“Need? Do I need something? Why would I need something to call my daughter? I just wanted to remind you about Sunday dinner,” she said. “That’s all. You know how much it means to your father to have you there.”
“So, what are you saying? That my being there isn’t important to you? And how could I forget about a dinner you call every week to remind me about that’s been a standing appointment so long my car would drive there without me?”
But, of course, Nina asked none of those questions. She simply said, “I’ll be there.”
Nina took the stairs instead of the elevator, a sort of aerobic decompression to move the tightness in her chest down her body and out through her feet, leaving the tension behind with each pounding step. Why do I let her get under my skin like a splinter?
She knew the reason. She’d known for decades. She was her parents’ only child. Their only surviving child. When Nina was nine, her older brother Thomas came home after his second year at the University of Miami. At first, her parents told their friends Thomas wasn’t sure he wanted to return, that he might want to attend college closer to home. Nina remembered running to hug her brother, excited about the possibility of his being close. But when the summer ended, he didn’t enroll at a Texas university or any other one. Thomas started helping his friend Rick, a housepainter, which annoyed and disappointed their mother who accused him of wasting his intelligence, his potential to make something out of his life. He told her, “It’s what I put in to life that matters. Every day I get to make something fresh and new. That is enough for me, for now.”
That was the only part of their conversation Nina heard that day when she walked in to the kitchen after the yellow school bus lurched away from their street. Thomas looked tired, which, as she headed to her room as per her mother’s orders, she understood on some level even then. The emotional tug-of-war with their mother required endurance training. Sheila continued to tug, but eventually Thomas let go of the rope. Nothing to fight for when there was no one to fight with.
Less than a year later, Sheila picked Nina up from school, an act in itself a signal that something was awry in the O’Malley home, to tell her that Thomas was gone. At first, Nina thought she meant he’d left the hospital where he’d been, but her mother told her that he wasn’t coming home. Ever. After Thomas’s funeral, her father retreated into his wordless shrugs, and her mother donned the armor of the self-righteous because, as she told anyone with an ear, “I told him that he wasn’t meant to waste his potential that way.”
Twenty years later, Nina still couldn’t penetrate the shield of her mother’s emotional defenses. And, like her brother, the pain of trying became much greater than the fear of not. But now she needed to sharpen her own sword, fight her own battles. And two of those battles sat in offices on the other side of the Trends door that she now opened.
She stepped into the lobby, and the aroma of hazelnut coffee greeted her before Michelle, the new receptionist, had a chance to. She started a month ago, replacing a twenty-something who wore clothes on the verge of vintage and kept an iPod bud in one ear and the receptionist’s headset in the other. The day Elise overheard her tell a client to hold on, “my song’s almost over,” she fired her. Two days later she interviewed Michelle, who looked like she could have been Elise’s older sister though she was probably old enough to be Elise’s mother. The perfect combination of maturity and chic. Michelle was on the phone, but she mouthed “hello” to Nina when she passed and pointed to a tray of scones and muffins on the hospitality table next to the coffee. Nina stopped to fix herself a cup of coffee and carried it and a cinnamon scone to her desk, whispering “Thanks,” to Michelle on her way.
Nina hadn’t yet decided how to approach Daisy about the cryptic note, so walking down the hall to the offices, she felt a pinprick of anxiety. Ridiculous. Daisy is a friend, not your mother. She’s not out to sabotage you. This could be your silver lining after the storm. She took a breath and summoned a smile.
But Daisy wasn’t sitting in her chair eating her predictable breakfast of yogurt, blueberries, and walnuts; in fact, the desk looked just as it did the night before when Nina left. After setting her coffee and scone down, Nina walked around the gray partitioned wall and asked Carole, in charge of ad sales, if she’d seen Daisy or heard if she was out on assignment somewhere. Neither Carole nor her sales reps knew anything. She was about to call Michelle, when her phone buzzed. It was Michelle telling her that Daisy had left a voicemail that she wouldn’t be in the office for a few days. “She said she had unexpected family business to take care of, but she’d be back on Monday.”
“Did she mention where she was going?” Not that her destination was any of Nina’s business, but Daisy wasn’t known for doing disappearing-from-the-office acts. Most of the time, convincing her to disappear from the office was the problem.
“Hmm. No. No, she didn’t. But you have her cell number, right? Maybe you could call and find out, see if she needs us to do anything.”
After Michelle hung up, Nina made it through half her scone and still the “family business” angle confused her. Daisy never mentioned her father in any of their conversations, and all she ever said about her mother was that they had made peace with each other. She knew she didn’t have any siblings because they’d had the “only child” discussion soon after they met. And why didn’t Daisy call her? They didn’t spend too much time together outside of the magazine, but they did text and phone chat at least about office business. So, if Daisy wanted to contact her, she could. Nina checked for a text message, a voicemail. Nothing. She opened her laptop to check her email. Nothing from Daisy, but what she did see there could be a silver lining or another cloud in waiting.
Elise had sent her another email. “Please see me as soon as you arrive this morning.”
5
Nina stared at the email from Elise, then started to roll her chair back to tell Daisy. Only there was no Daisy. No Daisy to demand that she not focus on her unmanicured hands, go-to faux-wrap dress and overdue highlights. No Daisy to reassure her that every communication from Elise was not an invitation to disaster.
She closed her email, checked her makeup using the mirror she kept in her top desk drawer, and wished praying did not seem like a foreign language. Too late to wish an Elise-summons didn’t go directly to her inner child—the one biting her nails as she sat by the telephone and listened as it didn’t ring.
The office stirred around her, awakened from its overnight sleep by phones that rang like alarms, doors that yawned open, and desks that claimed their owners. Still, she hadn’t heard Janie’s voice, so if she just pushed herself into action now, she wouldn’t have to endure the knowing glances as the elevator doors closed.
Nina walked up and found Shannon, the intern from the night before, at the elevator. She held two venti-sized Starbucks’ cups and wore a discombobulated expression. When she spotted Nina, she smiled as if she’d been rescued from a bad blind date.
“Are you going up, too?” Shannon rolled her eyes. “Well, that was a stupid question. Why else would you be standing at the elevator. Right?” She looked at the cups in her hands. “Guess I should’ve bought a caffeine jolt for myself. But I couldn’t figure out how to juggle all that.”
“Can I help you with one of those?” Nina stepped in the elevator first and pushed the button to keep the doors open.
“Thanks. But if you could just press seven for me, I can handle these.”
“Is one of those a skinny soy chai tea latte no foam?”
“Actually, they both are,” Shannon answered.
“So, you’re on your way to Elise’s office,” said Nina, ashamedly relieved that at least she wasn’t the person asked to make the coffee run before the visit.
“Right again.” She held up one cup. “Elise.” The she hoisted the other. “Whoever orders for Elise. How did you know?”
“She’s the only thing the 7th floor and chai tea have in common,” Nina said as the elevator doors o
pened. She nodded in Shannon’s direction. “Go ahead. I’m getting off here, too.” And she hoped not for the last time. “Wait. I can deliver those for you.”
Shannon hesitated, and Nina imagined she weighed the awkwardness of being the coffee waitress against the possible payoff of being willing to serve. Not that she blamed her. “You know, maybe it’s better for you to bring them. I should stop by the bathroom first.”
“Oh, okay. Then I’ll see you downstairs.” Shannon headed to Elise’s office, while Nina veered in the direction of the bathroom that she didn’t really need, but spared the intern from having to make a decision.
“Shannon said you were on your way,” said Tammie, Elise’s assistant. “She’s expecting you.”
“Thanks,” Nina said and smiled when she saw the Starbucks cup by Tammie’s keyboard. She wondered what came first, the order or the boss?
Nina opened the door and heard Elise’s voice as she entered, but she wasn’t at her desk.
“Behind you,” said Elise.
Nina looked back to her right and saw Elise standing over a table in a small room off her office. She’d never noticed it before, but then she had never been in Elise’s office long enough to know where the doors led. Laid out on the long table were flat-plans of each page of the next issue.
“I could do this digitally, but there’s something about being able to see it, large, this way that appeals to me so much more,” said Elise, who continued to look at the pages in front of her. She was one of the few women Nina knew who could pull off a red pleated skirt and silk cream T-shirt without looking as if she was returning to high school. The gunmetal gray suede pumps probably helped. The metal toe seemed perfectly suited for Elise.
Nina didn’t know if a response was expected, since Elise hadn’t even made eye contact yet. She knew what Elise meant because sometimes, especially when she felt stuck, Nina outlined and wrote drafts of her stories on her yellow legal pads. Moving a pen across something tangible connected her to whatever she was working on at the time. But before she could move the words from her brain to her lips, Elise picked her coffee cup off the table, finally looked at Nina, and said, “Let’s go to my desk.”
“Sure,” Nina replied. Oh, brilliant, Nina. What a sharp response. But whatever Elise’s reason for this particular summons, Nina felt confident it wasn’t another cloud. Elise seemed too relaxed. When it came to terminations or demotions, Elise was a guillotine. Fast, sharp, and irreversible.
She reached in her desk drawer and handed Nina an envelope. “Here are two tickets to the We Care benefit next Friday.”
The swish of panic zipped through Nina’s chest because her lack of an immediate response stood between them. Nina knew that Elise knew that she didn’t know enough about the benefit to reply. She watched the realization move over her face as if a window blind had been lowered to block the light.
“The We Care benefit? The fund-raiser for The AIDS Memorial Quilt?” Elise filled the quiet with a question meant to shovel enough mud out of Nina’s brain to unearth the answer.
The shovel hit paydirt. “The quilt in Washington, D.C., right?” Nina unwound her fingers from the chair arm. She’d been holding on like she was preparing for an airport landing.
“Yes, that one. Local support groups donate quilts for a silent auction as a fund-raiser. The money goes to support local projects and the NAMES Project Foundation that preserves and cares for The AIDS Memorial Quilt.”
She took the envelope from Elise and wouldn’t have been surprised if she snatched it right back. Now that she’d saved her head from being chopped off, Nina wondered why she was covering an event so meant for Daisy. Feature writing was definitely not her forte, and schmoozing with Houston’s gilded made her uncomfortable. Daisy could handle being out of her element, especially if it involved such an important cause.
“I know you’re working on the story about that local politician and questionable contracts, so you’re going to have to add this one to your list. Janie will be in New York looking for an apartment. If Daisy’s out longer than we or she expects, well, I don’t want to take that chance.” She took a sip of coffee, then looked at the cup as if someone had just handed her the wrong baby in delivery. “What is this?” Elise set the cup aside. “How difficult is it to order coffee?”
Nina assumed that was a rhetorical question, but rather than risk a conversation about Shannon being the orderer of the coffee, she asked about Daisy. “Michelle told me this morning that Daisy wouldn’t be in for a while. Do you know how she’s doing?” Nina tread cautiously, unsure how Elise would react to being asked information about another employee.
Elise stopped tapping her pen on her desk. “Daisy, from what I could tell by her message, is fine.” She resumed the pen’s previous beat, but Nina was grateful she drummed her desk pad this time. “She wasn’t very forthcoming about her situation, so we’ll just have to wait to see how it unfolds.” Elise turned toward the Houston skyline where glass, brass and mirrored high-rises pierced the clouds. “If only we could figure out a way to grow roses at this height.”
The sadness in Elise’s voice surprised Nina. And the fact that she took time to muse about flowers when she seemed so like those buildings. Imposing, impressive, and impenetrable. She looked at Nina. “So, all the information is on the tickets. If you have no need for the extra ticket, I’m sure someone in the office would be happy to take it.”
“No . . . no, I have someone in mind for the other ticket,” she said. Aretha would love a free night out. “And thank you.” She hoped she sounded genuine. Nina might be disgruntled, but she didn’t want to be impolite. Seeing the worn heel on her shoe when she crossed her legs while she spoke reminded Nina she was not only going to be a stranger to covering benefits, her present wardrobe would surely mark her as a misfit. She returned both feet to the floor, hid her untidy cuticles in her lap, and exposed her fashion-sense handicap. “Is what I should wear on the ticket? Because if it’s not, what do you suggest—”
“It’s Black Tie Optional.” She leaned in closer. Elise must have noticed her expression of confusion. “For you that means a cocktail dress or dressy separates. Some women wear long dresses, but they look like they were lost on the way to their high school prom.”
Note to self: Ask Aretha if my one long dress can be shortened to cocktail length.
She stood and shuffled a stack of papers, “If you have any questions, let Tammie know.”
“Yes, yes I will.” Nina stood and felt the flap of her dress turn east instead of west. She smoothed it back into place. “Thank you, again. And I’m sorry that you won’t be able to attend that night.”
Elise looked up from her iPhone, and her eyebrows lifted as if Nina had just said something amusing. “Oh, Peyton and I will be there. But I certainly wouldn’t attempt to cover the event.”
6
You know, you’re not the date of my dreams.”
Hearing Nina’s voice, Manny whined from inside his portable pet carrier. If Aretha had been along, she could have translated. But Nina was pretty sure he’d be complaining about not riding in one of those hot, new car seats where he could sit high and view the road.
“I can’t wear a pet booster seat to a fancy party, so your ride will have to wait. Besides, spending my Saturday taking you to Dr. Alvarez isn’t what I had in mind for an outing either.” Nina looked in her rearview mirror as she spoke, though all she could see was a pair of wet brown eyes through the netting of his carrier.
No comment from Manny. The more Nina talked to him, the more she understood the conversations between him and Aretha. Manny made for the perfect chat mate when all she needed was to not feel crazy speaking out loud when she was alone or to be able to vent because she didn’t want someone to solve her problems, just to listen to them. She wasn’t so sure he was as thrilled with the arrangement, but the fact that he couldn’t tell her whether he was or not made him such a great non-conversationalist.
She found a parking spot
on the dog side of the veterinary clinic. When she first opened the clinic, Dr. Alvarez had one common waiting room. Some of the cats would practically leap on their owners’ heads when the dogs howled and growled and barked. Over time, her dog and cat clients were becoming as antagonistic as their pets. So, for everyone’s safety and sanity, each now had a separate entrance. The reception desk in the center of the clinic with a swinging door on each side provided, as Dr. Alvarez said in her newsletter, “. . . just enough space for the two and four-legged creatures to get along.”
After checking in, she found a corner away from the sneezing Pomeranian and the Labrador Retriever that wanted to smell every inch of her body. Nina didn’t mind the wait so much. The clinic smelled like lemon oil and appeared freshly scrubbed every time she came in. In fact, the one negative about it was that it made her feel guilty about the state of the dust bunnies at her own home.
A few pages into the latest issue of People, it was Manny’s turn. Nina always smiled when the assistant called out, “Manny O’Malley.” She wasn’t sure Manny was impressed by his lyrical name.
After weighing Manny and showing them to the examination room, Wendy explained to Nina that they’d be seeing the relief veterinarian because Dr. Alvarez’s husband surprised her with a weekend getaway for their anniversary. “The entire office helped him plan it. He’s such a romantic.” Wendy hugged Manny’s file to her chest and looked off into some Maui sunset. “And it doesn’t hurt that he looks like a younger version of George Clooney.”
“I’d be happy with the present version. Does he have an older brother?” Nina attempted to pry Manny’s paws from her shoulder. He’d draped himself across her chest like a sash, and his too-long toenails dug through her sweater and into her skin. “Preferably one who doesn’t mind neurotic pets.” Aretha might have added “women” to that question, so it was probably good she had a hair appointment and couldn’t make it.
Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series Page 3