by Jane Graves
When she arrived, Carolyn was already there, sipping her usual Mocha Frappuccino. She was a woman prone to excessive gossip, wearing out her credit cards, and doing the kind of charity work that involved lots of teas and galas and silent auctions. But since almost all the women Darcy knew had those same characteristics, she figured she might as well hang out with the one with the most fashion sense.
Darcy went to the counter and ordered a Caramel Macchiato. She took a sip and let her eyes close, the sweetened caffeine hitting her system like an anvil dropped from a fourth-story window. Ah, God, it was good. For a moment, it almost made her forget just how destitute she was.
“Okay,” Carolyn said when Darcy sat down. “You have got to tell me what’s been going on.”
Darcy filled her in on the whole story, and when she got to the part about the family living in her house, she thought Carolyn was going to stroke out.
“And now I’m living with my parents,” Darcy said.
“Oh, God. In their trailer?”
Darcy sighed. “Yeah.”
“You know I’d let you stay with me, but Ralph is so unreasonable.”
She had that right. The Lord of the Manor didn’t like Carolyn’s friends dropping by socially, much less taking up residence.
“So what are you going to do now?” Carolyn asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’d loan you some money, but . . .” She sighed. “Ralph is so unreasonable.”
She had that right, too. Once when he thought Carolyn was spending too much money, he took away her credit cards for a whole month. Carolyn would have fared better trying to kick a heroin addiction. If she loaned money to a friend, he’d probably cut her off for life.
“Do you have anything left that’s worth anything?” Carolyn asked. “Something you can sell?”
Darcy thought about the jewelry she’d taken with her to Mexico. Unfortunately, they’d stayed at a beach resort, so she’d brought along mostly costume stuff. She wouldn’t be able to sell that for much.
Then she looked down at her wedding ring. Its emerald-cut center stone had the four Cs in spades, surrounded by stones that were smaller but no less spectacular, all of them set in platinum.
“Just my wedding ring,” she said.
Carolyn gasped. “You can’t sell that!”
“Don’t worry,” Darcy said. “I wouldn’t think of it.”
And not because of any lingering nostalgia about her marriage gone awry. Husband or no husband, this ring was her symbol to every store clerk, spa attendant, and waiter in town that she was a woman of means, and therefore she was to receive the utmost in customer service. Now that she was destitute, she needed that symbol more than ever. No way would she consider taking it off, unless she found another man who could replace it with an even bigger one.
But ring or no ring, just sitting in her Starbucks now, she felt like an imposter, as if everybody here could see through her and right to her blue-collar roots.
“I wonder who else read that article?” Darcy said.
“Well, let’s see,” Carolyn said. “There was Gail Howard, Barbara Barrett, Colette Ward—”
“What?”
“They’re just the ones who called me this morning.”
“Called you? Why did they call you?”
“Because I’m your best friend, and they wanted to know what was going on.”
“Oh, they did? Well, tell them it’s none of their business.”
“I don’t think they’re being catty,” Carolyn said. “I think they’re just concerned.”
“Wrong,” Darcy said. “If they were concerned, they’d have called me themselves. Calling you meant they were on a gossip-gathering mission.”
“Well, last year when Gail divorced Larry because she found out he had a thing for cheap prostitutes, we called Barbara to see what was going on, didn’t we? And last month when Barbara’s son was arrested for cocaine possession, we called Colette. And when—”
“No. Those things were different.”
“How were they different?”
Darcy thought about that for a moment. Truthfully, they weren’t different at all. It was just the way things were in her world. Or what used to be her world. Just because you smiled to somebody’s face didn’t mean you weren’t taking secret pleasure in the fact that their misfortune wasn’t yours.
Now that it was hers, Darcy was rethinking that policy.
“Okay, so it isn’t different,” she admitted. She took another sip of her coffee, savoring every drop as if it were her last. And the way things were going, it just might be. “My father thinks I should get a job.”
Carolyn shuddered. “Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you used to be a receptionist?”
“Yes. A long time ago. That’s how I met Warren.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Do you want to get married again?”
“To the right man.” One who’s breathing. With money.
“I read in Cosmopolitan that forty percent of all people find their spouses at work. You met Warren there. Why not do it again?”
Darcy went still for a moment, turning the idea over in her mind, examining it from all angles. The longer she considered it, the more it gained momentum. Was Carolyn actually making sense?
Warren wasn’t the only man on the planet with deep pockets who might be looking for a beautiful woman to shower with the finer things in life. Hooking a man like Jeremy Bridges might be out of the question, but finding another highly paid upper-management type certainly wasn’t. Darcy hadn’t been blessed with an overabundance of talents, but she’d never had any trouble attracting the opposite sex. She’d just have to be very careful to choose a workplace filled with professional men with large bank accounts. And while she was hunting for her next husband, a regular paycheck would allow her to put a few bucks in a bank account of her own.
Men had all kinds of foibles and insecurities. All she had to do was find one who was divorced and having a nice little midlife crisis that a hot car or hair-replacement surgery hadn’t been able to relieve, and snagging him would be a breeze. She’d just be playing to her strengths. Wasn’t that always a smart thing to do?
For the first time since her life fell apart, she actually felt hopeful.
“That’s not such a bad idea,” Darcy said. “A job may be just the thing I need.”
“There you go. Now you have a plan.” Carolyn checked her watch. “I’d better go. I’d stick around longer, but I have to go home and fix lunch. Ralph’s working from home today, and—”
“I know, I know. He’s so unreasonable.”
Carolyn sighed.
“Carolyn? Why don’t you just divorce him?”
She shrugged weakly. “Because I love him?”
Oh, God. Because she loved him? What was with some women? “Then at least take the ‘kick me’ sign off your back, will you?”
Carolyn shrugged again. Was there such a thing as a human invertebrate?
“I have to go, too,” Darcy said. “It’s time to start job hunting.”
“Don’t you mean manhunting?”
Darcy smiled. “One and the same.”
At nine o’clock the next morning, Darcy sat in the lobby of the A-1 Employment Agency, filling out a job application and a questionnaire about her skills. Unfortunately, it appeared that in the fourteen years she’d been married to Warren, a technological revolution had passed her by. Good thing she’d made an appointment with a man. She needed an edge, and that was about the only thing she had in her favor.
A few minutes later, Darcy was summoned into the employment counselor’s office. She put on her best air of confidence and entitlement, fully prepared to unleash every charm she had on him if that was what it took to land a really plum assignment. But one look at the guy, and she banished those thoughts immediately.
He was young. No, not just young. Any bartender on earth would card
him in a heartbeat. When his face broke into a boyish grin, she was actually relieved not to see a set of braces.
“Ms. McDaniel,” he said, standing as she came through the door. “Come on in here and we’ll have a chat.”
She sat in the chair in front of his desk, eyeing his name plate. Scott Connolly. They’d probably called him Little Scotty Connolly. Last week. In the third grade.
“Okie dokie,” he said, plopping down into his pseudo-leather executive chair like a kid in front of a video game. “Let’s see what we have here.” He slouched back in his chair, swiveling back and forth as he looked at her application.
His expression turned grim. “Your most recent experience was fifteen years ago?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “Hmm. I’m not seeing much computer experience. Do you know anything besides Word? Power-Point? Excel? Maybe a little accounting software?”
It sounded like blah, blah, blah to Darcy’s ears. “I don’t know much about those.” As in, nothing. “But I’m a fast learner.”
“Most companies want you to hit the ground running. What about office machines? Typing speed?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“You’re a little short on qualifications.”
“But all I’m looking for is a receptionist job. Answering phones. Making coffee. Greeting people.” Male people with lots of money.
“You really have been out of the workforce for a while, haven’t you? These days they expect receptionists to do more than just say howdy. Even copiers these days are so complicated you practically need an engineering degree to run them. They want receptionists who can back up other employees. Handle overflow work. Companies are all tightening their belts, so they want lots of bang for their buck.”
“Just send me on an interview. I’ll get the job.”
“Sorry. No can do.”
“Excuse me?”
“Can’t send out unqualified candidates. You might think about taking some junior college classes. A lot of older women are going back to school.”
Darcy’s eyes sprang open wide with horror. “Older women? Just how old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. Forty?”
Forty? Oh, God. Were her roots showing? “I’m not forty.” And I won’t be for another couple of weeks.
Little Scotty just shrugged.
“Don’t you have anything I might be qualified for?” she asked.
“Maybe you should consider something in the food service industry.”
She shuddered.
“Or how about a department store? They’re always hiring.”
Well, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Selling clothes and cosmetics to women she used to buy them with? That would be the ultimate humiliation. And just how was she supposed to meet men like that?
“No, thank you.” Darcy stood up. It was clear that Junior here wasn’t going to be able to help her. It was time to go straight to the source—the companies themselves—and show this little twit just how employable she was.
Darcy had no idea just how unemployable she was.
By the end of the day, she’d visited the Human Resources departments at six major corporations in west Plano. The applications she’d filled out had netted her only two interviews, because most of them stopped the process at that stage with the words she didn’t want to hear: You have no experience. Thanks, but no thanks.
After her last stop, she got into Gertie and sat there, wondering what to do next. Little Scotty had been right. They all wanted her to be “computer literate.” Not only that, but the phone systems she saw today looked like the instrument panels of 747s and came complete with voice mail systems so convoluted it took a flow chart to follow them. They expected a receptionist to do all sorts of mousing around on a computer in addition to looking good, saying hello, and making coffee. Sometime in the past fifteen years, a race of three-handed receptionists had to have surfaced who could actually perform all those functions at once.
As the day progressed, she’d moved from the certainty that she was going to walk right into a cushy job and find the man of her financial dreams to the uncertainty of whether she’d be able to find a job at all. The very idea that all she was qualified to do was put on a paper hat and flip burgers scared her to death. It was even possible that if she went head-to-head with a McTeenager for that job, she’d come out on the losing end.
She rested her forehead on Gertie’s steering wheel, trying to keep from falling apart, trying to think of a way out of this horrible mess.
Well, she thought as she slowly raised her head, there might be one place she could get a job . . . .
No. That was nuts. Even though she was facing the possibility of lifelong poverty, she still had a little bit of pride. The last thing she wanted to do was go back and beg for a job from the crabbiest man alive.
Then she thought about the alternative, which was taking up permanent residence in Dysfunction Junction with no ticket out. At least she could get a little money ahead and some recent job experience so she could get back on her feet again.
Oh, God. Was she actually considering this?
Yes. She was. At least it was a job she knew she could handle. With only a few people in the office, their phone system couldn’t possibly have more than a few lines coming in, and the copier looked as if it had been ripped right out of the 1980s. The big boss clearly needed a personality transplant, but maybe he’d be out of the office most of the time stealing cars from poor, unfortunate people like her and she wouldn’t have to see him very often.
It wasn’t just a solution to her problem. Right now, it looked like her only solution. Bright and early in the morning, she was going to pay John Stark a visit, and she wasn’t leaving until he gave her that job.
Chapter 7
At eight o’clock the next morning, John was in the storage room at the office, digging around for a file he swore had simply disintegrated into thin air. He’d been through practically every box in the place, but still he couldn’t find it. He’d had so many clerks through here—both temporary ones and permanent ones who didn’t work out—that the filing system was in shambles. He closed that box and shoved it aside, too, with a sigh of disgust. Every moment he had to spend doing crap like this was a moment he wasn’t making money bringing in cars.
He picked up his coffee cup and came out of the storage room, surprised to see a woman sitting at the clerk’s desk chatting with Tony. And the moment he realized who the woman was, he could already feel his day going downhill.
An article in the paper a few days ago told him that the man who’d left Darcy McDaniel with nothing had also embezzled from his employer and skipped the country. John found it interesting that she was married to a man who’d turned criminal, which was almost as interesting as the fact that he was fifty-seven years old. Knowing she’d married a man old enough to be her father, along with the fact that she hadn’t held a job in fourteen years, told him all kinds of things about her, and none of them were good.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Darcy slowly turned her gaze to meet his. “I changed my mind.”
“What?”
“I’m accepting your job offer.”
He looked at her dumbly. “I didn’t make you a job offer.”
Tony turned to John. “Uh, yeah, I think you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did. When she said she could handle the job, you said, ‘Well, then. In that case, the job’s all yours.’”
“You think I meant that? I didn’t mean that!”
“I think there’s some kind of law that says you can’t Indian give where jobs are concerned.”
“That’s crap.”
Tony held up his palms as if to say, Hey, man, if you want to go to jail, it’s up to you.
John turned to Darcy. “You’re not working here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to answer that.”
“So you’re going to hire that woman who came in here this morning?” Tony asked. “The one who had to have time off every week to see her parole officer? Or how about the one who you were going to hire until you checked her references?” He turned to Darcy. “She once brought a gun to work and shot a copy machine.”
“I don’t have bad references,” Darcy said.
“I’m betting you don’t have any references,” John said.
She smiled sweetly. “Which means they can’t be bad.”
“You told me you didn’t have to work when you were married. Have you ever even held a job?”
“Of course I have. It’s just been a few years.”
“How many is a few?”
“Come on, John!” Tony said. “Does it really matter? Look at that stack of filing. We can’t find crap around here. And I’m sick of answering the phone.”
“No, you’re sick of having to deal with whatever woman woke up in your bed that morning because there’s nobody here to screen your calls.”
“Uh, yeah. That, too.”
“Don’t worry. I’m on it.” Darcy grabbed a pen and a sticky note, talking as she wrote. “Tell any woman . . . who calls for Tony . . . that he moved to Guam . . . and won’t be coming . . . back.” She pulled the note off and stuck it to the telephone, then folded her hands on the desk and smiled up at Tony.
He flashed her a smile in return. “Now that’s what I call a steep learning curve.”
“My office,” John snapped.
With a roll of his eyes, Tony followed John into his office. They closed the door, and through the glass Darcy could see John’s face turning tense and crabby. She was an eavesdropping expert, but still she made out only about half of what they said. She heard “loose cannon” and “combative” and “nutcase,” and something that sounded like “refrain” but was probably “insane.” Then more stuff from Tony about how somebody needed to be doing the job, so why not her?