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I’m wearing one of my sheath dresses. It’s one I normally would wear with a jacket, but I’m hoping it looks cocktaily this evening and not like part of a power suit. It’s a little tight, and I’m not moving as gracefully as I should.
I blame Lydia. Not only does she feed me lunch, she sends home whatever’s left for my dinner.
Lydia is a sweet counterpoint to my relationship with my mother, which is icy at best. She woke up the next day and instead of apologizing, she asked when I would start paying rent since CeCe had opened the money valve again. Those exact words.
I tried to explain that the money was for the business, but she did not care.
I have to find a new place to stay and fast, and dear god it looks like it won’t be with Harper because she’s obviously annoyed with me. I don’t understand it. I thought she wanted me to help him.
“I think it’s fun that you’re working at his grandma’s.” Anika always likes to turn the conversation away from conflict. It’s kind of her job in this sisterhood of ours. Harper and I have big personalities, and Anika often finds herself playing referee. It’s been better the last few years, but I wonder if that’s because I’ve been in San Francisco.
I worry I’ve come back and the place I used to have in this little found family changed while I was gone. I worry I changed so much I no longer fit and I’m trying to hammer myself back in.
I have no idea what I will do if I lose them, too.
“Lydia seems to be having the time of her life,” I say, grateful to move away from money and into happier parts of what I’m doing right now. “At first she listened in on us talking about hiring, but now she walks right in and tells us what she thinks. She does not care about a person’s skill set. She’s more interested in kind faces.”
She claims she can tell from a person’s smile whether they’re kind or not. It’s funny because this one guy had a gorgeous smile and she rejected him immediately. Her ways are mysterious. I’m going with it for now.
Anika smiles at this. “I bet that annoys the hell out of you.”
Oddly not. I like Lydia. I find her a deeply calming presence in my life. A bit like her grandson. “I hired the people she told me to. Now they also have the skills we need, but after interviewing them I realized I was looking at them in different ways. I’ve always thought I could work with anyone who can do the job. I realize now that people kind of suck, and I’ll take a slightly less talented coder over one I will want to murder within thirty minutes of hiring.”
It might have been one of the mistakes I made back when I was starting up Jensen Med. I hired what I thought of as the best of the best, never considering how they would fit into their roles. People like Nick, who came with stellar recommendations but wasn’t anything close to a team player.
“Are you serious?” Harper asks, setting her empty oyster shell down. “You’re letting an eighty-year-old woman tell you who to hire?”
“She’s a matchmaker. I’m letting her make me some matches.” It’s not exactly true, but it sounds cute. Though Lydia does seem to know people and how they fit together. She’s given us insight on how she thought the team will work, and Heath has complete confidence in her.
The good news is that if she’s wrong, I’m excellent at firing people.
“I thought you didn’t believe in stuff like that,” Harper counters.
“Do you?” I’m not sure why she’s all over me tonight, but I’m incapable of not handing it back to her.
She sits back and seems to think for a moment. “I don’t know. I know the way Heath talks about her she’s made a lot of people happy over the years, so there’s probably something to her method.”
“Well, I’ve met a bunch of people who swear she’s the reason they’re happily married,” I say. Over the course of the last week, I’d gone out with Heath on two more interviews. They went much more smoothly because I went in with a more open mind. One was an older couple, very wealthy. The other was a couple in their thirties with a small apartment that smelled a little like curdled milk, a highly gassy baby, and an exhaustion that permeated everything around them.
I’d been told they were one of the last professional matches Lydia had made, and despite all the tiredness they passed the baby between them and held hands during the interview. They were in the middle of the hurricane of new parenthood and holding on to each other with everything they had.
