Searching For Meredith Love
By Julie Christensen
Searching For Meredith Love Copyright 2010 by Julie Christensen
Cover design by Jennifer Maginn Copyright 2011
Smashwords edition 2011
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my writing group in New Mexico, where this all began: Cindy Foster, Lucy Bradley-Springer, and Amanda Ferguson. Thanks to Jennifer Maginn for another amazing book cover design. Special appreciation to Chelsea Rondinaro for her graphic design expertise. Thank you to Amy Christensen, proof-reader extraordinaire – 132,348 words and two parties in 48-hours! You rock! Thanks to Marisa Martinez, for getting me to New Mexico, and to Judith Reynolds for introducing me to the Watson Adobe. Thanks to Merci Madar for showing me what the social life of doctors is like. Your limitless capacity for making friends on every rotation and dragging them out to socialize is the main reason I could create a character like Ben Abel. Nancy Oestricher and Paul Weeks, you taught me a lot about smoking and smoking cessation. Julie Reichel and Stacey Wodehouse, you enriched my life when we were in New Mexico, and continue to do so now, even from afar. Finally, thanks to my family for your continued support and encouragement – Mom, Dad, George, Rosemary, Diane, Amy, Stephen, and, of course, Jerry.
Author’s Note
The Cowboy Junkies song that Meredith references in Chapter 27, You Will Be Loved Again, was written by Mary Margaret O'Hara. The Double Rainbow Cafe still exists but is now called Flying Star Cafe. Although the places in this book are real, this is a work of fiction and the characters are completely fabricated. If you recognize yourself in any character’s positive traits, then I may have had you in mind. But if you see yourself in any character’s negative traits, then you’re just imagining things.
Chapter One
“Fear creates loneliness. I’m not afraid, so I’m not lonely.” Meredith realized she had the phone in a vice grip and tried to relax her fingers.
“Then why won’t you meet Joel? He’s an angel. He’s perfect for you.”
“Sarah, I just told you, I’m not lonely.”
“What are you afraid of, Meredith?”
“God, would you listen to what I’m saying?” Someone passing outside the office glanced at Meredith.
“I am listening. I just don’t believe you. Do you really want to be alone your whole life?”
Meredith closed her door. “I’m twenty-nine, Sarah. I still have some time. And I’m working right now. I have to hang up.”
“His eyes are a clear gray. You look at him and you feel like you’re looking at the sky on a rainy, spring day.”
Meredith paused for a moment, and then said in a low voice, “Have you slept with him?”
“Like, a year ago. I’ve only just reconnected with him and he’s perfect for you. He has this great house. It must have cost $200 grand. He owns a BMW and a four-runner.”
Meredith pushed her chair away from her desk. “Sarah, I won’t date someone who owns two cars. It’s disgusting.”
“If you’ve got the money…”
Meredith stood up. “Sarah, I have to go. I have work to do. Stop offering me your leftovers. If I want to date I can find my own man.”
“But that’s just it. You don’t date. You haven’t dated in almost three years. It’s unhealthy.”
“I’m perfectly happy. I’m too busy to date anyway.”
“You are not!”
“I have to go. I’m at work.”
“Fine. I’ll keep looking.”
“Goodbye.” Meredith slammed down the phone. She stared blankly at the phone, and then dropped with a thump into her swivel chair. A knock came at her door and a second later, her boss craned his neck into her office.
“Come in, Doug,” Meredith said as she rolled her chair back to make room for Doug’s entrance. The office wasn’t very large, but it was all hers and she was grateful. As Doug seated himself in the folding chair Meredith had acquired for visitors, Meredith brushed aside a vague feeling that she should offer him her swivel and take the folding chair herself. Doug was the Family Practice department’s statistician. The only PhD in a sea of MDs, he was about 34, a kind-hearted, overworked family man who seemed older than his years. He sat silently now, studying Meredith with worried eyes. In the months they had worked together, Doug had anticipated trouble before Meredith saw it herself, so this long silence made her wonder what was wrong.
“It’s been a week,” he began, leaning toward her with his elbows on his knees. “How’s it going for you?”
“Real well. Things are good.” Meredith fought the urge to twirl her hair. Doug’s dark brown eyes never left her face. She shrugged and smiled. “It doesn’t really seem like my first week because...”
“You’ve been doing the job for much longer. I know. But now it’s official.” Meredith smiled and suppressed her giddiness. “Well, I’m not sorry to leave my secretarial days behind me. And it’s true that I’m looking forward to being able to focus completely on this job. I definitely won’t miss taking messages or filing papers.”
Doug straightened up. “Of course not.” As he put his hands to his knees to stand, he asked, “Any trouble with people forgetting that you’re no longer their secretary?”
As Meredith paused, someone knocked on the door. Dr. Harry Gomez was standing with a computer disk in his hand and an ingratiating look on his face.
“Mer,” he said. “You’ve gotta help me.” Doug stood and Harry held up a hand to ward him off. “Doug, this is between Meredith and me. I’m desperate and she’s the only one who can help.”
“Harry,” Doug’s voice seemed loud against the painted cement brick wall. “Meredith is my computer programmer, not your secretary. It’s time to cut the strings.”
At that moment, a second doctor, Corky Lubbock, poked her head in the door. She was holding a folder that Meredith recognized as the grant proposal Meredith had finished typing up last week. “Meredith, I hope you haven’t lost any of your typing skills yet,” she said. “I need you for one last job.”
Doug shook his head but his eyes gleamed with humor. “You’re like a pack of wolves.”
Harry and Corky laughed. Meredith didn’t. Harry edged past Doug and pleaded, “Just one quick question, Mer. I’ve got the updated quarterly report on this disk, but the computer won’t let me make any changes.”
Meredith reached for the disk as Doug warned, “You do that at your own risk. If you stop them now, they’ll leave you alone. If you keep enabling them, you’ll never get them out of your hair.” Meredith knew Doug was right. But she didn’t know how to say no to Harry. He’d never condescended and he’d always remembered to inquire about her programming coursework.
“Fed-Ex is on their way. I’ve got a 5 p.m. deadline,” Harry wheedled, but it was all for form. His face showed no worries that Meredith would send him away.
“See this black thing?” Meredith said. Harry pretended to study the disk as if he’d be tested later. “Just slide it over to here. You had the disk locked. Now it’s unlocked and you can make changes.”
“Good Lord, how old is your computer, Harry?” said Doug. “No one is using floppy disks anymore.”
“Floppy what?” Harry asked before losing interest in the subject matter and turning back to Meredith. “You’re a gem. Doug, she’s a gem. You’re lucky we couldn’t hold on to her.” “Yes, her ability to use opposable thumbs has come in very handy just now,” Corky smirked. Meredith ignored Corky. Harry smiled at Meredith and said, “Hey, the temp we’ve got left her brain on the bus this morning. What do I need to do to get you in there to make these changes?”
Meredith thought that Harry had probably already forgotten what
the black thing on the disk was for. She looked at him levelly. “I guess you’d have to put a gun to my head.” Harry scowled. He didn’t like that answer - it wasn’t in keeping with the bantering they’d all been doing with each other.
“And here comes the attitude,” Corky said from the doorway.
“Seriously,” Harry said. “You had a roof, heat in the winter, AC in the summer, and great benefits.” He was still smiling, but there was an edge to his voice. “Your job wasn’t as bad as you make it out to be.” With that, everyone made a hasty retreat, including Doug, as surely as if she’d dropped a rotten egg on the floor. Sitting alone again, staring at the computer screen, Meredith spoke quietly to the room. “It was that bad.” Then she jiggled away her screen saver and started working.
It was raining when Meredith left the Family Practice building that evening. She walked slowly to her old blue Nissan hatchback, enjoying the wetness on her face. The Sandia Mountains were turning the famous golden pink they became every day, just before sunset. When Meredith first came to town, she didn’t understand why pink mountains were named after watermelons. She always pictured the green rind of the fruit, not the rosy edible portion of the melon.
The sky was the only thing still light by the time she pulled onto her street. The South Valley was a lot greener than the rest of the city; deep-rooted trees were fed by the Rio Grande. Enclosed in the largest city in New Mexico, the South Valley was more like an underserved rural area, a part of Albuquerque where Spanish flowed readily and cottonwood trees and old pickup trucks dotted the landscape.
Her house was set off the road behind a larger house that was rented by a family of six, the Gonzaleses. To the west was a vacant lot that in the summer was overgrown with a tangle of wildflowers in hurricane grass.
Despite a strong sense of community, the school drop-out rate in the South Valley was high. A lot of families didn’t even have telephones. Many of the homes were very old, some in ill repair. Many were real adobe, with walls two feet thick. Meredith’s own rented cottage was adobe, and she could trace pieces of hay on the outside of her clay walls. The neighborhood let its dogs run unleashed and one dog in particular, a Shepherd mix with a bent leg, would run ahead of Meredith's car to the main road every morning and furiously attack the bumper of any car that dared be on the road when Meredith or one of her neighbors wanted to exit. She had nick named him “Sic’em.” Every morning, Meredith would watch in her rearview mirror as Sic’em trotted back up their road, content that he’d navigated her safely onto the highway.
Tonight, Meredith sat in her parked car, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, listening to the hum of the fan as her Nissan began the long process of cooling itself. Her neighbors were burning citronella candles as they sat scattered around their front porch. A hammock rocked in and out of the darkness. The moisture from the river bred mosquitoes like no other part of town and, despite the candles, Meredith could just make out Mr. Gonzales slapping at his neck and shoulders every few minutes.
Rubbing her face to break up the fatigue, Meredith let out a deep sigh. The commute was about thirty minutes, depending on traffic, and she usually arrived at her driveway with banged-up nerves. But rent was cheap, and it was nice to get a distance between work and home. Work was almost always exhausting, but she thought that if she could put less of herself into the job she would be able to come home and do some kind of project, like learning to crochet. Instead, she spent many evenings laying in a shell-shocked heap on her futon.
Voices from the Gonzales’ porch floated across the evening air. The idea that they were watching her car, speculating on why she was sitting in it, motivated her to climb out and head inside. The phone was ringing as she unlocked the deadbolt. In a mad, unthinking rush, she answered it, immediately regretting her action when she heard, “You were supposed to call me.”
“I just walked in the door, Sarah. My keys are still hanging in the lock.”
“You just got home? You’re a secretary, not a stockbroker.” Cradling the phone in her shoulder, Meredith pulled the keys out of the lock, shut and bolted the door and sank into the sofa.
“Did you go to my graduation last week, Sarah? Did I graduate cum laude in filing?”
Sarah was the president of a small but successful company that made cell phone covers. Last year it was worth $10 million on paper. She had written her business plan in the last year of her MBA. Sarah didn’t get straight As in her classes, but by the time she’d graduated she had $100,000 lent to her from a bank, and two contracts with cell phone companies that wanted to use her designs. Or rather, Eli’s designs. Sarah had lured her designer from a California art school. He made the product, but she sold it.
Captivating and meticulous, Sarah had a talent for promotion, weaving the company into conversations with any individual from whom she thought she could benefit. In the first year, the company made three-quarters of a million dollars in revenue. Sarah paid Eli well, but lived frugally herself in those “lean years.” She’d gone public in her third year, and that’s when the big money was made. Eli was an exceptional designer and Meredith liked to think that if Sarah lost him she’d lose her place in the market. The only reason he’d even signed on board was because he was sleeping with Sarah. Three boyfriends later, Sarah had somehow managed to move on while still retaining Eli’s loyalty. Somehow, Meredith thought, Sarah always managed to have her cake and eat it too.
Because Meredith had worked full-time during graduate school, she’d taken fewer classes each semester and just graduated at the end of July. Those years had been hard, but she’d graduated with a 4.0 GPA. Still, Sarah seemed always to be rubbing her nose in the fact that she had been a secretary.
Back then, Meredith had wrestled constantly between pride in doing her job well and acute embarrassment in telling people she was a secretary. She could see her value as a person diminish in people’s eyes when they found out what she did for a living. Sarah could knock her out of the water in one sentence. “Hi, I own a $10 million company and this is my best friend Meredith, who’s a secretary.” Now that Meredith had finally broken free of those chains, Sarah kept “forgetting” that she could no longer use that stamp.
“I’m not a secretary anymore,” Meredith said. She made an effort not to sound upset. “Just like you, I’ve actually got a real job. And that means that sometimes I work late.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I didn’t forget. I’m just used to that phrase. You worked late all the time as a secretary too, you know. And that was a real job.” Meredith cringed. She was forever voicing what she thought were other people’s unspoken views and then getting lectured on not thinking highly enough of herself.
“People take advantage of you,” Sarah was saying. “You’ve got to start sticking up for yourself.”
Maybe she’s not trying to put me down, Meredith thought. Maybe she talks about my job to people because she doesn’t see shame in it.
“Let’s meet for dinner,” Sarah suggested. “I’m craving a good Caesar salad.”
The restaurant with Sarah’s favorite Caesar was back up in the University area. “I don’t know, Sarah. I’m pretty tired. The thought of driving back out there tonight makes me more tired.”
There was a moment’s pause. Meredith could picture Sarah, mouth dropped open by the shock of being turned down for dinner. Why am I friends with her? Meredith wondered, I don’t even like her. Then Sarah said, “God, how inconsiderate of me. Of course you’re tired. First week on the job. I just thought it would be a nice celebration to mark this crossroads in your life.”
Immediately, Meredith felt ashamed of her thoughts. Sarah couldn’t help being overbearing. And you’re just oversensitive. Her resolve crumbled away. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
“No, you’re tired. And you don’t want to drive.”
“It’s my own fault for living so far away. I’ve got to eat. Traffic at this hour will be light.” She heaved herself off the sofa. Fatigue was set asid
e and purpose took over.
Chapter Two
The waiter came by to refill their water glasses, which were sweating on the table. Meredith paused in her conversation, watching the lemon swirl among the ice cubes as the waiter poured the water from his shiny pitcher. When he stepped away, she continued, “and they are so manipulating. They dump all this praise on me to get me to do their secretarial work and I feed into it. I actually feel flattered.”
“You should feel flattered,” Sarah told her, stabbing her fork into a bed of lettuce. “The bottom line is, you have skills they don’t have.”
“How to get jammed paper out of the Xerox machine is not a skill.”
“Yes it is.”
Meredith took a bite of ravioli. “When I started that job, I had never seen a fax. I didn’t know how to replace the toner. The door of the Xerox has instructions and pictures, but no boss of mine has ever stopped to read them.”
Sarah swallowed a mouthful of salad and nodded her head in agreement. “High maintenance. You’ve got support-dependent bosses. Why think for themselves when someone will think for them.”
Meredith nodded vigorously. Sometimes she loved talking to Sarah. She had flaws but she could analyze a situation and back Meredith up like no one else. The ravioli was good, the conversation was good. She was glad she’d driven up from the South Valley to eat.
Sarah had started talking about a new guy she was dating. Nice-looking but not very ambitious and Sarah felt like she was already outshining him. As Sarah talked, Meredith watched her without really listening. Sarah was not beautiful, but she acted confident and comfortable with herself, so people thought she was. Well groomed, Meredith's grandmother would say. Her nails were manicured and her hair was straight and thick with blunt ends that always looked freshly cut. Meredith unconsciously ran her fingers over her own, long, unruly auburn hair. It was pretty, she’d been told, but the curls seemed young compared to Sarah’s straight, blond, shoulder length cut.
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