She started the long walk to her boss’s office, very much looking forward to seeing Janet, no matter how much it also worried her. Being in Janet’s commanding presence, she consistently felt like some moist, juicy cinnamon roll, fresh out of the oven, all warm and gooey on the inside.
So much for Emily Blunt.
Wendy tried her best to once again banish her gay thoughts as she came to Janet’s door.
Elizabeth had already sat back down at her desk outside, buzzing the intercom to inside: “Ms. Cedar to see you, Jan.”
The intercom clicked. Even through tinny speakers, Janet’s voice was cool and controlling, a firm finger rolling down Wendy’s earlobe… “Send her in.”
Elizabeth gave Wendy a look and, belatedly, Wendy realized she should open the door. And go through.
Janet’s office was chillingly precise. Paintings of nondescript things on the wall, unassuming furniture, a large desk whose surface held only a computer and an inbox and an outbox. The outbox’s stack of papers always outnumbered the inbox’s. And an altimeter wall clock, just to prove she had a personality.
Behind the desk, Janet sat flanked by the view out her floor-to-ceiling windows. Skyscrapers in the background on either side of her, like intimidating goons. Wendy gulped and heard her name in greeting. “Wendy.”
“Ms. Lace,” Wendy said, low-key enough. “How’s tricks?”
Janet got up. She always rose like a cobra coming up from its coils, hands planted firmly on her desk, then tapering away in a supple stroke of her fingertips as she came up to her full height. Wendy didn’t know if it was designed to, but it always had her staring at Janet’s fingers.
“Assuming ‘tricks’ is referring to the well-being of myself and the company that supports my livelihood…”
“Always.”
“Then very good.” Her hands braided together, Janet walked out from behind her desk and over to her liquor cabinet. Her office was much larger than Wendy’s. It had room for a liquor cabinet. It probably had room for a vineyard, if you didn’t care about feng shui. “I’m very pleased to say that, while the gears may turn slowly, they do turn. We retested the new prototype, found a design flaw, and we’re taking it back to the blueprint stage.”
“So.” Wendy paused. “The drawing board?”
“No, we already have drawings of it,” Janet said, perched somewhere between oblivious and simply careless as she browsed for one particular bottle like a general inspecting her troops. Her liquor cabinet curiously resembled an art deco hotel cleaning cart to Wendy’s eyes. “We’re just redesigning it.”
“But isn’t that…bad?” Wendy asked cautiously. “I mean, it’s a huge setback.”
Janet came up with a bottle of brandy. “It would be, but our distinguished competition—” here Janet toasted with the bottle, before endeavoring to open it “—had a test flight of their prototype. It crashed.”
“Oh my God. Is everyone all right?”
“Probably.” Janet shrugged. “I didn’t ask.” She held the bottle out to Wendy, unopened. “Do you mind?”
“Sure,” Wendy said, and worked on the cap. She wondered if Janet couldn’t open it, or just couldn’t open it without looking undignified.
Either way, Wendy could look undignified and open it.
“Thank you.” Janet took the bottle back. “Now, their design flaw was the exact same scissor link problem you identified and that we’ve been taking steps to correct. So you can imagine how pleased the Old Man was to tell Senator Marston all about how our prototype is already well on its way to having that very problem licked.”
“Yeah. Being licked. Cool.”
“And it’s all thanks to you.” Janet poured for both of them into two of those pebbly, crystal glasses that Wendy was sure you weren’t supposed to drink Dr Pepper out of. Of course, she tried not to drink Dr. Pepper out of anything. “You deserve a reward.”
“Oh, well, I…” Licked. Why the hell had Janet had to enunciate it that way? Licked. Like it was the name of a drug or something. Licked. Licked. It’d been three seconds and already that sounded like complete nonsense, like fizzypuff or President Trump. “I was just doing my job.”
“Ms. Cedar, there are two things you should learn from me. One, never let anyone pay you less than you’re worth. Two, always take credit when it’s well-deserved.” Janet handed one of the glasses—tumblers, Wendy thought, then wondered why the hell they were called that—to her. “I know a glass of fine Kentucky bourbon isn’t much, considering you may very well have saved lives by ‘doing your job,’ but it will have to do. Just know that your workmanship does not go unrecognized, or unappreciated. I’m very good at remembering employees as competent and trustworthy as you.”
“Thanks.” Wendy looked at the tumbler. Damn, it was dark. Like amber. “Should I drink this? I am on the clock.”
“Drink,” Janet said.
Wendy obeyed without thinking. It burned. Not as much as the lemonade Wendy had made as a kid without sugar, but more than Wendy thought a throat should, which was none. She coughed and sputtered, and Janet graciously took the tumbler from her.
“It’s an acquired taste,” she said. “Well, that’ll be all. Back to work. Next time I’ll see about getting you a Long Island Iced Tea—”
“Do you have a cold?” Wendy asked suddenly.
Janet froze, coiling inward into a defensive lack of affect in her speech. “Why do you ask?”
Wendy pointed to the wastebasket beside her desk. It was full of wadded-up tissues, so it was either a cold or Janet was jerking off a ton, as Wendy’s scumbag brain pointed out, despite the obvious logistical issues there.
“Oh, yes, just a sniffle,” Janet insisted, though she still seemed perturbed, unaccustomed to being second-guessed or however it was she’d taken Wendy’s question. She knocked back what was left in Wendy’s tumbler. Well, she’s good at swallowing, Wendy’s scumbag brain added, before Wendy managed to silence it for good with threats of watching Downton Abbey.
“Please go,” Janet continued. “I’d hate for you to catch anything.”
“Yeah. Sure,” Wendy agreed, pausing nonetheless. Eyes frantically darting around, seeing if she could get Janet anything. She seemed to have plenty of napkins; a lot of fluids, even if they were largely alcoholic.
“Go, go,” Janet insisted. “Make me more money. Shoo.”
Wendy hurried along, reminding herself that Janet was a grown-ass woman and could buy herself all the DayQuil she needed.
Wendy did not think of her apartment as small. She thought of it as efficient. She really didn’t need a couch to sit on, after all, when she had a bed, or a TV when she had a laptop, or an oven when she had a microwave, or a closet when she had a floor. Sure, it wasn’t like home, where you could take a bath in water, but it was on the first floor of her building and she didn’t have to work up a sweat walking her Triumph Bonneville inside and getting it up onto the kitchen table (eating would now be done on her lap, which was sadly only a single entendre).
With her Bluetooth calling Tina, she got to work on her bike as a mother would fawn over a sick child (although the Bonneville was far more expensive).
“Wendy, hey, what’s up? Bike again?”
“Bike again,” Wendy confirmed. “One of the cable stops disappeared, now the carbs are completely out of sync.”
“You’re never going to get that thing running right,” Tina said between crunches.
Wendy could imagine her lying on her couch, enjoying some pita chips, while they spoke. “We’re never going to get a Terminator movie better than T2 either, but it doesn’t mean we stop trying.”
“Heh. Yeah. So I’m guessing the stop fell out?”
“Yeah, but that’s impossible, there was always tension on the throttle cable.”
“Betcha the cable sheath is dropping. When you turn the bars it straightens out, that puts slack in the cable and the little bastard escapes. Fuck it, tape the damn thing.”
“What abou
t a snap ring?” Wendy asked. “On the outside of the major OD?”
“As you like it. Although you’d think if your dad was going to get you a motorcycle, he’d get you one that worked. Or a penthouse apartment, for that matter.”
“The bike’s a birthday present,” Wendy replied.
“So’s being rich.”
“You’re talking yourself out of riding bitch this very moment.”
“Hey, I always ride bitch no matter where I sit. Now, tell me you didn’t call me just so I could tell you to tape a loose cable?”
Wendy cracked her neck as she went to her toolbox, situated on top of a kitchen chair, and dug out her safety glasses and needle-nose pliers. “You know any homeopathic cold remedies? You know, tea leaves or whatever?”
“You mean from Vietnam, where I was born, or from Cleveland, where I actually grew up?”
“Either’s fine,” Wendy said, pouring an añejo into a tequila glass. The most important safety equipment of all.
“Because if we can’t figure out how to win the World Series, we definitely can’t cure the common cold.”
Wendy got a sangrita from the freezer, carrying the shot glass in the same hand as the añejo. She was a professional. “Okay, but you guys have noodles, right? You eat noodles when you have a cold? That’s like a universal—universally acknowledged treatment for—”
“Don’t.”
“What?” Wendy asked, getting a snap ring out of the parts shelf on the wall.
“You’re planning something. Don’t do it.”
“I’m trying to do something nice for a friend who is down with the cold.”
“I’m your only friend, remember? Who’s this skanky other friend? Is she younger than me?”
Wendy paused, finding the new cable stop that she’d already put in. This one she wasn’t losing. “She…might be Janet Lace.”
“Don’t,” Tina said, one note higher than before.
“It’s not—”
“No.”
“I’m just—”
“Nooooo.”
Gritting her teeth, Wendy jammed the tips of the pliers into the holes at the end of the snap ring. It took her a moment to get them through. “It’s just a little care package to let her know I’m thinking of her. It’s barely even romantic.”
“It’s your boss! She can fire you!”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“And?”
Wendy opened the pliers, forcing the arms of the snap ring to open. “She’s not going to. Listen, men have been seducing women for hundreds of years at least. I think I can pull it off.”
“Remember the last time you tried to seduce someone?”
Her hands occupied with the pliers and snap ring, Wendy bit down on the rim of her tequila, eased the glass over, and sucked up what she could. “That lawsuit was dropped.”
Tina took a breath deep enough for a spiel as Wendy slipped the widened snap ring over the cable stop and the groove where she wanted it to stay. “Listen—if this Lace person is so nice, why don’t you just ask her out on a date? The worst thing she can do is say no, and then at least you can forget the whole thing like I’m telling you to do right now.”
“I would,” Wendy protested, closing the pliers gently. “I absolutely would, but, she might be, and this is just a possibility—she could be married.”
“Could be married? What, was he shot down over German lines or something?”
Wendy pulled the pliers away, letting the ring snap closed. “She wears a wedding ring… It could just be so that men don’t see her as an object of desire and sexually harass her.”
“Yes, that wedding ring is clearly discouraging people from obsessing over her.”
Wendy heard a crunch of pita chips over the line. She’d driven Tina to stress eating.
With a heaving sigh, Wendy tossed the pliers back into her toolbox. “Okay, you think I don’t know it’s not going to happen? I get it, it’s me, it’s not going to happen. But I can at least be nice to her! And she can smile at me! And I can have these really nice sex dreams where she asks me to work late and—sorry. Private thought.”
“No, keep going, this is like watching a true crime show for lesbians. My best friend is O.J. Simpson with a vagina.”
Wendy tapped at the snap ring with a thumb ring on her right hand, making sure it was properly seated. It didn’t budge. “Tina, my ovaries are begging me here. She has a cold and I can take care of her a little bit. This is the only workout my libido gets. At least you can watch Ryan Gosling movies.”
“God, I’m starting to see why my parents had an arranged marriage. Okay, go ahead and pick her up some tissues, in case she runs out. That won’t be too creepy. Just for God’s sake, be subtle about it. Try to conceal your raging les-boner?”
Wendy whipped her safety glasses off and snatched up her sangrita. “I will just ask how she’s doing on tissues because I happen to have some extras in my desk. She won’t even be able to tell I’m gay.”
“Oh, she’ll know, but maybe she’ll think you’re interested in an age-appropriate relationship.”
“Okay, yeah, I can totally get away with that one.” Wendy took a sip of sangrita, then immediately back to the good stuff. The tequila was tasting better already. “I should get her some DayQuil too, right? In case she had some at home but didn’t bring any to the office with her?”
“It’s like Hollywood made a prequel to Single White Female, I swear to God…”
She hung up.
Wendy went to stir the chicken broth she had going on her stove.
Janet tried to focus on Hunting Warbirds, let herself be pulled in by the first few pages until her imagination was well and truly fired, but her attention refused to be so easily assigned. She couldn’t relegate it away from the last words Roberta had spoken to her, or the dream of Wendy that stayed as stubbornly fresh as if she were waking up from it every second.
She closed the book on its first page as Elizabeth came in, bearing papers for her signature. Intuiting Janet’s mood, she left without a word, but with a consoling smile. Janet was signing them when her intercom buzzed—a smooth tone reminiscent of a Tibetan singing bowl. It only disturbed her in so much as she paused in the middle of a pen stroke, taking the time to use her free hand to toggle the intercom, then finishing her signature. “Yes, Elizabeth, what is it?”
“Wendy Cedar here to see you, boss.”
Janet quirked an eyebrow and lifted the contract to double-check if her signature was required on the next page. “Does she have an appointment?”
“Nope.”
“Oh well. Send her in.”
Wendy entered, dressed tolerably, carrying what looked to Janet like a quite undersized briefcase.
“Is that a lunchbox?” Janet asked.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know you were a parent.”
“Oh, I’m not.” Wendy pulled up a chair before Janet’s desk, set the lunchbox down on it, paused to get it just so for Janet’s benefit, then opened it up. The first thing she pulled out was a large Tupperware container. “Chicken noodle soup, old family recipe. Not my family, I found it on the internet, at the end of like a five-thousand-word short story on the emasculation of the American male after Vietnam, it was like out of a cookbook that Hemingway would write, but I tried the recipe and it was actually pretty good, and it is homemade, and it could be vegan, well, the noodles aren’t vegan, but I’m pretty sure the broth doesn’t have a face.”
Janet blinked. “Did I…ask you to bring me chicken soup? And forget about it?”
“No, it’s for your cold.” Wendy explained, sounding briskly sure of herself.
It was her confidence that Janet found most off-putting. She seemed a hundred percent convinced that Janet required chicken soup.
“And here’s a bottle of Sprite, diet, straight from the vending machine so it’s still cold. Although the prices are ridiculous. Like, a buck for this bottle. I could get at least a liter of this at any
convenience store. It’d be warm, yeah, but are we really charging seventy-five cents for the equivalent of a couple ice cubes? What is this, Tito’s Yugoslavia?” She gleaned Janet’s bewilderment quickly. “Or a more relatable metaphor? Here’s a cookie.” Wendy brought out a cookie. It was the size of a piece of bread and emblazoned with chocolate chips. “Don’t worry, they’re not raisins.”
“And this is for my cold?”
“Yeah, I mean, I know how hard you work, you always take your lunch in here, send Lizzie—” Wendy jerked her thumb back to Elizabeth’s desk “—out to get you lunch, if you even have lunch, but c’mon, there’s Chinese food and then there’s food that’s good for fighting a cold.”
“This is a very considerate gesture.” This time, Janet didn’t blink, but fully closed her eyes for a few seconds before opening them again. “Would you like me to pay you back for the ingredients?”
“No, no no no, it’s just a friendly—an act of friendship. ’Cause we’re friends.” Wendy quickly amended her statement. “Or friendly. We’re friendly. Like a mentor or a…an employer.” Wendy cocked her head. “Kind of warm acquaintances, is how I would like to think of us.”
“Did you bring a spoon?”
“Yes!” Wendy said, managing to sound remarkably like she was agreeing to something. She pulled out an actual metal spoon, wrapped in a napkin, from the bottom of the lunchbox.
“Because I have some plastic utensils in my desk,” Janet finished. “Metal is nice, though. Very sturdy. Thank you for the gesture of…” Janet sought out a word. “Goodwill?”
Wendy made an elaborate gesture that amounted to ‘let’s call it that.’
Janet reached for the Sprite.
“Wait!”
“What? You already said it was diet.”
Wendy felt around in the lunchbox. “I got you some extra DayQuil too, in case you ran out. So you should probably take that before the Sprite, so you have something to wash it down—” Wendy then looked inside the lunchbox. “And I left it in my car. This is a very small lunchbox, there wasn’t a lot of room, and I was pretty worried about smashing the cookie.”
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