“You have me on speaker phone, don’t you?” Aretha’s accusation was as loud as it was unmistakable. “That’s it. I’m buying you a Bluetooth device for those perky ears of yours.”
Nina bit her bottom lip, typed in a few key words to pacify the paragraphs, and picked up her cell phone. “You’re off now,” she mashed the speaker button, then held the phone to her ear as she plowed through the contents of her purse hoping to excavate a buried Snickers bar. “And I have no idea where deadline originated, and I don’t need to know at this moment because I’m less than an hour away from meeting mine.” She pulled out an empty Twix wrapper, two smashed cheese crackers, and an aging peppermint. Her stomach rumbled in disappointment. “What’s up? And the microwave version.” They’d been roommates a little over a year, and Nina learned Aretha couldn’t tell someone the time without detailing where, when, and why she bought her watch.
“Well, if you’d bother to listen to your voicemails you’d know what’s up. The fact that you’re so cranky ought to remind you we’re waiting for you at Carrabba’s. It was your idea to eat Italian this month. Remember?”
Girls’ Night Out. She forgot. Again. “It can’t be seven o’clock already . . .” Had it been that long since Daisy left? She stood and looked around the room. With the exception of a few interns huddled around Grey’s Anatomy, she was the lone staff writer left in the office.
Squinting to check the clock in the corner of her computer screen, she heard Aretha’s voice, “No. It’s almost thirty minutes later.”
Nina figured by the time she finished checking and rechecking the article before sending it off to Elise, the girls would already be ordering or eating dessert. Doubtful they’d want to wait for her to catch up. Not that she could blame them. And if she wasn’t already holding her breath to button her jeans, she’d go straight for the tiramisu and skip dinner altogether. With enough misery threaded into her voice to gather a bit of sympathy, Nina said, “I’m so sorry. I have to get this story in on time. Especially after today . . . but I’ll tell you more about that later. Please ask the girls to forgive me for making them wait.”
She truly meant the part about being sorry. In college, Nina chose not to rush for a sorority, mainly because she never received an invitation. It wasn’t until she and Aretha became roommates that she began to let loose of the notion that all women her age were younger versions of her mother, eager to provide a list of her shortcomings in the name of helping her become the way God meant her to be. Nina felt comfortable with this group, and she didn’t want to jeopardize that friendship by being the lone no-show every month.
“You’re just lucky we all like you or else we’d have voted you off the dinner table by now,” said Aretha. “I suppose you want an order to go.”
Nina thought she felt her stomach applaud. “Yes, please. Pasta Weesie.”
“You know you order that every time? I think you just like saying the name,” she said and sounded less frustrated and more amused. “Let me hang up or else they’ll start thinking I’m redecorating the kitchen or something.”
Aretha, in her last semester of interior design school, had a “fabulous idea to make this room pop” almost everywhere they went. At the last dinner, the group threatened to blindfold her just to have a conversation not focused on window treatments or paint colors.
Knowing she’d be met by fettuccine Alfredo with shrimp motivated Nina to push herself through the article, assembling what remained like puzzle pieces, snapping them into place until the picture was complete. Not that profiling candidates for local county elections made for riveting writing. And that was exactly the problem. Nina hoped there was a story waiting for her to find it. A story that would prompt Elise to maybe send a two-line email. A story that would begin to pave her way to the Big Apple.
“Miss O’Malley?”
Startled, Nina’s body hiccupped. She took a deep breath and recognized the lilac perfume Shannon, one of the interns, typically wore. Nina turned to face her. “Now that I know it’s you, what scares me more is your using ‘Miss.’ It ages me five years.”
“I’m sorry.” A smile flickered across Shannon’s face as she slid her pearl drop back and forth on her necklace chain. “We’re all leaving. Do you want us, me, to wait for you?” The other interns, three young women who looked like they shopped in each other’s closets, hovered a cubicle away.
Nina stretched back in her chair, mowed her fingers through her entirely-too-short hair, then stared at her monitor. “Not much more to go.” She looked at Shannon and realized she didn’t even know her last name. Or even what she did for the magazine. Have I been that cocooned in my own life? Earlier, Elise encouraged her to network. Nina realized at that moment she better begin in her own office. But clearly not now.
“So . . . um . . . does that mean it’s okay for us to go?” Shannon asked as if she had dropped Nina off for her first day of kindergarten and needed the teacher’s permission to leave.
Distracted by her own shortcomings, she’d created another by not answering Shannon’s question. “Oh, of course, of course,” she replied and sounded perkier than she meant to. “I shouldn’t be long, and Nelson can walk me to my car.”
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Shannon, and she trailed after her friends as they headed out the door.
It didn’t register until after Nina had clicked “send” that she forgot to thank Shannon for thinking about her. How inconsiderate.
Nina didn’t know if she heard her mother’s voice just then or her own.
Did her mother always have to be right?
Nina had asked herself that question, she supposed, since she could first express a coherent thought. The answer didn’t change. Sometimes Sheila wasn’t 100 percent right, but on some weird pie chart of probabilities, there would always be a slice for her mother. Little wonder her father spent so much time shrugging his shoulders and shuffling into his mancave when his wife’s pronouncements fell like stinging rain.
In sixth grade, Nina became friends with Elizabeth Hamilton, and Sheila told her she should stay away from her because “that girl’s nothing but trouble.” With every trouble-free year that passed, Nina reminded her mother what she had said about her friend. Four years of trouble-free, until the tenth grade when Elizabeth had a “stomach virus” that eight months later was named Andy. And Sheila reminded her daughter what she had said about her friend.
During her junior year of high school, Nina started being invited to parties given by girls who wore shoes that cost more than all of her clothes. They didn’t seem to mind picking her up in their sleek cars, the ones that didn’t have names, just initials. They even let her wear their dresses to school dances where the beautiful girls met the handsome boys, and they moved inside their own force field that kept everyone else away. One day, on the way to the women’s Bible study at church, her mother said, “Those girls are just buttering you up to use you. One day, they’re going to drop you like a hot potato.”
Nina laughed. “What could I possibly have that those girls would ever want? Is it too hard for you to believe popular kids could like me?”
Some days after school, Nina would be invited to one of their houses, the ones kept behind gates. They’d ask their maids to fix them something to eat, escape to the kids’ den where they would listen to music, watch television, and complain about homework. They were so very impressed with Nina’s ability to understand calculus, analyze poetry, and write essays. They asked for her help, flattered her. It felt good to be needed. She noticed, though, as weeks passed, that the more she did to help them, the less they did to help themselves. When Nina refused to write Courtney’s research paper because she could barely complete her own, she faded from their sight a little bit every day. Until one day, she was completely invisible. And Sheila reminded her daughter of what she had said about her friends.
Her first relationship in college ended when, after almost a year of dating, Adam informed her he wasn’t “ready to commi
t to anything more serious.” Sheila said “he was up to no good.” Three months later, he married her roommate.
Nina spent her life walking through the mine field of her mother’s judgments, and no matter where she stepped, something was going to blow up. Tonight, forgetting to thank the intern? Not even a minor blast.
Nina shut down her laptop, slipped her feet back into her not-at-all sensible suede peep-toe shoes, and decided fettuccine and an upcoming story on the new ambulance service weren’t compatible. All she needed for home was herself. She hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and headed for the door when she remembered she forgot to email Daisy about a possible interview with one of the preservationist candidates she profiled. Since she was only a few steps away from Daisy’s desk, Nina pulled a blank sheet of paper out of the printer, jotted the information, and set it on her calendar pad next to a screaming yellow sticky note. Certainly, Daisy couldn’t miss that. Neither could Nina because what Daisy had written on it shocked her: “Ask JB about the opening in NY.”
3
As soon as she put her key into the lock, Nina heard Manny’s canine symphony of yelps, barks, and squeals on the other side of the door. She scooped him up after she walked in because, if she didn’t, he’d be doing figure eights around her legs until she did. “Okay, okay, little man, I’m happy to see you, too,” she said as she petted Manny and calmed his enthusiastic, cold-nose nuzzling greeting.
Aretha stood at the kitchen sink filling a teakettle with water. She looked over her shoulder at Nina and smiled. “You know, I hope to find a husband who’s as excited to see me come home as that dog is to see you.”
Nina laughed and released the wiggling puppy who headed to his water bowl, his stubby legs causing him to toddle on the oak floors like a canine Charlie Chaplin. “I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the excitement if he didn’t have doggy breath.” She hung her purse on the hall tree and felt her body sigh in relief as if it had just been permitted to acknowledge it was tired. Nina pulled off her shoes and left them at the foot of the stairs before sitting on one of the kitchen barstools. “I’m so glad we ended up living here in the city; otherwise, I might have had to spend the night at the office.”
“You’re so welcome,” Aretha told Nina and smiled, knowing they shared the memory of that decision. Nina, with the exception of college dorms, grew up in neighborhoods where the ranch style homes differed only by their brick color and front door placement. After college, she moved into an apartment complex that wasn’t much different. Coming home at night required close attention to make certain the door you attempted to unlock was your own. But, it was close to her job then and, even after she was hired by Trends, she grew accustomed to the long drive.
Her choice of rentals was one of the few intersections of belief that Aretha and Brady, the then Brady, had. When he asked if she planned to move closer when the lease expired, Nina had shrugged and said, “I’m not sure. It’s not that bad.”
The two of them had driven to Baldwin Park to let Manny, just months old then, experience grass and sunshine and other wonders of nature he couldn’t see from his kennel in Nina’s kitchen. Brady had stopped the game of fetch he played with the puppy to look at Nina. “Don’t you want more from life than, ‘it’s not bad’?” She sensed, by the way he averted his eyes so quickly, that he could see she’d never given it a thought.
Aretha had been dating Franklin, a friend of Brady’s, when they met. The four of them would often meet for dinner or brunch on Sunday mornings. At first glance, the two women seemed the unlikeliest of friends. Nina was as fair as Aretha was dark, as tall as she was short. While Aretha kept her wits about her, Nina scattered hers everywhere. They became fast friends, the kind of comfortable that allowed them to be quiet or rowdy in one another’s presence, and knowing which one the other most needed. Their relationships with the men in their lives ended, one sputtering to a close, the other screeched over the finish line. Instead of feeling abandoned, the two young women picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and started all over again.
When they’d first committed to become roomies, Nina had thought she and Aretha should consider renting a garden home in one of the upstart suburban communities miles outside of Houston. Manny would have a yard, and they wouldn’t have to worry about crime. Aretha countered that since Manny was smaller than a five-pound bag of sugar and would spend almost all of his time inside, a yard the size of a beach towel would be sufficient. “And you will have to deal with crime,” she’d told Nina, “because if I have to drive back and forth to school and work fighting that traffic, I’ll want to kill you myself. Plus, a woman with cornrows named Aretha has no business being anywhere but the city.”
But now her cornrows were long, loose braids whose movements reflected an energized or subdued Aretha at any given time. She placed a bag of Earl Grey tea in one of the vintage cups from her collection, this one decorated with delicate violets and sprigs of greenery. “Guess my evening ritual will include nuking that dinner of yours,” Aretha said and took a lemon for her tea and a to-go box out of the refrigerator.
Nina ran her bare feet along the bottom rung of the chair trying to restore her cramped toes to life. “I had one of those horrible, no good, terrible, awful days. I felt like Alexander in that children’s book. And it started this morning.” Elbows on the counter, cradling her face in her hands, Nina might have fallen asleep except for the lush smell of garlic and butter and rosemary escaping from the microwave. And Manny barking at his empty food bowl.
“Mister, I fed you earlier. Don’t pretend you’ve been neglected just because your momma’s home.” Aretha always translated his barks, growls, whines, head tilts, and chirps into words, and he almost always ignored hers. He circled the bowl as if to reassure himself he’d not missed a nibble, eyed Aretha, then Nina, and settled himself in his dog bed. “He’s pouting,” Aretha concluded. “He’ll get over it.”
Knowing Aretha took this conversation seriously, Nina just nodded her head and tried not to smile. Especially since, after hearing Aretha’s voice, Manny turned his head away from them and faced the wall.
She transferred Nina’s dinner to a plate, “Take this, you can tell me your sad story while I do my homework.” She nodded in the direction of the den where a mini-library spilled over the sofa cushions.
Nina sat in the worn leather chair next to the sofa. She draped a placemat across her lap and balanced her plate as she propped her feet on the glass-topped coffee table. Between bites, she narrated her dreadful day, ending with the cryptic note on Daisy’s desk.
“Give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe all those initials are wildly incidental,” Aretha said in that voice she used when she complimented someone’s rather ordinary-looking baby. She didn’t sound convincing then either. Her legs tucked under as she sat on the sofa, Aretha had formed a moat of books and magazines around herself in search of historical photographs for her upcoming design assignment.
“You couldn’t even make eye contact with me when you said that. If you don’t believe it, why do you want me to?” Nina ate the shrimp she’d stabbed with her fork and waited for Aretha’s response.
“Look at this stunning Louis XIV armoire,” said Aretha, her brown eyes lit with a reverent awe as she held up a picture of a massive wardrobe with a star of Bethlehem carved on each door. “Sorry.” She closed the magazine. “Got distracted.” She rearranged an almost toppling stack of art books, unwound her legs and stretched them out on the ottoman. “I doubt if there’s an inner office conspiracy at Trends. Just ask Daisy tomorrow.”
Nina looked up from her pasta-twirling. “Sure. I’ll ask her what the note on her desk, not mine, meant. She wouldn’t at all think it might be an invasion of her privacy. And, anyway, she’s not once expressed an interest in going to New York. Wouldn’t she have said something when I told her months ago that I wanted that position? Do you think . . .” She stopped, her voice shifted into worrisome. “Do you think maybe she wanted to go? But not
with me?”
“If you were any more neurotic, I would have to take you to work and pray someone would take pity on me and commit you. Those county mental health specialists don’t fool around,” said Aretha, her words edged with just enough seriousness to pinch Nina’s ego. “Maybe it’s time for you to reassess.” She looked over Nina’s shoulder. “And take Manny for a walk.”
Nina looked down to see her dog, holding one end of his leash between his teeth, the rest of it snaked behind him.
“See, even he knows, sometimes you just have to be upfront about what you want,” said Aretha.
4
Nina pulled away from the drive-through at Starbucks when her mother’s phone number flashed on her navigation screen. Did Sheila O’Malley feel a shift in her frugal universe because her daughter just bought a latte for the price of a pound of coffee? Nina decided to stay on the feeder road and not attempt merging into the early morning Houston freeway. Verbally sparring with her mother while negotiating the traffic version of dodge ball—could it get any worse? Probably not. Get the worst over with now, and the rest of the day will seem like the set of a Disney movie. She had the cloud waiting for her to answer; the silver lining couldn’t be far behind.
She took a deep breath, pressed the call button, and prepared herself for battle. “Good morning, Mother.”
“Are you in your car?” It sounded like an accusation, not a question.
“I’m on my way to the office,” said Nina and wished she could close her eyes during their conversation. For some reason, shutting out the world in the soft blackness inside herself made her feel less anxious during these painful volleys. “Is there something you need?” She used her best chirpy voice even after she pushed her brake hard to avoid smashing the car in front of her. Her purse toppled onto the floorboard and burped out its contents.
Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series Page 2