarah looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Nothing. I don’t mean anything.” His smile appeared forced. “Just … there seem to be more accounting majors every year.”
Sarah shrugged, wishing she could find a polite way to get out of the conversation. “I guess so. It’s an interesting field, I guess, and it’s a pretty stable career choice—”
“Stable?” a stocky man seated across from them interrupted. “Haven’t you ever heard of downsizing?”
“Bill, is that necessary?” the dark-haired man asked. He turned back to Sarah. “Don’t mind him. He gets cranky if he has to go five minutes without a cigarette.”
The stocky man glowered and raised his newspaper to block their view of him.
“Sounds like you know him,” Sarah murmured.
“We worked a temp job together during tax season. Bill smokes like a chimney, all right. I quit six months ago, myself. Did you know that corporate insurance rates are higher for smokers than for nonsmokers?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Well, it’s true. That’s why I quit. Why hire a smoker when you can save money by hiring a nonsmoker?”
“Can they really do that? Isn’t that discrimination?”
“Strictly speaking, they probably aren’t allowed to, but they can always find some other excuse to write down. ‘You’re overqualified.’ Or ‘The new owners like to hire their own teams.’ Some such nonsense.” He sighed. “The point is, why risk it?”
“I see what you mean.”
“I worked for the largest corporate insurance company in Pittsburgh for twenty years, and I know what I’m talking about.”
Everyone looked up as a tall woman in an elegant tailored dress appeared at the door. “Thomas Wilson?” she announced.
The dark-haired man picked up his
leather briefcase and stood. “Nice talking with you. Good luck.” He extended his hand.
Sarah shook it. “Thanks. Good luck to you, too.” He followed the woman out of the room.
Her nervousness suddenly returned in full force. She selected a magazine from the pile on a nearby table and tried to concentrate on an article about HMOs. Occasionally the elegant woman would return and call out the name of another applicant, who would rise and follow her out of the room.
Finally, it was Sarah’s turn.
When they left the waiting room, the woman greeted Sarah with a firm handshake and a pleasant smile. “It’s good to meet you, Sarah. I’m Marcia Welsh, Director of Personnel.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too.” Sarah was surprised to hear that her voice sounded far more confident than she felt.
Marcia stopped at a door bearing a sign that read CONFERENCE ROOM. She opened the door and let Sarah enter before her.
The conference room was roughly the same size as the waiting room, but it was almost completely filled by a large table. The four men and the woman sitting on the other side wore conservative business attire and stern expressions. Marcia closed the door and took a seat between two of the men. She gestured to a lone chair on Sarah’s side of the table. As Sarah sat down, the man closest to her poured a glass of water from a crystal pitcher and pushed it across the table to her.
“Thank you,” Sarah said. He ignored her.
“Well, let’s get started,” the man in the center began. “I’m Brian Turnbull, owner and CEO of PennCellular Corporation.” He reeled off the others’ names and titles so quickly that Sarah had no hope of catching them. She did get the impression that the group included the company’s top executives and representatives from the accounting department, but no one, it seemed, from public relations.
“It’s nice to meet you.” Sarah stood and tried to reach across the table to shake their hands, but she couldn’t quite make it. Embarrassed, she quickly sat down. Marcia smiled understandingly, but the others showed no reaction.
Brian Turnbull began by asking her the same questions she always heard at these interviews: what made her decide to go to Penn State, what she had accomplished at her last job, what did she think her strengths and weak-nesses were, and so on. She recited the answers she had prepared in advance, taking care to make eye contact with everyone around the table. They seemed satisfied with her answers, so Sarah’s anxiety began to ebb.
Then the man who had poured the water set down his pen and pushed his pad away. “Enough of this beating around the bush. How are your math and reasoning skills?”
Sarah started, not because the question was difficult but because until then no one but Mr. Turnbull had addressed her. And Mr. Turnbull had been much nicer. “I feel that they’re quite good,” she replied, trying to look confident. “As you can see from my résumé, I have a three-point-nine GPA in my accounting courses and experience in—”
“Yes, yes, I can see the résumé. That doesn’t answer my question.”
Sarah hesitated. Why did he look so annoyed? “Well—”
“Can you, for example, tell me how many grocery stores there are in the United States of America?”
“How—how many grocery stores?”
“Yes. How many grocery stores. You can include convenience stores if you need to water it down.”
Sarah stared at him. “Grocery stores. Sure.” She decided to take a drink to buy some time. She watched as her hand lifted the glass in slow motion to her lips. It trembled dangerously, and for an instant she imagined it sending a shower of water in all directions. She tried to smile as she carefully returned the glass to the safety of the tabletop. “I was probably sick the day they taught that.”
No one smiled.
Okay, wrong answer. “I guess I could try to figure it out.”
“Try.” The man on the end shoved his pen and pad at her.
“Okay, well, the population of the United States is about a quarter of a billion, right?”
No response.
“Okay, a quarter of a billion.” She scribbled the number on the pad, her heart sinking when she realized they weren’t going to give her a single hint. The interviewers’ silence made her nervous, so she described the steps in the problem aloud as she worked through them on paper. First she estimated the number of aisles in a typical grocery store, then the amount of time an average customer spent in line. As she used those numbers to calculate the number of customers per store per day, she knew her figures could be off by several thousand or by several hundred thousand, but there was nothing she could do to verify them.
She plowed on doggedly, since she had no other choice. As she worked, her nervousness hardened into anger. It was an unfair question, one with no relevance to the job she sought, one she had no chance of answering accurately. She had researched PennCellular, she knew everything there was to know about the latest trends in the profession—but none of that made any difference. All they cared about was this ridiculous grocery store tally.
The man on the end rolled his eyes and shook his head when Sarah had to double back to correct a mistake; she had been working with the number of people in the country rather than the number of families, which was a more appropriate figure since usually one person did the shopping for their household. She tried not to let the man’s disdain bother her, but she felt her cheeks growing hot and she wished she had never come. She raced through the last calculations. The sooner she finished, the sooner she could leave.
“Okay,” Sarah said at last. “If we have sixty-two million five hundred thousand shoppers—”
“That’s a pretty big ‘if,’ ” the man on the end muttered.
Sarah took a deep breath, fighting to keep the tremor out of her voice. “If that’s how many shoppers we have, we would need, um … four thousand, one hundred thirty-three and a half grocery stores. Except there wouldn’t be a half of a grocery store, so let’s say four thousand, one hundred and thirty five.” She stared at the figure. “That doesn’t sound right. It seems like there should be more than that.” She bit her lip and looked at the man on the end. “Is that right?”
He straightened in his seat, indignant. “How should I know?”
Sarah gaped at him. “But—”
“Well, I guess that should pretty much do it,” Turnbull said. “Do you have any questions?”
“Huh?” Her eyes were still fixed on the man on the end.
“Do you have any questions about PennCellular or the job?”
Questions—she had to ask some questions about the job. Frantically she searched her memory for the list she had prepared. Where was it? “Cell phones,” she blurted out. “You sell cell phones?” It sounded like a tongue twister. You sell cell phones by the sell shore.
Turnbull looked puzzled. “Yes, of course we do. I thought you knew that.”
“Oh, I did. I was just checking. Maybe you sell something else, too.”
“No, just cell phones.” He paused and studied her. “Anything else?”
“No—no, I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, we’re all set.” Turnbull rose and the others jumped to their feet. Sarah stood, her legs trembling. He reached across the table and shook her hand. “You’ll be hearing from us either way in a few weeks. Thanks for coming. Ms. Welsh will show you out.”
Sarah nodded. “Thank you.” She felt numb. Marcia led her to the exit and bid her good-bye.
Sarah spotted the truck in the parking lot and almost ran to it. “Thank God you’re here.” She took her seat and leaned back, closing her eyes.
Matt started the truck. “I’ve been here a while. They sure kept you long enough.”
“I spent most of that time in the waiting room. That was the most bizarre interview I’ve ever had.” She told him what had happened, not omitting a single strange or embarrassing detail.
When she finished, Matt shrugged. “Sounds to me like you handled everything just fine.”
“‘Jus
t fine’? I sounded like I never made it past high school algebra.” Then she thought of something else and slapped a palm to her forehead. “Oh, no.”
“What?” “I calculated how many grocery stores there need to be, not how many there are.”
Matt glanced away from the road to look at her. “That doesn’t really matter, though, right?”
“What do you mean? Of course it matters. It’s a completely different issue.”
“Maybe he’s interested in how you tackled the problem, not in whether you got the right number. It’s not like he could check your answer, right? Maybe he was also trying to see how you respond to pressure.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Well, sure.”
“Then it’s worse than I thought.”
“Oh, Sarah.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I’m sure you did as well as anyone else they talked to. Probably better.”
“Think so? You didn’t see the waiting room. All those older men, with all that experience. How am I suppose to compete with them?”
“They probably wonder how they’re supposed to compete with someone younger who won’t expect as much money and won’t be thinking about retirement in five or ten years.”
Sarah looked out the window and said nothing. True, she did wonder why anyone with their experience would be interested in an entry-level job and why they would be out of work in the first place. But those men surely wouldn’t be out of work for long, not with their backgrounds. Everyone else who passed through that waiting room that day would probably have another job before she even had another interview.
Nine
Two days later, Sarah finished her work in the library and was ready to move on to the next cleaning and inventory assignment. But not right away. First, she wanted to continue her quilting lessons. She took the stairs two at time and hurried to the sitting room.
“Fine work,” Mrs. Compson remarked, studying Sarah’s finished Sawtooth Star block with a critical eye. “These stitches are a bit crooked here, but not so bad that you need to rip them out. Fine work for a beginner.”
“What’s next?”
“You’ll need to make templates for your next block, the Double Nine Patch. This block is still rather simple since it has no curved seams or set-in pieces, but it can be tricky. Some of the pieces are small and there are many places where the seams must match up perfectly or the design will be ruined.” As Sarah took a seat, Mrs. Compson handed her the template drafting supplies.
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