On the Fly (3 page)

It really shouldn’t
have been so hard to concentrate on this
interview. Not when I’d become such an old pro at them in recent
days. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the man who’d
run straight into me a few minutes ago. He’d been huge. I mean, I
knew professional athletes were bigger than your everyday sort of
man in general, and no one would ever call my five foot two tall,
but holy cow.

Talk about an imposing presence. And
if I was going to work for an NHL team, I was going to be around
guys his size all the time. At least Maddie wouldn’t be around
them, though. It wouldn’t be so bad for me, and I needed a
job.

I might have been able to stop myself
from thinking about him if he hadn’t been so good-looking. Not just
everyday good-looking, but like a movie star—a bit like Pierce
Brosnan, back in his younger days. I thought all hockey players
were supposed to be missing half their teeth and have bent, broken
noses and stitches and bruises everywhere. He’d had a long scar on
one cheek that had faded to a pinkish hue, but that was pretty much
the only flaw I could find on his chiseled cheekbones, perfectly
straight nose, and piercing brown eyes.

And
that
was more than just a little
disarming.

“
I’m a little curious,” Mr.
Sutter said, peering at me over the top of his glasses and jolting
me back to the task at hand, “why the employment agency would send
you to interview for an administrative position when your prior
work experience is all in manufacturing.”

I knew that look he was giving me. The
doubt. I’d been to a dozen interviews in the last week, and every
single one of them had dismissed even the tiniest little inkling of
a thought of hiring me, straight out of hand, for no reason other
than I’d never done any administrative work before.

Well, not all of them. The woman at
the doctor’s office on Friday hadn’t let that part bother her. Her
problem had been the fact that I didn’t have a college education,
that I only had a GED instead of a high school diploma.

I just needed someone—anyone—to look
past my lack of experience and education, to give me a chance. I
could do anything I put my mind to, and I’d prove it, but I could
only prove it if someone gave me the opportunity.

I fought back my frustrations and took
a breath to clear my head. “I’m looking for a change,” I said as
calmly as I could manage. “I don’t have anyone to help me with my
kids, so I need something with comparable hours to when they’ll be
in school. When I worked in manufacturing, it was always second
shift. I was at work when they were at home.”

And that was when all hell had broken
loose.

I couldn’t go much longer
without work. I had to have
something
, and I needed it now. There
were only so many more nights I could afford the hotel room and to
buy meals for my kids, Madison and Tucker. It wouldn’t be long
before we’d go completely through the dregs of my cashed-out
401(k), and then what would I do? Sell the car? It wouldn’t be very
easy to get to a job without a car. Besides, I doubted it would
bring in much, as old as it was.

Mrs. Alvarez leaned closer to me and
narrowed her eyes. She intimidated me more than Mr. Sutter did. It
was her eyes. It was like she could see through you, see all the
bits of yourself that you’d rather keep private.

I shifted in my seat and crossed my
legs in the opposite direction.

“
But you did have someone
to help when you were in Texas?” she asked.

“
I did. I don’t
anymore.”

He would damn sure never step foot
near my kids again. Thinking about Jason now would only make my
blood boil, though. Either that or make me cry. One of the two,
neither of which would help me get this job.

“
Hmm,” Mr. Sutter
said.

That was usually what interviewers
said right before they thanked me for my time and ushered me out
the door. I had no intention of letting that happen again today. I
couldn’t stop myself. I was getting to be a bit desperate, or maybe
a lot desperate, and desperation made me do stupid
things.

“
Look,” I said before I
thought better of it, definitely more emphatically than I’d said
anything since stepping foot in this building. “I’m a hard worker,
as hard a worker as you will ever come across. I may not know how
to do everything you need me to do yet, but I’ve never faced a
challenge I couldn’t meet, and I learn fast. I was an honor student
in high school until I got pregnant. I worked in manufacturing
because that was the only job I could get without a high school
diploma other than working a drive-through window, and
manufacturing paid better and gave me benefits that a job in fast
food couldn’t.” I finally took a breath and looked to see what sort
of reaction my speech had garnered.

Instead of glaring at me
like he wanted to kick me out of his office for practically begging
for a job, Jim Sutter looked…I don’t know,
interested
. That shocked me. It
shocked me a lot, actually.

“
Do you know how to type?”
he asked, leaning back in his chair with his hands forming a
steeple in front of him. “How to use word processors and
spreadsheets, that sort of thing?”

I nodded. “I learned in middle
school.”

Mrs. Alvarez stared at me
and then scanned the r
é
sum
é
I’d
given them. She brought her eyes back up to meet mine. “You don’t
have a phone number on here and the address is a hotel. What are
you running away from?”

“
I…” Okay, so maybe I only
thought I was shocked before. I wasn’t prepared to answer questions
like this. It seemed too personal. But I needed a job, and this was
starting to feel like it might be my only real chance to get one.
“Someone hurt my kid. He can’t hurt her anymore. He’s in prison. I
wanted to give her a fresh start, a chance to reset and make her
life what she wants it to be.” I wanted that for all of us, not
just Maddie…but especially for her.

“
That’s why you left
Texas,” Mrs. Alvarez said while Mr. Sutter just sat back and let
her take over the interview. “But why did you come to Portland? Of
all the places you could have gone, why here? You said you don’t
have anyone to help with the kids, so what brought you?”

My reason sounded stupid, even to me.
I let out a half-laugh, but I told them anyway. “When I was a kid,
my parents brought us here on a family vacation once. We saw all
the sights, did the whole tourist thing. But on our last day, they
brought us to Powell’s City of Books, and I thought it was the best
thing ever, books upon books upon books. I could get lost in there
and never want to be found. I thought maybe something like that
would be good for my daughter, a place where she could live in
someone else’s world for a while.” A fictional world was a heck of
a lot better than her reality, lately.

With that pathetic explanation, I was
pretty sure they’d be ending the interview any minute. Who picks up
and moves their family halfway across the country because of a
freaking bookstore? No one sane.

I probably wasn’t sane anymore. Good
grief, how did this interview get so twisted around? Why had I let
it? I probably should just end it myself, thank them and then get
up and walk out, see what other employers the agency could send me
to.

“
Have you taken her to
Powell’s yet?” Mr. Sutter asked before I could do that.

I nodded. “Over the
weekend.”

“
And did it
help?”

Maddie, Tuck, and I had spent the
whole afternoon there on Saturday, visiting each of the many
floors, following the map to find where all our favorite types of
books would be. When they called it a “city of books,” they weren’t
kidding. It was just as magical a place as I remembered it being.
Sure enough, Maddie and Tuck had both found a stack of books to
explore, and we had holed up in a corner and read for
hours.

I’d felt bad that we were spending so
much time there and reading so many books, treating it like it was
a library and not a store. So when we left, I’d given in and bought
each of them a book. That just meant I’d be eating ramen noodles
for my lunches instead of something more filling, at least for a
while. It was worth it to be able to buy books for my kids, though.
Maddie had already finished her book and had started reading it
again, and today was only Monday.

“
Yeah,” I finally said.
“It’s helping.”

He nodded, but then he stared at me
for so long that it made me squirm.

Mrs. Alvarez straightened the stack of
papers in front of her and then said to him, “She’s the
one.”

The one what?

“
She is,” Mr. Sutter said
without explaining. He got up from behind his desk and came around
it, then sat down in an empty chair between me and Mrs. Alvarez. He
took off his glasses and stared at me. “If you’re going to be my
new assistant and learn how to replace Martha, I can’t have you
living in a hotel with your kids. Why are you?”

If it hadn’t already been
too personal, now it
really
was, but I felt oddly comfortable talking to him.
To both of them. “I can’t sign a lease until I have a job, a source
of income. Until I have enough money for a deposit and
rent.”

“
We’re more of a family
than a company here,” he said, “the Portland Storm organization.
It’s not just a team. We take care of our own.”

I didn’t have the first clue what he
meant by that.

The team had
almost finished practice by the time I’d gone to
see Drywall Tierney, the team’s head equipment manager. He helped
me to sort out what gear I needed to take with me and what would be
provided in Seattle. They were winding things down on the ice, so I
hung around for a bit. I needed to talk to Jamie
Babcock.

Babs was an almost-twenty-year-old
hockey phenom and, at least for this season, my roommate. Last
season, he’d lived with Zee so he could adjust to life as a pro
hockey player and to being away from his mom and dad. When I got
called up to finish last season in Portland, I’d lived with them,
too. This year, Babs and I both thought it would be better to give
Zee and Dana some space, some privacy. We got a condo together near
downtown, a nice place not too far from either the arena or the
practice facility.

I liked Babs. He didn’t need me to
babysit him or anything, but he had still jumped at the idea of us
living together. I was pretty sure it was that he wouldn’t have to
figure out how to cook for himself, more than anything, that
convinced him it was a good idea.

Babs wasn’t that great in the kitchen.
Actually, he was a holy terror in the kitchen. I’d banned him from
ever touching the stove within a week of us moving into the new
place. Not much later, I’d added the oven, the toaster, and the
coffee maker to the list of off-limit appliances. It was best for
all involved if Babs didn’t attempt to make anything more
complicated than a peanut butter sandwich.

When the boys came off the ice, I told
him the news about me heading to Seattle for a week.

He was busy changing out of his gear.
“Damn, Soupy,” he said once I finished talking. “That sucks. I
mean, it’ll be good to get back on the ice, but…”