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“I received your email,” she said in a formal voice. “May I enquire your reasons for leaving?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, surprised by my response. “Your contract has specifications about a termination. You need to give a month’s notice, at least.”
If she was trying to intimidate me, it wasn’t working.
I wasn’t the same impressionable girl I had been only three months ago.
I took a breath. “It’s better this way, you can check with Tate, Mr. Sagarro, I mean.”
There is a pause on the line. “Did something happen, Evie? You can tell me.”
“As I say, I’d prefer not to discuss this,” I say. “If there is nothing else, I need to go, I have someplace I need to be.”
Then I put down the phone and took a bus to the Latino side of town, spending a pleasant couple of hours going to the fruit seller on one street corner for mangoes, then right across town to a deli in a backstreet for a particular kind of cheese. I arrived at Luisa’s grandmother’s place at around lunchtime. She was staying in a kind of subsidized senior citizen community with separate apartments. I pressed the buzzer for her place and was let inside. At her door, I knocked again.
“Who is it?” She called from inside.
“Mrs. Gomez? My name is Evie, I’m your granddaughter Luisa’s roommate.”
“Says who?” The old lady’s voice came from inside, suspicious. “You could be coming here to steal my money, hit me over the head and run off to go get drugs.”
I had to laugh. “Luisa told me to tell Miguel that the chorizo he sold you last time was too fatty, and he gave me a special price on this one.”
The door opened a tiny bit and a wrinkly face appeared in the gap.
“You live with Luisa?” The old lady asked.
“Yes, she asked me to help her out today. She has a test later on and I, well, I quit my job and was at a loose end.”
“Why you quit your job?” she fired back at me.
I laughed. “Well, it got complicated with my boss.”
“Why? He come on to you?”
I had nothing to lose by telling the truth. “We slept together and then he treated me like shit.”
The door closed and opened properly. Luisa’s grandmother stood in front of me, almost a head smaller than me, a face lined and wrinkled but with brown eyes as sharp and alive as they must have been sixty years ago.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said, leaving the door open for me to come in.
The small apartment was filled with clutter, a mess of newspapers and magazines. I knew from Luisa that her grandmother had been living in the apartment for the past ten years. There were aides supposed to assist the seniors in the complex but they were in high demand and there was often no one to help Mrs. Gomez with her shopping. The arthritis in her knees made walking and carrying heavy bags a problem. While I helped unpack her shopping and cleaned the kitchen for her, she listened to my sorry tale, making clicking noises with her tongue to indicate her disapproval.
“You need a nice boy, someone like my grandson Filippo. He’s got his own auto shop.”
I shook my head. “No, I think I’m done with men for a while.”
She gave me a sharp look. “You want him to beg you to take him back?”
“He won’t do that,” I said.
I’d told her that Tate Sagarro was not the type who begged or asked. He took what he wanted. He was used to getting his own way.
“But you are playing hard ball,” the old lady said, slapping the table hard, and cackling like an old witch. “I like that!”
I didn’t want to tell her that no, I wasn’t playing any game anymore. I felt like I had let him use me, given in to desire even though I knew it wasn’t what I wanted. I had feelings for Tate, I wanted to be with him. The job had always been about him, I didn’t care about the actual work at all. The money had been good but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to be treated the way he had been treating me, blowing hot and cold, depending on his mood. And it was humiliating, the way he had sent me running all over town that afternoon, looking for a laptop that he had with him the whole time. It was controlling and arrogant and I didn’t want to be at the mercy of that kind of man. I could hardly believe this was the same man who had been so nice to me in Los Angeles, showing me the Sunset Strip and taking me for ice cream all over the city.
