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“I am good at my job,” she said quickly, flushed.
“Are you though?” I let the words hang in the air.
I leaned forward and stared into her big blue eyes.
“Better than all the other thousands of pretty young things who come in here every day looking for a job?”
“I am good at what I do,” she said again, sticking out her chin in a rather fetching attempt to be feisty.
“Thing is, Lauren. I don’t like disappointment,” I said. She bit her lip, and I could see the tip of her tongue nervously darting to her upper lip. “I really don’t take disappointment well.”
“I won’t disappoint you.”
“You did before though. Back in college? Seems to me rather convenient how you’ve forgotten about the lake party?”
She stared at me as if she couldn’t believe I’d bring it up now.
“I think, Lauren, you will find that I have changed a bit since college. I am no longer able to forgive and forget, like I did back then. I mean, I let you off the hook rather easily, I’d say.”
She just stared at me.
“I think you owe me, quite frankly.”
She still didn’t say anything.
“And I think you can begin by fixing this Freezas disaster. Right now.”
I turned on my heel and marched out of the office.
Chapter 3
Lauren
As I walked back to our apartment, I became aware of the balmy late afternoon. Summer was coming to an end, and we were in for a lovely evening. I slowed down as I walked the streets to our place, noticing people taking strolls and eating ice cream and enjoying the atmosphere. New York in summer could be a glorious place. At the steps outside our apartment, I found my mother talking to one of our upstairs neighbors, Mrs. Penderis.
“Hey, honey!” my mom grinned at me. “I was hoping I’d see you tonight!”
I had been working late all week and often my mom was out or seeing friends by the time I got back.
“Can I get you a beer?”
“Sure.”
I sat down on the steps, looked at the trees and families walking past. Two lovers, hand-in-hand, with eyes only for one another came by. I watched them, noticed how absorbed they were in each other’s conversation, the way the woman threw back her head to laugh, the way the man’s eyes lingered on her face. I remembered what it felt like to be that in love and rather wistfully wondered what happened to that feeling. Why couldn’t love stay? Why did it seem like it always changed into something else or faded away?
“Here you go,” my mom handed me an open beer and I took a grateful swig. It had been a long day and it felt good to be home.
“So, how’s the new job? We’ve barely had time to talk this last week.”
My mother had never looked like any of the other kids’ moms when I was at school. She was always younger than the other mothers, always cooler. She felt more like a sister than a mother. She’d had me when she was quite young herself and it had always been just the two of us. Growing up, we’d been close and there had never been the kind of tension in the house that so many of my friends had. I always felt lucky, even though there was no father figure, no huge house or garden, no siblings to annoy or irritate me. We had our own world, and we co-existed happily together. My mom had been a model for a few years, then she’d had a few dead-end jobs before training as an art teacher, a job she loved and was good at. She saw it more as therapy than as a teaching job, a way of providing stressed kids with paint and equipment and an outlet for their many troubled emotions. Every now and then, there would be a kid with talent or a great idea for a project, and this would give her such job satisfaction.
“It’s… good, great, really.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
My mom had been a part of my job search those months after I’d left college. She’d not pressured me to get a job, but I had taken the rejections personally. So many companies didn’t even email back or send responses. I’d go to interviews and receive cold texts informing me that someone else had gotten the job. I started feeling something was wrong with me. I wasn’t thin enough, or tall enough, or something. I’d started waitressing just to make a little money and feel less dependent on my mother. The job at Egal had come along as I was starting to give up hope. I loved the idea of running social media for a large corporation, being in charge of health products and especially vegan product lines. Everything had been going swimmingly until I’d discovered that Matthew was my boss.
I gave a sigh. “That’s not it. It’s my boss.”
