She gestures for me to sit, and of course I comply. Rather than sinking back into the bowed and tufted white leather chair, I sit with my back rod straight, ready to jump up and bolt at any second, which is what I feel like doing.
"I need you to take over the Emory Brewster project," Candace says without preamble, her hands prim and still in front of her as she gazes at me from across her uncluttered desk.
I can't help myself. I scoff out loud. "Take it over?" I say. "It was my project to begin with." I can't believe these words have just escaped my lips, but now that they're out there, I might as well keep going. Somewhere in the back of my brain, my promise to "get my fire back" is playing on repeat.
Candace looks scandalized, but she doesn't say anything. So I press on.
"Why?" I ask, my eyes narrowing at her. "What happened? Lover's quarrel?"
I had no idea when I woke up today that I was on a mission to get fired.
She purses her collagen-stuffed lips, and with her eyes bugged out by my brash response, it gives her the effect of a pale, smooth-skinned fish. She looks like this glass Christmas ornament my mom bought on a family trip to Cape Cod one summer—it's gaudy, with a glitter-striped body, an anchor painted on a jaunty hat that's perched above its head, and huge, pink, glittery lips. Thinking of her this way, I can't take any of what I'm saying seriously. It's as if I'm having an out-of-body experience.
"I can understand why you're upset with me," she says in a voice that doesn't sound contrite. Still, I can't believe she's accepting any responsibility for our current situation. Up to this point, she hasn't so much as acknowledged the fact that Brewster was my client. "But no," she says in a quiet voice. "It's the opposite of what you're suggesting. Emory and I have become…close, and I'd like to take a step back from our professional relationship. I suggested handing the project over to my team, and he's requested to work with you."
Her lips are pursed again, which makes me think she isn't happy with this particular request.
It also makes me wonder if, of her own accord, Candace would have pawned the project off on Rachael, her new protégé. This ticks me off all over again, and I blurt out, "What about Dan?"
I have no idea where all of this nerve is coming from. Carrie would be so proud.
Candace breathes a deep, shuddery sigh. "Jennifer," she says as if she's about to admonish me, and then she's quiet for a long moment and seems to be contemplating what to say. When she looks up at me, there's steel in her eyes, which has the effect of making me wish I'd shut up while I was ahead.
"Dan and I are…separated."
She doesn't elaborate, so after another long pause I just say, "Oh."
We both sit there in uncomfortable silence, and finally she begins shuffling items around on her desk, pulling a file from her inbox, opening it, and noisily stacking a sheaf of papers. I can tell she won't say anything more on the subject, so I stand.
"Is there anything else?" I ask.
She doesn't look up at me. "Emory will be giving you a call," she says. "If you have questions about anything that's already on order, you can talk to me or Rachael."
Rachael?? I think, broiling internally as I wonder which parts of my project my traitor mentee has been working on behind my back.
But I don't say another word.
As I open the office door and step into the open studio and the curious stares of four sets of eyes, I'm thinking, At least I got Brewster back.
* * *
I'm still in the office at 8:15 that night. Between prepping for my appointment with my new clients, going on a site visit to the bicycle factory—which I found out today I won the bid for, at least halfway—and making a last-minute pit stop by the bakery to oversee the lighting installation, I'm officially swamped.
Plus, I've got the Brewster project back.
When I checked my voicemail after leaving Candace's office, Emory had left me a rambling message filled with instructions about connecting with Aubrey and making sure I'm in the house while the carpenter installs custom shelving that wouldn't have made any sense at all if I hadn't talked to Candace before listening to it.
I'm picking back up with the project as if I'd never left it, apparently. Only I have no idea what I'm walking into, since I wasn't involved in the final selections. Candace dropped the project file on my desk while I was out this afternoon, but I haven't had a chance to look over it yet.
I push back in my desk chair, rubbing my eyes. I've been staring at floor plans for the bakery for the past half hour, trying to work out a problem with the table arrangement in a front room that Chick, the owner, is calling "the study room." There aren't enough outlets in the old building, which used to be a private residence, to support the technology needed for the room to function the way she wants it to, so it's up to me to figure out the most cost-effective way to retrofit the space and get a plan to the electrician. I've just finished drawing up a rough, and now I'm dying for a glass of wine, my DVR, and the squishy afghan on my living room sofa.
I've been so tense these past few weeks that I can't remember the last time I was able to relax. With all my newfound work, it doesn't appear that I'll be doing it anytime soon.
I lean back in my chair and gaze unseeingly at the black-painted industrial pipes that crisscross the ceiling of our studio. After my Facebook gaffe, I thought I'd be losing my job. That's why I created my action plan. I certainly didn't expect it to work this well. I didn't expect to be busier than ever with new work at a time when I thought I'd be sending out résumés and living off my meager savings.
With a jolt, I remember that I have another potential project in the works, one that could dwarf the others in terms of importance. I'm dying to text Amelia and ask how things went with the house inspection, which, if I'm remembering right, took place this morning. Or maybe it's tomorrow morning.
I'll wait for her to tell me. I don't want to bug her to death, and if she wants me to design her prospective new house, she'll let me know when she's ready. But if there's even a chance that a project that big is coming my way, I need to work as hard and fast as I can to clear some of this other work off of my plate.
Even though I'd been about to pack up and go home, I push back up to my desk and open the Brewster file, thinking wistfully of that glass of wine and comfy spot in front of my TV.
If I'm going to reclaim my former success at Greenlee Designs, I can't slack off, not even for one night.
CHAPTER TEN
Ups & Downs
By Wednesday, I'm frazzled but in a good way, still riding the high of being busy and feeling like a competent professional who's good at my job. It once was a familiar feeling, but the past two months still have me unsettled, like the train of my good fortune might jump the track at any minute. To compensate, I'm working harder and faster than usual, which is saying something.
I'm practically manic.
The consultation with the doctor and her husband, who it turns out is also a doctor, happened this morning, and the project is bigger in scope than I realized over the phone. The house is almost completed, which means they didn't hire me in time to help select finishes and fixtures, but the husband wants to start from scratch with furnishings despite the wife's insistence that they have some family pieces they can use. I can already tell that I'll have to be their mediator and their referee. Sometimes interior design is as much psychology as art.
They're moving from a two-bedroom apartment on Mud Island, down by the river, where they'd lived while Nestor, the husband, completed his residency at the VA hospital downtown. Chelsea, the wife, is an allergist at a clinic way out East, near the new house. Since they've spent the past three years in an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment, their old furniture will fit almost entirely inside one upstairs room—meaning their new five-thousand-square-foot space is a blank canvas. Chelsea seems overwhelmed by that fact, but Nestor's eyes sparkled with excitement throughout our meeting.
I've seen it before with professional clients—after y
ears of living frugally to get through school, it's a heady feeling to suddenly start earning a real salary and be able to afford to buy nice things. I know it myself on a much humbler scale.
I'm thrilled and terrified at once about this project because I just went from super-super busy to astronomically busy. As soon as I left the Santiagos' house, my binder stuffed with measurements and notes, I had to move on to the next appointment. I'm now speeding to a meeting with Chick Emerson about the bakery furniture installation.
The electrical work is complete, and as of yesterday the pastry cases at the main register area are installed. I brought in a kitchen designer to help with the big, industrial kitchen that takes up what used to be three rooms in the 1920s house—it will serve as the main pastry kitchen for all three of the bakery's locations. The kitchen, almost clinical in its liberal use of stainless steel against white walls, is nearly finished, and pretty soon the customer-facing spaces where I'm working will be done as well.
Once inside, I get right down to business, pulling open my laptop and talking Chick through the renderings to get her final okay on the seating plan.
"Can we put the big sign here?" She points with one long, slender finger to a spot behind the counter where I've already planned to hang the hand-painted sign with the bakery's confectionary logo. Her nails are rose colored with yellow dots, and this week her hair is the green of mint chocolate chip ice cream. She's like a walking advertisement for her shops.
I smile at her. "That's exactly what I was thinking." From the get-go, Chick and I have been in sync with design decisions. The project has been a piece of cake, no pun intended.
I pace off the lines of booths and tables on the painted hardwood floor, and she okays my fabric suggestions for the study room and for the outdoor seating. Metal bistro tables and chairs dot the covered terrace at the back of the restaurant, which is served through a walk-up window I had installed in the rear wall.
We plan the final furniture installation for a week from Thursday, two days after the benches are scheduled to arrive in our warehouse. The outdoor furniture and wood chairs and tables are already there. I'm feeling the light at the end of this tunnel, and the timing is welcome.
"Now, I want to discuss art in the study room," I say. "I know you're using your original Chick's signage in here." I gesture around the main room. "And I know we're moving over some of the folk art from your store on Monroe. But you have a lot of wall space in the front room, and for that I was thinking we could let it double as a gallery. I have an artist in mind whose color palette and themes would work great with the bakery's aesthetic. I think she'd be excited to form a partnership with you."
"O-M-G, I love it," Chick says, bobbing her head up and down. "I was wondering what you'd want to do with that big, blank wall. So what, we'll just have price tags next to the pieces on the wall? And we'd work out some kind of consignment deal?"
I'm nodding. "Yes, and I was thinking, depending on her stock of available work, that we could rotate pieces pretty often and maybe mix another artist in here or there. And I thought maybe, when you do your grand opening, that you could extend your marketing reach and do a combined bakery and art opening, like a gallery show." I pause. "Maybe even a fund-raiser? I've done some work with Gwyn Evanston at the Youth Art League, and I was thinking they might be interested in getting involved."
Chick flings her arms toward me and pulls me in for a hug. She's wearing a vintage green gingham dress with short, puffed sleeves, and one of the sleeves is stiff against my cheek.
"That's a freaking awesome idea," she says.
I figured she'd feel that way, since Chick is known around town for raising money for various causes. Plus, this artist I'm thinking of is emerging—she's a recent grad of the local art college, and I found her work at a juried exhibition during the school's holiday bazaar. I loved her use of color, and I stored that knowledge up for future use. I knew the right project for her work would come along someday. Plus, I assume she could use the exposure, which means this could be a win-win for everybody involved.
I'm thrilled that Chick seems thrilled. At last, it seems, I'm able to do a few things right.
* * *
When I walk back into the studio two hours later, I'm still riding the high of my day's successes. So when I see Brice, Quinn, and Rachael break apart instantly when I step past the front partition, I don't think anything of it. Brice has a guilty look on his face, and Quinn is snickering as she walks past my desk, but even then I don't connect this behavior with myself. I just figure they've been watching YouTube videos or scrolling the latest posts on People of Walmart. If Quinn spent as much time developing her portfolio as she spends finding and sharing inane internet content, she'd be one of the top designers in the city.
I've just placed my bag on the floor and am pulling items out of it from my appointments when I sense rather than see Quinn loitering beside my chair. I spin around in my seat.
"What's up?" I ask, blowing a strand of hair out of my face. I've been running around all afternoon, and the heat index in the city today is around 110. With all the work I still have to do before I leave the office today, Quinn is like a fly I need to swat off.
"Um, you might want to see this," she says, holding out her phone to me.
I'm still pulling items out of my bag and arranging them on my desk, barely looking at her and wishing she'd get the hint—my body language clearly conveys the fact that I don't have time to talk. I pull out my binder from the Santiago appointment and then sit up in my chair, reaching forward to wake up my computer screen. She's still standing there, looking impatient.
"What is it?" I ask in a dry voice, expecting an epic specimen from Awkward Family Photos or a mind-blowing performance by a nine-year-old soloist on America's Got Talent.
She hands me her phone, and I have to scroll up and then study the screen for several seconds before it begins to register what I'm seeing. It's a website called Facebook Epic Fails, and in front of my horrified eyes is my Facebook status from weeks ago, copied and pasted for the world to see and mock in the comments. I scroll down and see that twenty-three people have already rung in on my shame.
"What the hell is this?" I say in a loud, shrill voice, causing Brice to lift his head from his work and look sheepishly in my direction. I continue scrolling down the screen and reading the comments, unable to speak for several seconds. And then I glare up at Quinn. "Did you do this?"
"No," she says. She sounds taken aback, so I actually believe her.
"Well, how did you find it, then?" I ask, bewildered that such a site even exists. Who are these people with nothing better to do than make fun of strangers on social media?
"Rachael found it," she says, and both of us turn to stare in Rachael's direction, but she's no longer in the room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
New Forms of Self-Destruction
I don't have time to freak out over the Facebook parody site this afternoon because, once again, I'm at work until well past the end of the business day. But it's there, nagging at the back of my mind, for hours.
Mostly I'm obsessing about who's going to see it. My name is blacked out, but if Rachael saw it, clearly it's making the rounds. And who the hell took the screen shot in the first place? The status was only live for maybe seven hours. As far as I know, I don't have any enemies. Whoever captured the image has to be a friend of mine on Facebook. Some friend.
Second, I'm obsessing about how to get it taken down. I have a feeling I won't be able to do it—I'm betting the website operator knows the loopholes to keep from getting sued for libel, and since my name doesn't appear anywhere on the site I doubt I have a claim. A couple times today I almost looked up the site to figure out who to email, but I was too busy to stop working. Besides, just thinking about fighting with some unnamed purveyor of cyberspace makes me disheartened and exhausted.
Finding out a friend is two-faced in real life sucks, sure. But finding out a friend is two-faced via social media is
potentially much more destructive. My generation sure has managed to invent a whole new array of problems. With eons of human history behind us, you'd think humankind would have seen and done it all by now. But the internet age demonstrates in a brand new way how we small, powerless creatures have an endless ability to inflict new forms of self-destruction.
I glance up at the clock on the brick wall of the studio—a George Nelson clock straight out of the '50s, with Sputnik spikes that spoke out from the clock face and end in colored balls—and see that it's almost 7:30. I'm meeting Eleanor for drinks tonight, something that almost never happens these days with the twins and with Brian's frequent work travel, so I can't cancel on her despite the fact that I've barely made a tunnel through my mountain of new work.
It's Brewster's project that's engulfing me right now. I've never started a project, handed it off to someone else in the middle, and then taken it back again. The choices Candace and, apparently, Rachael made don't jive with the notes I took in my initial meeting at Brewster's house, but it's up to me to create a cohesive space out of what I've been given. Part of me loves the challenge, but the bigger part of me is annoyed to death, still, that Candace effed up my project in the first place.
And now I have to sit in the middle of some weird romance between Candace and Brewster that, frankly, doesn't jive. She's eight years his senior, I think, and still married. He's a perpetual bachelor who, as far as I know, hasn't been linked with anybody in the years since his career took off. He was on the same list of the city's most eligible bachelors that Jeremy was on, only considerably higher up.
I'm poring over the furniture file, trying to figure out what's being shipped when. There's a sofa coming from Henredon that's scheduled to arrive next week, the same day I'm charged with sitting at Brewster's house to oversee the bookshelf construction project. There are case goods from a North Carolina-based manufacturer that still actually builds and finishes its pieces in the United States—a real rarity these days. Most every stick of furniture we order from our trade sources now is produced in China, even the high-end pieces.
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