Page 2 of Be My Valentine

“Do you have a rubber band? Mr. Arrow just had a go at me about my hair, too.”

Margaret returned a puzzled look to her.

“We all wear it loose.” She touched her straight blond hair that framed a perfect oval face.

Kate shrugged.

“Obviously, I can’t.”

“Oh, but yours is gorgeous, it’s a shame.” And it was true: brown ringlets descended to her mid-shoulders, wavy but tame. Kate used only a small clip for the unruly strands that would fall across her face, this way she avoided constantly pushing her hair behind her ear while sitting at her desk.

Margaret rummaged through her purse to no avail.

“I’m sorry.” She told her regretfully.

“Screw it, who cares? If he doesn’t get his file within the next thirty seconds he’s going to yell again.” Kate angrily grabbed a rubber band provided by the clerk’s office.

“Oh my god, no!” hissed her friend, “You’ll end up ruining it!”

“I’ll be ruined if I lose this job, believe me Meg, hair is the least of my problems.” She knotted it as tightly as she could.

“Is it okay?” She asked quickly.

“You have beautiful eyes, they’re really big!”

“All the better to see you with, my little one!” Kate laughed doing the voice of the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood.

Meg watched as Kathryn catapulted herself into the lawyer’s office.

“Cartwright.” She said only as she placed the file on the desk.

Mark Arrow nodded without raising his head.

“I hope you’ve taken care of your hair as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

The lawyer looked up, then stared a few seconds too long.

Kate stopped breathing expecting a new reprimand.

“Very well, you may go.” He emphasized with a firm hand gesture.

Kate flew out of the office; he had used a kind of gesture as if to chase away annoying insects.

Arrow’s legal office occupied an entire floor of a building on Broadway Street in New York City: on the upper level was Attorney Holmes’ section. A complete wall was made up of windows that allowed light to fill the entire room, which was composed of workstations with open desks: there was practically no privacy. As soon as she crossed the threshold, on the left, there was the manager’s seat, Annie Carson, placed in front of Arrow’s office: of course, the boss’s office had glass walls, equipped with Venetian blinds that, however, remained almost always open, except when meetings with other lawyers took place.

Kate sat down at her desk to tidy up the file that had been mishandled by the lawyer a few minutes earlier. Then she began again to digitize the firm’s oldest files. It was not a conceptual job; it could have been done by a high school junior, so it was a task within her grasp. Kate didn’t have a paralegal background, she had only gotten the job through the recommendation of a family friend, a lawyer who was enjoying retirement: it had been the saving grace for her and her mother. Sarah Donovan had been in a bad car accident and Kate told herself that she had been lucky to get out alive, but surgery and rehabilitation were expensive and insurance didn’t cover the expenses: her mother had attended a real estate agents meeting and had been drinking; she wasn’t drunk, but the insurance clauses were clear and Sarah Donovan, that night, had had one too many glasses of champagne, two in all. The money saved for Kate’s tuition had been used to pay her medical bills. The result was that Kate, after the first semester of her senior year, had dropped out of the English literature faculty, at only twenty-three years of age: she had returned home and by luck and recommendation had found a job in the law firm. From two until eight in the afternoons, then she would run to the pub where she waited tables and earned another hundred dollars a week plus tips, which were really decent at the weekends. In the morning she would drag herself out of bed and take care of the house, cleaning and cooking, accompanying her mother to therapy, always praying that they would give her an appointment in the morning so she could save money on a cab. At only twenty-three years old, Kathryn Donovan was perpetually tired. No one in the office knew about her mother’s accident. She would have avoided telling anyone about her second job at the pub, but she was obliged to tell the manager; however, if everything went as Kate hoped, the nightmare would be over in a few months: her mother was recovering, she would go back to work and start getting good commissions: regardless of the market trend, the rich always existed, thank God, and they bought expensive properties… also because there were no cheap properties in New York. Kate wanted to have faith. Everything would work out; she would finish college and fulfil her dream: to become a teacher.

In the meantime, she had to grit her teeth. She had become something of a maid in the office, too. Everyone knew that she had only been hired to digitize the archives and that she had no training whatsoever, so they didn’t hesitate to ask, “Kate, could you get me a coffee?”, “Kate, we’re out of sugar, will you go?” “Kate, can you bring me that delicious strawberry herbal tea?”. And Kate didn’t say a word: after all, wasn’t that her job after ten at night? It didn’t matter if it wasn’t just the lawyers who asked, but also the secretaries; they were professional, she wasn’t.

Only two people never asked anything of her: Meg, who kept telling her that it wasn’t her job, at least not in front of her colleagues, all of whom had their own legs, and the lawyer Mark Arrow, who would have had the authority to ask for a coffee to be brought to him, but evidently didn’t like her doing it, as he saw her as an annoying thing to chase away like a bug. Kate sighed, hunched over the scanner: it would be over soon, it had to be over soon. For now, though, she was just an ordinary girl with an ordinary job. She hoped that in the future no one in there would remember her existence.

Chapter 2 / Kate

I’m not a religious woman

but even I know that if you try