How to Look Happy (2 page)

Confused, I tap the calendar app on my phone’s screen and begin scrolling down the page, thinking I must have mixed up the date, which is also unlike me. At this point I’m relieved Brewster isn’t expecting me because as flustered as I am, I’m in no shape to conduct a presentation.

“I have down 5:30 on Monday, May 12,” I say, glancing up at Aubrey and then over her left shoulder as I hear Brewster’s muffled voice coming from somewhere in the house. I cringe and stand a little straighter, composing explanations in my mind.

But Brewster doesn’t appear, and as I take a couple more steps into the foyer, both Aubrey and I pause as another voice mingles with his. It’s a woman, and her garbled words are punctuated by a peal of laughter.

Something about that laugh is familiar, but I don’t make the connection right away since I’m busy backtracking toward the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow to reschedule,” I say over my shoulder.

At the same time, Aubrey says, “Don’t you want to go in there with them?”

I stop mid-step and swivel on one patent leather heel. “Go in there with them?” I repeat. “Who?” I shake my head. “Who is Brewster…I mean, Mr. Brewster, in there with?” I ask.

“Well, he’s with Ms. Greenlee,” Aubrey says, as bewildered as I am. “Aren’t you two working together?”

My eyebrows must shoot up two full inches, but I clamp my lips shut and try to contain my surprise.
No, we’re not working together
, I think, but if Aubrey thinks we are, clearly something is in the works that I’m unaware of. “Of course,” I lie through clenched teeth.
What the hell?
“I just didn’t realize Candace was taking part in this presentation.”

I follow the soft tap of Aubrey’s ballet flats as she turns and breezes through the foyer, my sharp heels sounding thunderous in her wake. Brewster’s study is one of the first rooms past the entryway, and that’s where she stops. She knocks quietly twice. Then she turns the handle and pushes open the heavy walnut door.

“Mr. Brewster, Ms. Dawson is he—” she says and then trails off mid-sentence as the door swings open wide enough for me to look past her into the room.

Candace is on a sofa with her back facing the doorway, but I can see her shiny, sleek-straight blonde bob clearly enough to be certain that it’s her. Brewster, who’d risen as soon as the door opened and knocked something to the floor in his haste, rushes toward us now, swiping at the corner of his mouth with his knuckles. I squint to get a better look just as he walks into the glow cast by a sconce near the door. He’s missed a spot—there’s a distinct coral smudge trailing from the edge of his lip onto his lower left cheek.

My confusion turns to disgust as I flick my eyes back to Candace. She rises from the sofa, attempting to discreetly fasten a button on her champagne-colored silk blouse as she walks smoothly toward the three of us.

“Jennifer,” she says in her honeyed Southern accent. “I thought your appointment was rescheduled.” I notice that she looks at Brewster as she says this instead of me.

“I didn’t get the memo,” I say after a long pause, my voice faint. And then, louder, “And I didn’t realize you were teaming with me on this project.”

Candace laughs lightly, and I’m sure I’m the only one who catches the nervous edge behind it. “Well, of course,” she says, “any client with Emory’s taste and resources will work with the most
experienced
members of our team.” She emphasizes the word, and I feel like gagging at the double entendre.

My mind is spinning, and I take a step forward, peering past Candace into the study. The Queen Anne cocktail table in front of the tailored Ralph Lauren sofa is spread with products and samples, as if Candace has been at it a while. From the look of things, if I’d arrived ten minutes later she might have spread out a lot more than fabric swatches and color samples on Brewster’s highbrow furniture. I vaguely wonder how long she’s been plotting this hostile takeover.

“Of course,” I repeat, smiling brightly at the disheveled lawyer, who’s succeeded in removing the lipstick from his cheek but not the confusion from his expression.

“I apologize,” he says in his trademark tenor that holds traces of an East Coast accent and expensive education. “When Candace called me to move up the appointment I assumed you’d worked it out together.” I watch his eyes slide from my dark blonde hair down my body to take in my pencil skirt and blazer combo, all the way to my skin-tone, three-inch heels. My body shivers in response but not the way it might have if I were conducting this appointment alone. Instead I stand frozen in a fight-or-flight panic. I can practically see the word “threesome” followed by a question mark in Brewster’s dilated pupils.

I glance at Aubrey, whose eyes are wide and shifting between the three of us in alarm. She looks as if she’s flipping through a mental etiquette primer but can’t find the right page.

“That’s all right,” I say smoothly, wishing I could reach out and slap the licentious look off Brewster’s face and whisk the polite and unassuming Aubrey from his presence. Clearly Emory Brewster is a person who’s used to getting what and who he wants—not unlike Candace. “I’m sure it’s my mistake.”
My mistake for ever hearing your name in the first place.
“I’m happy to let Candace finish the presentation. We can discuss it at the office later.”

My voice, on those last words, holds a warning that I know carries no weight. After this little scene I’m certain I can kiss my chance at a partnership good-bye—since clearly I never had it in the first place.

“Good night, Aubrey. Thank you for seeing me in.” I spin on my heel and walk through the foyer and out the front door so quickly she doesn’t even have time to follow.

Tequila Sunrise

Later that night, I’ve just polished off my third Aviator at Local, a gastropub in the Overton Square entertainment district, when I signal the bartender. “Give me a Velvet Elvis this time,” I say once he walks over, my head swimming just a little bit.

Beside me, Carrie pulls the bar menu toward her and skims it. “Velvet Elvis… You’re switching to tequila?” She shakes her head. “This is nothing but trouble, girl. You oughta slow down.”

I pat her hand as she slides the menu back toward the inside edge of the shiny wooden bar. “Did your boss screw you over today?” I ask in a wounded tone.

She gives me a pitying look. “No. My boss is awesome.”

“Aww, thanks, sweetie,” says Katie Anderson, Carrie’s boss, her unruly red curls sweeping across the bar as she leans around from my left. Carrie is on the barstool to my right, and beside Carrie is her boyfriend David. Katie’s husband, Kyle, is also in our group, along with Sara Beth, an account manager at the PR firm Katie owns.

“I’ve already decided I’m calling in sick tomorrow, so let me have a real reason for it,” I say, warning bells going off in my brain that Carrie is right, and I’m about half a cocktail away from a ledge I probably shouldn’t step over.

“You’re calling in sick?” she says. “Don’t do that. Let that wench have to look you in the face.” She turns on her chair and studies me for a couple of seconds. “You can’t seriously tell me you’re just going to let her walk all over you?”

I sigh as the bartender places my new drink in front of me, and then I take a long drag through the straw. It’s a strong one—I feel the burn of the tequila as it slides down my throat. “She owns the firm,” I say glumly. “If she wants my client, she takes my client. I don’t really know how to fight this.” I pause and take another, smaller, sip. “Besides, who’s he going to want to work with—the designer who does the job he’s paying her for and goes home, or the designer who picks out the bed and then helps him test it out?”

David chimes in. “I’ve heard of a happy ending at a massage parlor but not a design studio,” he says, deadpan.

“I have,” I say, and five heads lean a little closer to me over the bar. “I mean, it’s just rumor, and I don’t know for sure—”

Carrie’s eyes are wide. She gestures in a circular motion with her right hand as I hesitate. “Go on,” she says. “Do tell.”

“Y’all, you have to keep this to yourselves,” I say, a tequila varnish coating my tongue and slurring my words. “Ellie Kate told me that Caroline told her”—Caroline is Candace’s former partner who moved to France—“that Candace had an affair with Lane Bickers while she was doing his house in Southwind a few years ago.”

The story has just the shocking effect that I, in my drunken state, am going for. Carrie’s jaw drops, and even David and Kyle look surprised. I feel a twinge of guilt. I’ve never shared that story with anybody, not knowing if it’s true and all.

“Lane Bickers.” Sara Beth repeats the name, sounding impressed. Lane was one of Memphis’s biggest heartthrobs while he was in town, and landing him as a client was a coup. Every design firm in Memphis scrambles for the business of the city’s NBA stars, who tend to populate the mansions around the PGA golf course in the southeast part of the city or the swank condos and bluff-side houses downtown. Lane and his young, pretty wife lived in the former until he was traded to Sacramento about two years ago. All of this (allegedly) happened about a year before I joined the firm.

A conversation ensues about the current Grizzlies roster and who’s been seen with whom around town. I tune most of it out, sipping steadily on my drink and getting lost in my desolate thoughts until Carrie pokes me in the side.

“You okay?” she asks in a low voice, the conversation buzzing around us.

I shrug. “I guess.
Que será, será.
Life goes on.” I keep staring into my glass, thinking how crappy it is that I finally land a big-time client of my own and then have to stand back and watch as my bigger-than-life, Southern belle of a boss swipes him right out from under me. So to speak.

“It’ll probably be forever before I get another job this big,” I add, wallowing.

Carrie purses her lips and stares at me for a few seconds. “Uh-uh,” she says. “I’m not going to let you do this. You’re not letting her take your client. You’re going to fight back.”

I drain the last dregs of my drink, pulling on the straw until it makes that slurpy, sucking-at-air noise. Then I glance up, searching for the bartender again. I push my glass forward and beckon him over.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll fight back,” I say with no fight in me whatsoever.

*   *   *

About two hours later, the six of us push through the front doors out onto the sidewalk—or, I should say, my friends push through the doors, David propping me up on the right and Carrie linking her arm through mine on the left. She’s right… I totally shouldn’t have moved on to tequila.

The street lamps and neon storefronts of Overton Square are glaring after the dimness of the bar, and I squint, the lights bleeding together in my peripheral vision until the whole scene looks like one of those slow-shutter images of cars speeding down an interstate after dark. In my fuzzy, drunken state, I’m hit with a loopy memory of the T-shirts with inane sayings that line the racks of gaudy souvenir shops along the Gulf Coast.
One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.
How many Velvet Elvi did I drink? It’s unclear at this point, although I do remember Carrie and the bartender agreeing that it was time to cut me off. And without Carrie and David to lean on, I think “floor” might be exactly where I’d be right now.

That’s why I don’t see him at first.

When we round the corner of the last restaurant on the block and turn right toward the parking lot, I hear Carrie and David chattering across me. Their whispered sentences don’t make much sense.

“Is that Jeremy?” David says.

“What is he… What’s he doing?” Carrie asks, talking over David. “Why’s Jeremy leaning against her car? It’s like he’s waiting for her.” She pauses. “I wonder why he didn’t just come in.”

We walk in silence for a few seconds.

“Obviously we’re leaving Jen’s car here,” David says as we approach my parking spot. “Or do you want me to drive it while you take her home?”

“Maybe Jeremy can drive her,” Carrie says.

We’re in the middle of the cramped parking lot behind the strip, and I hear Katie and Kyle yell their good-byes from a row or two over. Sara Beth is still walking beside us, though she veers off toward her car and waves as the three of us stop behind mine.

“What’s up, Jeremy?” David asks in his baritone drawl. I’m standing on my own now, just barely.

“She’s a little, um, well, she’s, um.” That’s from Carrie.

“She’s wasted,” David says with a little chuckle.

I glance up to see Jeremy’s gaze scanning over our group, not really looking at me, and I’m with it enough to feel sheepish. “I had a bad day,” I mumble, my tongue feeling a couple sizes too large for my mouth.

“Can I talk to you?” Jeremy says, reaching forward to sort of catch me when I stumble toward him. His voice has a weird, detached quality that hits me in my stupor and sobers me up by a degree, and I work to focus on his face. I’m feeling indignant—it’s not as if he’s never been loaded drunk into an Uber by his buddies before. It’s happened to the best of us.

I catch the fact that Carrie and David exchange a puzzled glance. They’ve backed up a few steps, but they don’t leave.

“Now?” I ask and feel myself being pushed around like a rag doll, my head swimming, as Jeremy uses his spare key to click my car unlocked, open the door, and deposit me in a limp, sideways position in the driver’s seat. I slump against the seat, resting my left cheek on the headrest. “Can we go home first?”

“I really need to talk now,” he says.

I lift my hand in a weak interpretation of a gun and point it at him. “Shoot,” I say, giggling at my own cleverness.

I hear him utter an impatient sigh. Then he launches into a story that, in my foggy state, seems as bizarre as a dream. By the time he’s finished talking I can’t hear him anymore because I’m shrieking at him. Finally he leaves me there—leaves me heavily inebriated behind the wheel of a vehicle to which I possess a key—and I realize none of this is a dream. It’s a nightmare.

Carrie rushes over and fills the thick, black void Jeremy leaves in his wake.

I’m buckled safely in my passenger seat with David behind the wheel when I realize the shudders racking through my body are from more than my shock and distress. The car’s air conditioner, still on high from this afternoon, is blasting cold air at the front of my shirt, which is soaked through with my tears.

*  *  *

Around 1:00 a.m. I land facedown on my bed, my phone in my hand. I’m just aware enough to feel embarrassed as Carrie pulls off my shoes and reaches under me to yank back my white matelassé coverlet and tuck me under my white sheets. I’d been kidding when I said I was planning to call in sick the next day, but now the likelihood of it seems imminent.

Carrie disappears, and I’ve almost dozed off when she comes back and perches on the bed beside me. She pokes me on the shoulder, and I half-turn, vaguely aware that she’s squirting liquid into the two small compartments of my contact lens case. She pokes me again, and I groan.

“Here,” she commands, patting my arm until I grudgingly prop myself up in bed enough to pinch a lens from my right eye. She takes it and expertly places it into the case, caps it, and waits until I hand her the left.
What an awesome friend
, I manage to think.

“You’ll thank me for this tomorrow morning,” she says and then adjusts the bedding again before walking toward the door and turning out the light. I wonder for about one second how we got here and how she got into my house, then my eyes start to close.

They open again when the front door of my old house opens and shuts with a loud creak and a thud. My miniature schnauzer, Simon, who’d settled across my feet, leaps from the bed with his collar tags jangling, and I’m jolted into fuzzy awareness. The events of the day and evening flash behind my eyes, and my temper flares. All I can think about are Carrie’s words in the bar earlier:
“You’re going to fight back.”
With a surge of energy, I reach for the phone that’s poking out from under my pillow and start tapping angrily at the screen before losing steam and passing out.