Hush Little Baby (3 page)
“Morning,” I say.
He smiles for the first time of the day, an anemic grin with no teeth.
“Red or blue?” I ask.
“Red.”
He always picks red, because red almost always wins.
We start to count. This morning blue cars are in fashion and I pull to an early lead, but then I miss a few, and when we pull into the drop-off lane of his school, we are even. He unbuckles his seat belt as a teacher drives past in a small red Mini Cooper.
“You win,” I say.
I
enter the glass and steel tower and ascend to the fourteenth floor, where the executive offices of Harris Development are housed. Harris is the third-largest design-build firm in the country with close to a thousand employees and six offices throughout the world. Last year, we did over a billion dollars in projects, ranging from prisons to housing developments. I’ve been with them since I graduated sixteen years ago and have risen through the ranks quickly to become the youngest vice president in the company and the CEO’s right-hand man (woman), a position I relish and defend with pride. My mantra is
Anything you can do, I can do better, and make it look as though I’m not even working hard to do it.
And achieving it requires not yawning, eating, or peeing.
As soon as I step through the ten-foot glass doors, my world shifts, and for ten hours a day, five days a week, I escape.
Sherman McGregor sits across from me as he has a dozen times in the past year, but today will be the last time. In a few minutes, he and I will shake hands and our firms will merge and we will part.
He’s twice my years and with ten times my accomplishments, so I allow him these last moments. He will accept, but I also understand how much he doesn’t want to.
“Better for who?” he says.
“For everybody,” I answer.
“But more better for Harris?”
“Probably.”
Sixty years have brought him to this, a lifetime of passion, sweat, and achievement diminished to a sale of it all to his lifetime nemesis for a small fortune he won’t have time to spend. He knows, as do I, that before the ink is dry, he will be reduced to an old man, once great, now no longer relevant.
With a silent breath, he straightens in his chair and says, “Jillian, I’d say you’re worth your weight to Harris in gold, but since you only weigh three pounds, that would be a gross understatement.”
“I used to weigh more, but then McGregor Architects came into my life.”
The humor fades with the mention of the company that bears his name.
“Three sons, five grandsons, and not a single one wants anything to do with the business that’s paid for their lives,” he says, his great jowls shaking.
We’ve had this conversation before. Sherman’s old-school—work hard and earn what you’ve got. His kids are a new generation—play hard and spend what you’ve got.
My children are decades younger than his, but I feel his disappointment. Until you have kids, you don’t realize that their worlds and ideas won’t necessarily reflect yours and that their paths will be their own.
With the thought of my own family, I glance at my watch. The day’s just begun and already there’s too much to get done.
“I’ll have Connor draw up the papers,” I say.
Sherman groans. “Harris’s shark.”
Connor Enright is Harris Development’s in-house counsel and my best friend. He’s the only employee who makes more than me, and he’s worth every penny. He earns his healthy salary ruthlessly negotiating Harris’s business dealings as well as cleaning up Harris’s personal messes, of which there are plenty. And for the past two years, he’s been a thorn in Sherman’s side, wreaking havoc on the battalion of attorneys Sherman’s employed to negotiate this deal.
“You have some great whites on your side as well,” I say.
He nods and sticks out his hand. It’s been a noble battle—the takeover not friendly, but ultimately necessary for both companies’ survival.
“Jillian, there’s no one I’d have rather waged war with.”
“Likewise.” I take his large veined hand in both of mine.
And with his shoulders slightly more stooped than they were when he entered the office, Sherman walks out the door.
I
walk through the maze of cubicles inhabited by the draftsmen and architects who draw the three-dimensional future in two dimensions.
Too many eyes. Too many shy smiles.
Shit.
There are over a hundred employees at the western office of Harris Development, and it seems every birthday is an excuse to stop working and traipse everyone into the cafeteria for a “surprise” celebration of their aging.
Beyond the sea of gray boxes, I spot the blond head of Connor, “the shark,” working in his glass-walled office, and take a quick detour.
“Connor, call it off.”
His head lifts from his reading, and he smiles without teeth—a grin that probably as a kid got him into more trouble than he actually caused.
“Call what off?”
“Whatever spectacle of distraction has been concocted on behalf of my birthday.”
“It’s your birthday?” he says as he reaches into his drawer, retrieves a silver envelope, and holds it out, his smirk widening.
On the outside of the envelope in beautiful penmanship is Connor’s pet name for me, “Jinks,” lovingly given to me for my Velma from Scooby-Doo looks and smarts. I pull the card from its shiny envelope.
On the front is a middle-aged couple playing tennis; beneath the cartoon it says, “Love 40.”
Inside it reads, “New balls please.”
Clipped to the inside are two tickets for
Wicked
.
My heart swells. Why can’t all guys be this good?
Because then they’d all be gay, procreation would stop, and the human race would go extinct.
“Take me, take me,” he says, bouncing in his chair with his hand in the air.
I walk around his glass and chrome desk and hug him. “Who else would I take?”
“Well, I thought you might feel obligated to take that hunk of a caveman you call your husband.”
“Seeing women and men singing and dancing in tights isn’t exactly Gordon’s thing.”
“Mine, neither,” he says. “I prefer singing and dancing without the tights. Big plans for the big event?”
“Just a night out with my parents on Wednesday. Nothing too big or sexy.”
“Well, be on notice, when I turn the big four-oh, I’m expecting big and sexy.” His hands spread over his head to about fourteen inches. “Really big.”
“Ouch.”
He delivers his beaming smile, and his eyebrows rise and fall twice. “Speaking of which, gorgeous brown eyes, nice teeth, and good hair is coming in today, and I’m supposed to tell you to play nice.”
“Don’t I always?”
“Jinks, I mean it. We need this.”
“And the kids we’re building the school for deserve windows.”
“Do you like my shoes?” he asks, turning his crossed leg to and fro in order for me to see his finely polished Prada. “Because I do. I like my shoes, my BMW, my condo, my Sports Club membership. It’s insanely superficial and utterly selfish, and I’ve beaten myself up repeatedly for my shallowness because you’re right, the little kiddies living in war-torn Compton should have the benefits of light and air. But let’s be reasonable. If we lose this contract”—he looks forlornly at his foot—“no more shoes.”
“I’ll play nice.”
“Good, then off with you. I have a few more things to take care of before I’m beckoned to participate in your spectacle.”
“Just kill me now.”
“The plebeians need these small moments of levity and continual doses of useless calories and sugar to keep them sane.”
“Are you responsible?”
“No way. Over-thirty birthdays are like gas, better passed in private.”
I
’m very good at smoothing out trouble. I roll over it like a steamroller without paying the emotions around it any mind. It’s a special talent I have, and it’s why I get paid the generous salary I do.
But this afternoon, the trouble is in the form of Jeffrey Wheeler, and I’m afraid my talent might fail me.
“Morning,” Jeffrey says, standing and extending his hand. I go along with the nonchalance and shake it as though he’s any other client, any other man. He looks good—his thick brown hair a little longer than last time I saw him, his chocolate eyes smiling.
Tina, my assistant, has set out the drawings and sits with her pad and pen ready. Asian and efficient without an ounce of entertainment value, she’s been with me a year, and I’m dying for her to move on.
“Water?” she asks in a clipped accent.
Jeffrey nods, and she skedaddles from the room.
Kelly, the project architect, sits across from Jeffrey, her thick arms wrapped around herself as she holds in her anger. I vaguely remembered that young cockiness—an ounce of talent and the optimism that you could change things, leave your mark, become the next Le Corbusier. The difference is, Kelly has more than an ounce of talent, and unlike me, she might just turn out to be the next revolutionary architect of her time.
Kelly’s nose begins to flare with short huffs, and this means her voice isn’t far behind. I get there first. “Jeffrey, it’s not that we don’t understand the security concerns. It’s just classrooms without windows, it’s, well, it’s…”
“Inhumane and stupid.”
I glare at the girl, whose Irish face, normally flush, is now entering Pink Panther territory.
Jeffrey laughs. Not a mean, in-your-face laugh, but the I-love-your-chutzpah-but-it’s-not-gonna-change-my-mind kind of chuckle.
And that does it. With great theatrics, Kelly pushes from her chair, teetering it, but not achieving the dramatic topple I’m sure she was going for, and storms from the room.
I roll my eyes, first at the back of Kelly’s wide booty as it exits, then at Jeffrey.
“What?” he says with a shrug. “She’s cute. I love the spunk.”
“She’s whiz-bang talented.”
“So are you, but you’re cuter.”
I feel my own flush, but unlike Kelly, my Italian skin conceals more. “Jeffrey, don’t.”
“Don’t what? Tell you you’re cute?”
A small smile escapes, and he ricochets it back with a big one that shows all his teeth. His grin is lopsided, and the eyetooth on the left a smidge too far forward, giving him an almost canine appearance.
I lower my eyes to the drawings and set my mouth to serious. “So you’re standing by your no-light-or-air-for-the-children position?”
“I miss you.”
My face tightens, my focus moves in and out, and I close my eyes a second too long as I swallow my thoughts one by one: regret, humiliation, attraction, and back again. And when the past is buried back where it belongs, in the recesses of a memory a year old, I take a deep breath and lift my face to meet his. “We need to fix this.”
“Yes, we do.”
“This,” I say, losing my strength and lowering my stare back to Compton’s new middle school.
He continues to examine me without excuse. “No windows, that’s the order from the school board. Too much vandalism and too many break-ins. They’re tired of dealing with it. I like your hair that way. It shows off your neck.”
The perfect lines on the bright vellum blur again, and I blink rapidly to keep the emotions in check, from traveling back to the time when I was the craziest I’ve ever been, when for a brief, wonderful, dangerous while, Jeffrey was more than a client, more than a friend.
Outside the conference room, a phone rings, snapping me back to the present.
“Please, Jeffrey,” I manage. I want to tell him how hard this is, this day in particular, my body and resolve freshly bruised, my resistance weaker than it’s been. Instead, that’s all I say.
“Okay,” he says with a sigh I feel more than hear. “Compton Junior High. Jill, I want you guys to have this, but the board’s getting impatient. No windows or no contract. That’s the bottom line.”
My hand traces the elevation in front of me, an edgy prefabricated box with ribbons of glass striping vibrant blocks of blue, white, and yellow in a Mondrian abstraction.
I lean back and pull my attention away from one attraction to focus on the other. “Will you at least read the research?”
He holds up the sheaf of papers Kelly prepared detailing the numerous studies that have been done purporting the benefits of fresh air and natural light in everything from factory production to animal fertility.
“She does have moxie,” he says.
“And she has a point.”
Jeffrey’s head shakes, and he gives a repeat performance of his not-serious laugh.
“Read it, then laugh,” I say.
He runs a thumb along the thick ream, and his eyebrows seam together in dread. “All of it?”
“Just until you’re convinced.”
I move to his side of the table to shake his hand, and he looks at my extended paw like it has six fingers.
“A hug is out of the question?” he asks.
I nod and keep the hand in place between us.
He takes my fingers princess style and lifts them to his lips. His breath brushes my knuckles as the callused tips of his fingers slide into the pocket of my palm, then, the instant before contact, my hand is turned, exposing the pale underside of my wrist. Light stubble graces the heel of my hand as his lips whisper across my skin.
“I miss you,” he says again, then turns and walks out the door.
T
he latch clicks, and I collapse into my chair.
The touch of his lips lingers on my wrist, and my fingers move to the cross around my neck, my guilt resurrecting itself like locusts waking after winter. In the glass of the conference room wall, my warped reflection stares, and my hand moves from the gold talisman to massage the neck he complimented.
I look tired. I am tired.
I turn away from myself, gather the drawings in my arms, drop them at my office, then leave for my appointment—my annual gyn exam, postponed three times, which landed it on my birthday and I had too much shame to postpone it again.
I’m fifteen minutes early and the doctor’s running an hour behind.
I settle in with my laptop.
