One night the machine ate Olivia’s rumpled dollar. She banged on it ineffectually and yelled,“Gol-darn it!”
Cady had never heard anyone say something like that except on television.
“Early training,” Olivia explained to Cady, with an embarrassed smile and a chagrined little shrug. “My mom’s a stickler for polite language. If she gets really, really mad she might say, ‘Dammit!’But then she always follows it up with: ‘Pardon my French!’”
Cady smiled, hitting the machine just so while reaching in the back, the way she had learned to do as a bad kid with no spending money. The mechanism started to hum and a PayDay bar banged down into the metal trough.
“There you go.”
“Thanks! That’s a neat trick. So, what’s your name?”
Olivia didn’t even know her name? It figured.Stuck-up jerk.
But nipping at the heels of anger was shame: Try as she might, Cady just didn’t pick up on social cues like other people did. She wondered whether it was something integral to her—some mysterious bit of genetic code she had inherited from her unknown parents—or if it derived from her detached, frenetic childhood. Ultimately it didn’t matter. She had always known she wasn’t...likable.
She turned on her heel and stalked back to the classroom.
After class, as Cady was gathering her things, Olivia made a beeline across the room. “So, I’m an idiot in general. And I can never remember names.”
Cady shrugged and zipped up the battered leather backpack she had scored at the flea market for five dollars.
“I’m a bit of a sleuth, though. Not to mention stubborn,” Olivia said, holding out her hand. “It’s nice to officially meet you, Cady Drake. I’m Olivia Gray. How do you do?”
Cady stared at her hand for a beat.
“Like I said, I know I’m clueless,” Olivia continued. “But since we’re the only two people in this class under the age of forty, I was wondering, do you want to go grab a drink?”
Maxine’s voice whispered in her mind:“Get over yourself, girl. Don’t assume everyone’s out to get you.”
So Cady nodded, and they stopped by George O’s. It was a seedy dive bar, typical for this part of Oakland, but when they walked in, Olivia’s eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning.
“This is great,” she announced, taking in the dartboard, out-of-date Halloween decorations, and half a dozen men slouched over the bar. She ordered bourbon on the rocks, and Cady did the same.
“So,” Olivia said as they took their drinks to a table. “‘Cady’ is a pretty name. I saw on the roster that you don’t spell it the traditional way, K-A-T-Y.”
“Yeah,” said Cady. “I mean, I came with it.”
Olivia smiled. “I always hated my name.”
“Why?”
“The kids used to taunt me at school, calling me Olive Oyl,” she said in a low voice, as though confiding a shameful secret.
“Gee,” said Cady after a beat, “that must have been very traumatic for you.”
Olivia looked surprised, then started laughing. “You just made a joke! And here I thought you were serious all the time.” She held up her glass. “Let’s have a toast. To quote Humphrey Bogart in that movie: ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’”
And oddly enough, it was. After the photography class ended, they enrolled in French language courses, then Thai cooking, then botany. Olivia and her boyfriend, Sebastian, had Cady and Maxine over for dinner, and when they married, Cady stood up with them at City Hall. Olivia loved to tag along at antiques flea markets, asking questions, and furnishing her falling-down West Oakland Victorian one piece ata time. Eventually she landed a job atSunsetmagazine, and steered the occasional freelance photography job Cady’s way.
Through the years they joked about who had the upper hand in the “Trauma Olympics,” and whenever she invoked her childhood, Cady was the hands-down winner. But Olivia had struggles of her own.
“Cady!” Olivia called again through the door of Maxine’s Treasures. “Open up. I brought coffee, made with my very own hands.”
With reluctance, Cady emerged from the back room and crossed the crowded shop floor.
“I don’t want any,” Cady said through the glass pane of the front door.
“Too bad. Open up.”
