By the Book (2 page)

She flipped a copy of
Have It Your Way
in with Mrs. Phipps’s groceries.

“Whoa! Hang on there. Let me give you a hand with that,” said a male voice as Ellen wrestled with a splitting grocery bag full of dairy products and fresh produce beside her car in the parking lot behind the bank. She grabbed a carton of eggs with one hand and tucked an orange under her chin with the other. “Here we go. We’ve got it now.”

Wedged between the backseat of the car and the open door, she couldn’t see the man’s face, but she was grateful to feel the extra set of hands laboring with hers to save her perishables.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, flustered. “Why don’t they double-bag the fruit?” she wanted to know, thrusting a stalk of celery under her arm as she guided the precarious pile of edibles back toward the seat she’d taken it from. “They double-bag canned goods. Why don’t they double-bag the fruit? Which is going to make a bigger mess if you drop it?”

There was a soft laugh but no answer as the groceries toppled onto the seat in a heap. She pushed a thick tress of crimson curls to the back of her head in one frustrated gesture, then turned to thank her champion.

Her heart jumped and all but fell to the asphalt with a loud splat. It was him. The mystery man from across the street. The mercenary/war hero/spy/FBI guy/loving son or nephew that no one seemed to know anything about—aside from the fact that he was darkly handsome and built like a well-paid, high-class bouncer. She felt as awkward as a teenager with a new set of braces. Smile or run? She wished the earth would open wide and swallow her whole. Why him? Why now?

He gave her a tentative smile and a sympathetic look as he totally misinterpreted her reaction to him.

“One of those days, huh? I’ve had ’em,” he said with friendly understanding. “You get out of bed in the morning, and from then on things run steadily from bad to worse.” He grinned, and her heart flopped around pathetically in her chest. “Doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to stop it either.”

The sound of his voice echoed in her ears as the silence between them grew uncomfortably long. Her mind scrambled for a pithy response.

“No,” she said.

“Well, a day only lasts so long,” he said, preparing to go on his way again—out of her life. “And every new day is a fresh start. Tomorrow will be better.”

“Yes,” she said, once again dazzling him with her wit. He nodded and turned, walking with a slow, easy stride around the side of the building, toward the busy street.

“Tomorrow has got to be better,” she added, tossing a loose block of cheese atop the bags of vegetables scattered across her backseat.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and screamed silently in her soul. It was sweltering in the car, but rather than leaving her enervated as usual, the heat now seemed to fuel the irrational excitement she felt as she probed the bottom of the bag for the answer to all her problems.

It was so little. She fanned the pages skeptically, flipped to the last page. ...

This step-by-step procedure can be applied to any area of your life that you find dissatisfying. Try it. On your boss. On your coworkers. On your neighbors. On that special someone who has recently caught your eye. Just remember, being happy is your right, but it’s up to you to exercise it.

Her brows lifted and her head bobbed up and down with the reasonableness of these statements. Slowly she turned to the first page and started to read.

You have the right to be happy. This is your new mantra. Say it. “I have the right to be happy.” The Declaration of Independence guarantees you the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So, if you’re alive, liberate yourself and start pursuing whatever it is that will make you happy.

You can have your own way. It’s easy. All you have to do is want it badly enough. Ignoring your right to be happy is an inclination that is learned in early childhood. A time when so many of our attempts to explore our world, to seek out and satisfy our own happiness, are thwarted, and the altered behavior is rewarded with the approval and satisfaction of others. Ignoring our right to be happy is simply a bad habit we’ve learned.

It’s time to unlearn a bad habit. Break it. Replace it with the practice of having it your way and getting what you want. ...

No one seemed to notice she was thirty minutes late getting back from lunch. She hurried across the lobby to her desk, put her purse in the bottom drawer, and picked up her pen to look busy.

She had a clear view of most of the bank from her seat—the tellers in their booths, the drive-by window behind them, the glassed-in offices of the bank officers. She, Vi, and Delores Shoot were lined up a few feet from the front windows in small, low-walled cubicles to show the community that customer service was a high priority at Quincey First Federal Bank.

Quincey, Indiana, was a just-right place to live. Ellen had always thought so anyway. Not too small or intrusive. Not too big or impersonal. There were plenty of strangers in town, people she’d never seen before, to keep life interesting. People she recognized but didn’t know, to keep it comfortable. There were acquaintances she could stop and talk to in the street, to keep it friendly. And since she’d grown up there, she had friends and family there too.

It was an unpretentious, middle-class American town, homespun and humble, and if she sometimes found it a bit boring and repetitive, she almost always assumed responsibility for her discontent. She had her faults, but shirking responsibility wasn’t one of them. There were days when she felt responsible for everything—the weather, the national deficit, the lives of her customers. ...

Mostly she checked on checks for people. “I can’t believe I forgot to write down the amount,” they’d say. “Now I have checks bouncing all over town.” Frequently she’d pull up on her computer the balance of a savings account or trust fund or the maturity date of a specific money market CD. “We’re planning a trip to Jamaica for our anniversary,” someone would tell her. “I’m getting so excited and nervous. I just need to make sure we have enough money saved and that nothing goes wrong.” On occasion she was forced to call a customer about insufficient funds. “I got the notices in the mail,” would come a sad voice. “But my husband is still out of work, and since I got laid off it’s been hard for us. I have three children. They have to eat. I have to keep them warm. Can’t we work something out?”

How could anyone not respond to someone else’s embarrassments? Their concerns and worries? Their desperation?

Today her phone was unusually quiet. The people of Quincey were coping. Her sigh was one of relief and gratification, fringed with a bit of boredom.

You got used to working in a fishbowl, she mused, glancing out the large display window. Being on exhibit all day, it became second nature to keep your hands as far from your nose as possible, to sit with your knees together, and to adjust your bra straps and panty hose in the ladies’ room only.

The world passed by that big window all day long, and one hardly considered it. She suspected it was the same from the other side as well. Who paid any attention to people working in the window of a bank when they were busy living their own lives?

Ellen took a good hard look out the smudge-free glass. The camera shop was directly across the street from her desk, its windows shiny clean. Poster enlargements of a boy with his dog, a blushing bride, and a stream in the woods took up most of the space above a small display of cameras, cases, and tripods.

What was he doing in there? she wondered, leaning back in her chair, her pen bumping rhythmically against her upper lip. Developing film? Unpacking new stock? Flexing his muscles?

Then, as if in answer to her reflections, he appeared in the glass doorway. Resting his hands on the push bar, he looked up the street and down, then directly across into her cubicle.

Her heart stopped and she sat perfectly still. He looked straight into her eyes, entered her soul without knocking. She held her breath. Then he was smiling, and her heart took off, beating too fast; her nerves twitched to life under her skin. She hunched her shoulders over her desk, kept her head down in deep concentration, and tried to gather her thoughts.

Had he seen her? Had he really smiled at her?

“Vi?” she called out, louder than her telephone voice but not so loud as to disturb the dignified fiscal quiet maintained in the bank.

“I saw it,” Vi whispered back loudly. “He smiled at me.” Something twisted painfully in Ellen’s chest. “Maybe I won’t have to buy that camera after all. Maybe he’ll come open an account.”

“Maybe,” Ellen said, swallowing the envy she felt. Vi was always so confident, always so sure. Ellen should have known that smile wasn’t for her.

She tossed the pen onto the desk and leaned back again in her chair.
Why
hadn’t that smile been for her? Hadn’t she reacted to it as if it had been? She turned her head to the window. The man was gone, but she could still see him standing there, smiling. She pursed her lips and her gaze meandered slowly to the bottom drawer of her desk

Determine exactly what it is you want. You can’t have your way unless you know which way you want to go. Be practical. Be realistic. Reach for the stars ... but stay in your own galaxy.

He was definitely in her galaxy. On her planet even, earthy and human. He’d helped her with her groceries. It was possible that smile had been for her. Vi didn’t have a monopoly on happiness; she wasn’t the only one who could take what they wanted from the world. Her gaze gravitated toward the teller boxes across the room and settled on Lisa Lee, earning fifty cents more an hour in a position she was barely trained for, knowing full well that if she played her cards right, she was in line to move up the line ahead of Ellen.

No, she wasn’t being fair.

Lisa was a sweet girl, a Korean immigrant who’d come to Quincey with her husband to make a better life for themselves. She worked hard—on her English, in her citizenship classes, at her duties at the bank. Ellen liked her ... but ... well, the position of loan officer was in her galaxy too. She worked hard too.

Okay. She’d had enough.

She knew exactly what she wanted now. Change. And she was going to make it happen. Was she not the captain of her own vessel? Was it not her life to direct? Could she not create her own destiny? If being too nice was causing her to fall short of her targets, wasn’t it time to try new trajectories? Wasn’t it her responsibility, as well as her right, to make her own happiness?

And it wasn’t the job or the money or the man—none of them in themselves had the power to make her happy—but
knowing
would.
Knowing
that she could have the promotion and the pay raise, and the man, if she wanted them—now, that would make her happy.
Knowing
that she could change her life, that she wasn’t a victim of fate, that being too nice was a curable disease—that would make her happy.

She’d get a pay raise, she’d get the promotion, and she’d make that man smile at her.
Her
—in a way that left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to whom he was smiling at, in a significant way that would curl her toes and cause her to smile right back at him. That’s what she wanted. That would make her happy. And she had a right to be happy.

“Vi,” she said, the wheels on her chair squeaking a little as she pushed herself away from her desk and reached into her bottom drawer for her purse.

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever had one of those days when your life didn’t seem to be worth living, and then something”—she held the small green booklet in both hands—“some little thing happens, and everything is different?”

Across the street in the camera shop, Jonah Blake was contemplating the short-term emotional benefits and the long-term physical drawbacks to putting another dent in the wall with his forehead.

He growled out loud, then took a deep breath, holding it until he was calm enough to blow it out slowly. A half-crazed laugh escaped him as he shook his fists at the ceiling.

“Jonah, old buddy, this town and that woman are going to drive you over the edge if you’re not careful,” he told himself, blowing yet another pent-up breath out through stiff lips.

He scanned the shop, looking for something to do, searching for something to focus his attention on—other than the woman in the window across the street. But it just wasn’t going to happen. Nothing had changed since the last time he scanned the shop, looking for something to do, searching for something to focus his attention on.

He’d processed every strip of film he could find, developed the pictures, gathered them up, put them in envelopes, filed them in alphabetical order. He’d washed the windows, wiped off the display cases, dusted the cameras. He’d vacuumed the floor, retallied the negative balance in the books four times, done fifty push-ups in the back room, and that was all before lunch.

Since then, he’d been kicking himself stupid for acting like a tongue-tied idiot when he’d finally gotten an opportunity to talk to her. “Duh. One of those days, huh?” he muttered to himself and cringed, remembering. Not the most intriguing opening line he’d ever used.

Not that he’d actually used all that many opening lines for a man his age. To date, his dealings with women had been long-term sexual encounters at best, with very little emotional involvement. And to be truthful, they’d suited him just fine.

Which wasn’t to say that on rare occasions he hadn’t contemplated the efforts involved in meeting a different kind of woman; in allowing himself to feel something for her; in marriage and children. Those occasions had left him feeling empty, alone, and small, and were often best avoided. But deep down inside, he knew that was exactly what he’d always wanted. To grow up, marry a nice woman, have children, and spend the rest of his life loving and taking care of them. Trouble was, he had no idea of where to start to build this dream he had.

His own childhood had been fragmented. What he hadn’t deliberately forgotten was blurry and permeated with sadness and confusion. What he did remember had little to do with home and family, and a lot to do with discipline and control, regulation and achievement.