“Okay, yeah. All of that,” Juniper conceded.
Gloria wasnotwrong about her type. Juniper already had the wheels turning on how to craft a “coincidental” run-in with the new woman.
“Okay, okay. Is she Runapewak?”
“I don’t know. I just know she asked me for directions to Theo Tyler’s office.” Gloria shuffled some things around on the top of her desk. “I don’t have a badge for her yet, or I’d tell you her name. Bet we still need to get her picture for it.”
“Hmm. Thanks for the intel. I’ll report back.”
Juniper pursed her lips and cast a devious sideways glance at Gloria. Gloria rested her arms on the desk, set her chin in her palms, and winked. Juniper dramatically slid her arms across the top of the desk as she sidestepped away, and they giggled together at the squeak of skin across laminate.
“Don’t forget to invite me to the wedding,” Gloria called out after Juniper rounded the corner to the staircase.
“Aye, I planned on you being my flower girl.”
Juniper took the stairs to the second floor and ran her fingers down the wall as she approached her program’s office. She wouldn’t have an office to herself — she didn’t want to work that way anyway — but she would have a good size room with lots of space to collaborate with other employees or community members with a large storage room off to the side that would eventually house storage cabinets for seed preservation and collection.
She opened the door and stared at the four blank white walls. Where others might feel this was sterile or uninviting, she came alive with thinking of the opportunities. She took inventory of a round, communal table in the center of the room and a desk with a computer in front of the large back window. She peered into the storage room, which was completely vacant. One of her first orders of business would be expending funds to outfit the space with all the necessary supplies to house a fully functioning program office.
She powered up the computer and logged in for the first time. She scanned her email for anything new since she had checked it last night. She couldn’t stop checking her email. She couldn’t stop looking at her official email handle. Too excited. Too much to look forward to.
Even though her path wasn’t what she had always, or ever, envisioned for herself, she was brave enough to wake up everyday and keep trying. Gloria was right – she hated being called resilient. But this was the pay off of that relentless tenacity. Her opportunity to rewrite the narrative of her life. The final curve of her redemption arc. And today was going to be the catalyst for the rest of her life. Of that, she was sure.
???
Earlier that morning, Rowan was paralyzed in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom of the house she grew up in.
“Rowan, you up?” Victor called from the kitchen at the backof the house.
“Yep.” She called out.
She pressed her hands into the edges of the sink and leaned her tall slender frame forward as she stared blankly at herself in the mirror.
What the fuck am I doing back here?
She asked herself, hoping for a different answer this time. An answer that would finally shut up her inner monologue that had kept her awake until 2am. Anything that would help get her body finally moving out of the bathroom.
“Come eat breakfast.” He called out again.
“Yep,” she sighed out to herself.
On her way to the kitchen, she stepped back into her childhood bedroom where she had tried, and failed, to sleep the night before. And the seven nights before that since she’d been home. She grabbed the pair of black lace-up brogue shoes she’d beaten in over the asphalt of New York City over the last couple of years and debated grabbing the matching navy blue suit jacket to the pants she had on.
Too much?
Probably.
Among many other personal characteristics she felt made her stand out like a sore thumb in her community, she certainly didn’t want to give the appearance of being too conspicuous about the money she had made as a lawyer. Even though she was averaging sixty hour weeks at her advocacy start-up and wasn’t working in anything close to corporate law that paid the big bucks, she still made a lot more than her dad. And most other people in the community for that matter. That wasn’t exactly the kind of first –or back again?– impression she was hoping to leave.
She left the jacket where she’d laid it out over her desk chair earlier that morning and made her way to the kitchen. Less was more.
“Dad, you didn’t have to do this.” She looked down at the plate of fish cakes and over easy eggs sitting on the tiny two-person table under the back window of the kitchen.
“Yes, I did. It’s your big first day. Now sit with me and eat up, baby girl.”
She sat down with him, inhaled the decadent and herbaceous scent of freshly pan-fried fish cake, and sliced into an egg. The liquid gold yolk dripped out, and she used her knife to slather it on the overloaded bite of cake she’d piled on her fork. She couldn’t even finish chewing her bite before groaning at how good it tasted.
“That–” She pointed at her plate with her knife, “is a perfect fucking fish cake.”
