Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single (18 page)

“Ed's retiring?”

“That's off the record,” he says, “but yeah. And if I play my cards right, you're looking at the new store president.”

“Very nice,” I say. “Want some dessert? Pumpkin pie.”

“Let me digest. Damn, that was a good dinner. You spoil me.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” I say, picking up my wineglass and gently swirling the expensive pinot noir I bought. “I just wanted to know if—God, this is so stupid.”

“What?”

“No, I mean it's no big deal either way. I just wanted to know if, you know. About you and me. About us.”

He leans back. “Am I in trouble?”

“No! I mean, it's just that I was at dinner at my mom's house and Hailey asked me if you were, you know, if you were my boyfriend.”

Brad doesn't say anything. I can feel the deck chairs sliding as the ship begins to tank.

“I mean, I don't care.” I say. “No, not that I don't care, just, I didn't know what to tell her, you know?” Brad picks up his wineglass and takes a sip. He seems to be thinking. Thinking of what? Of how to profess his undying love? Of how to politely tell me he's dating thirty girls right now and can't possibly commit to just one?

“I wish you'd say something.” I laugh. “You look so serious.”

“No,” he says, “not serious. Preoccupied I guess. Work and everything.”

This is not going the way I planned at all. I get up and clear the dishes. If he had two IQ points to put together in his head he would follow me into the kitchen and tell me I'm his girlfriend. Kiss me at least, but no, nothing.

I shovel out two pieces of pumpkin pie onto hand-painted dessert plates and bring them back to the dining room, where Brad is still staring pensively at his wine.

“Here,” I say, dumping a plate in front of him. “I didn't bake it.”

“Sorry if I seem out of it,” he says, and my heart catches.
“The thing is, the board still has to vote. About the presidency. About my position. It's sort of an all-or-nothing deal.”

The presidency? Here I slave all week getting ready for this dinner and he can't even look me in the eye? I take an angry bite of pie and that's when I realize we're sitting at the Brownville high-gloss black dining room table I saw when he first asked me out. I feel sick. I'm not his girlfriend, I'm his cook. His maid. His personal assistant.

“You talk about work too much,” I say with whipped cream in my mouth. I'm stabbing at my dessert like I'm checking to see if it's dead.

“Yeah,” Brad sighs. “Hannah says that, too.”

I swallow. “Who?”

“My ex-girlfriend.”

“Your ex-girlfriend? Which ex-girlfriend? You still talk to your ex-girlfriend?”

“Why?” he asks. “Is that bad?”

“You said, ‘Hannah says that, too.' Present tense. You still talk to your ex-girlfriend?”

“Well, yeah, we're friends.”

“Friends?”

“Don't you talk to your ex-boyfriends?”

“Nope. Can't say that I do, but it's great you talk to yours and you get advice from her even! That's super.”

“Jesus, you're mad.” He sighs.

“I'm not mad.” I'm actually furious. “I think I'll go home now. To my house.”

He rolls his eyes.

“You just rolled your eyes!” I point at his face. “Scientists say that is the number-one indicator that a couple will not stay together. The number-one indicator!” I cross my arms and refuse to speak.

We sit there in silence until I can't take it anymore. “So her name is Hannah?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Lovely.”

He shuts his eyes. “Jesus.”

“It's none of my business, Brad. It's your life. I don't even know if you're my boyfriend. So you talk to whoever you want to.”

“Come on. All I said was she agreed with you, that I talk too much about work!”

“You never even mentioned this Hannah person before.”

“We only lived together for like six months before she broke up with me. It totally wasn't going to—”

My eyes open wide. “
What!?
”

His eyes open wide. “What?”

“You lived together? She broke up with you?” My head is reeling. “You never told me you lived with anybody. You never told me that!”

“I thought I did.”

“No, I would most certainly remember you living with someone.”

“It was four years ago! Before I went to China!”

“Before you went to China? I didn't know you went to China.”

“Well, there you go,” he says, frustrated. “I went to China. I took a three-month vacation. Sabbatical. Whatever you want to call it.”

I think about this for a minute. Something doesn't seem right. Something seems most definitely wrong. “Wait a minute,” I say. “Did you go to China because of her? Like to get away from the pain or something?”

He shrugs.

I glare at him. “You lived with someone who broke your heart
and you had to go to China to get over her. Nice. I'm glad you enjoyed the salmon.”

“Maybe you should go,” he says.

I feel tears welling up in my eyes.

“Fine,” I say. “I'll go and why don't you go back to China! Go get over your soul mate ex-girlfriend you still talk to.”

Then he actually gets up and leaves the room. I stand there, speechless. Humiliated. I open my heart and he leaves? I will never speak to him again as long as I live.

I storm out to my car. He doesn't even come out after me. I just drive away in the night, alone and unloved, and certainly not anybody's girlfriend. I'm just me.

Chubby, boring Jennifer Johnson.

I don't understand what I did wrong. Am I too picky? Is that it? Should I have settled, like every other woman I know? I have sat through more weddings where I knew for a fact the groom had a drinking problem or more than one affair under his belt or even a violent temper from time to time and still every bride was ecstatic. White dress, rosy cheeks, happy parents, successful life story. Brother. Is it that important to land a man?

I should just focus on my life and me, on making my world better. I really need to clean everything. More than just the junk drawers. I need to scrub, boil, and disinfect everything in my entire place. I make a list of things to buy even though I probably shouldn't buy anything right now. I'm not really a “budget” person—in fact I really don't know how much I have in my checking account, I just use my cash card for what I want and hope for the best. I know that's bad, but if I'm overdrawn there's nothing I can do until my next paycheck, and looking at the negative numbers in my bank account is only going to depress me.

By midnight I've left four messages on Brad's phone. The first one was just a sniffle and some weepy noises. The second, I
was angry and told him two can play the flirt-with-others game. The third, I apologized for the second. And the last message was about ten minutes long and I don't really remember what I said, but regretted saying it.

Christopher says he's going to come chop my hands off if I don't stop calling Brad. “Just leave Fatty Glumpkin alone!” he says.

“I can't believe I'm such an idiot,” I sob into the phone. “I really think he's going to break up with me!”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won't. Maybe you should break up with him for being an emotionally bankrupt asshole.”

“I ruined everything.”

“If it's meant to be, it'll be,” he says. He's already said this three times during this conversation.

“Maybe I should call him again, so he knows I want to talk.”

Christopher sighs. “You already called him too many times. It's like when you overwater a plant. All you can really do is wait. You don't keep watering it, right?”

“I guess so.”

“That's right,” he says. “All you can do is wait.”

 

The next day at work, I check my cell phone and e-mail every thirty seconds to see if Brad has tried to contact me. I don't leave my desk all day, except once, for the Heart Bear fiasco. The Heart Bears were these little stuffed teddy bears that were supposed to be made by deaf kids or epileptic refugees or something, and Keller's was selling them for Valentine's Day. They were red with white hearts on their bellies and they had a small recording device tucked in their butts, so you could record a special Valentine's Day message like, “I love you!” or “Marry me!” or “For the best Grandma ever!” Keller's was giving the bears away with any purchase over twenty dollars or for five
dollars apiece, a buck of which went to the deaf kids or the epileptic refugees or whatever they were.

We got a truckload of these red bears and built a special Heart Bear kiosk that had big Lucite walls and a light-up sign that said,
GIVE A BEAR TO SOMEONE WHO CARES!
And as an added incentive, you could have your Heart Bear mailed anywhere in the lower forty-eight for free. So you could buy a bear, record a message, and then get it shipped to your niece or nephew or the person you were stalking and it really didn't cost very much. People started to buy them in quantity. HR even hired two temps to shovel these bears out to the public, so the regular salespeople wouldn't be hampered by the mad rush. Except that turned out to be the problem. Every bear these two temps sold had gone missing.

Four hundred and eighteen bears. Gone. What's worse, someone leaked it to the
Skyway News
. “Heart to Tell?” it read and noted the missing bears were not made by deaf children or endangered penguins but in fact by factories that use child labor in Mexico. Ed was livid and put Ashley in charge of media spin. Now she wants the marketing team to come up with “Sorry we fucked up and lost your Heart Bear” replacement gift ideas.

As we trudge to the meeting, Ted tells me he's already prepared a list of possible gift ideas for us to pitch. “We could give people a gift certificate for labia piercing,” he says, “or toasters. Maybe both! I bet we could find a toaster that also pierces labias. Probably just a small mechanical adjustment, you know?”

“Sure,” I say glumly.

“I also thought bereaved Heart Bear owners might enjoy
actual
bears,” he says, tapping his notepad with his pen. “There's a game reserve in Alaska looking to relocate a couple hundred older black bears that have stopped hibernating and become
‘nuisance bears,' which is another term for ‘bears who attack people.'”

I nod as we go into the conference room and check my cell phone one last time to see if Brad called. No. Of course he hasn't. I'm not even listening to Ted anymore, who's going on and on about bear ideas. “We could even get gourmet honey from the imported foods department so each bear would arrive with a jar of honey tied around his neck.”

We sit down.

At the head of the table next to Ashley is a Keller's employee I seldom see, Larkin, the head of store security. He's a tall, serious man who wears black horn-rimmed glasses and dark blue suits. He looks like a 1950s CIA agent, or Cary Grant, except meaner. I've never seen him smile, ever. Maybe now that Brad hates me he would be good dating material. I don't intend to smile ever again either.

The meeting begins and he stands. He clears his throat. “As you know we've been looking for a certain unit of Keller's merchandise called Heart Bears,” he says, “and after a thorough investigation, we have concluded the merchandise was not stolen.” Then he sits down.

No one says anything.

“Well, they had to be stolen,” Ashley says. “They're gone.”

Larkin looks at his file. “I'm aware they are gone.”

She makes a mean face at him. “Shipping never even got them.”

“I'm aware that shipping never got them,” he says.

“Well, thank you for repeating everything I say! Maybe you could tell me if you checked all the surveillance tapes!”

Larkin nods. “We checked them. Nothing. No one breaking in, no one breaking out, no moving parcels or suspicious activity. Nothing.”

“Well, you have to find them,” Ashley says.

“I'm in charge of security,” he says, “not Lost and Found.”

Ashley frowns hard enough to make her Botoxed forehead crease. “Well, what do you suggest we do? How do we find all these lost bears?”

Larkin shrugs. “I don't know, maybe put them on the back of milk cartons?”

This is the closest thing to a joke I have ever heard him say.

Ashley, however, is not amused. “So you're saying the bears got up and walked out the door?”

This doesn't ruffle Larkin in the slightest. He just checks his watch. “Perhaps they did walk out,” he says, deadpan. “Perhaps there was a Teddy Bear picnic.”

Okay, he's definitely dating material.

Big Trish comes huffing into the room with a red, splotchy face. God, her ass is big. She hands Ashley a file folder, and the room goes quiet. I can hear the overhead fan kick in.

“Well, they found them,” Ashley says. “The janitors found them in the incinerator. The geniuses selling them on the floor mixed up the mail chute with the garbage chute and sent all the bears down to the incinerator.”

Someone titters. Ashley's eyes fly open.

“Is that funny?” she asks. “Is it? Is it funny that four hundred and eighteen bears got set on fire? That all their recording devices sounded off and when they melted they said disgusting things, which apparently Keller's customers recorded, but which I am too much of a lady to repeat? Is that funny?” When no one answers she picks up the file folder on the table and rips out a sheet of paper, apparently an eyewitness's testimonial. “Bears that were manufactured to convey loving affection,” she says, “said things like, “‘Put your meat in me'” and “‘Teddy wants a blow job'” just before they burned up? Is that funny?” There is a pregnant moment of silence and then the room explodes with laughter.