Who else can she call? Rocco has been on Daisy’s pickup list ever since—against her better judgment—she let Rocco and Ruth take Daisy to the circus. She’d felt sure she’d made a terrible mistake, but they’d all had a good time. Charlotte has admitted to Ted—and no one else—that one of the things she distrusts about Ruth is the fact that she and Daisy seem to like each other.
She texts Rocco: CAN U GET DAISY IF I NEED U?
Rocco’s the only person she lets herself text in that dopey millennial shorthand.
Rocco doesn’t answer. The last she heard he was on his way back from Mexico.
Let Rocco be all right too. I’ll give up drinking. Rocco has! And I’ll never get impatient with Daisy, no matter how crazy she drives me. I’ll never yell at her, never—
She considers asking Alma if she could please cancel her shrink appointment, but she’s afraid that Alma will dissolve in a puddle. Alma takes a long look at Charlotte and reaches into her multipocketed, multizippered purse and extracts a bottle of pills. Alma’s discovered muscle relaxants since her breakup.
The Xanax might not be the best idea after last night’s wine and sleeping pills. But Charlotte takes it anyway, except that it doesn’t relax her. It just makes her sleepy and anxious at the same time, an uncomfortable combination. Still . . .
The pill helps Charlotte get through the next few hours, helps her decide to wing it. And . . . oh, yes, it lulls her into what’s probably a false sense of security. Everything will be all right. At worst, she’ll be half an hour late. The school will just charge her extra. One of the teachers will stay with Daisy. They’re definitely not going to throw her out on the street. At least she hopes not. Why is it so hard for her to trust people to take good care of Daisy?
By the time Charlotte needs to leave for the meeting, the pill has worn off, in a particularly unhelpful way. She feels awful. Anxious. On edge.
She looks out the window. Her Uber’s arrived, as if by magic. For the first time in history, the driver has arrived sooner than the app predicted. She can tell by the way the driver is looking at his phone that he’s not a patient guy.
Okay. Showtime.
She runs into the back room and looks in the mirror. Not bad. Only a little worse for wear. In her mind, she goes over—one more time—what she has to say. And she practices her most confident, competent professional smile.
Then she rushes out of the shop, forgetting to say goodbye to Alma, hearing Alma’s wan “good luck” trailing her out the door.
CHARLOTTE PASSES THROUGH two sets of metal detectors and takes two elevators to the conference room. The space might seem less intimidating were the leather swivel chairs occupied by more than the three people who look like little dolls at the gargantuan table that dwarfs them.
They rise to shake hands—a man in a Hollywood-blue suit and two women, both blond, both in their early thirties, both wearing little black dresses. The women could almost pass for mirror images—or fraternal twins except that one is wearing lush false eyelashes and twice as much makeup as her coworker.
They say their names, but Charlotte is too distracted to catch them. Now she may never learn them. What if she has to call the office and ask for one of them by name? She should never have taken Alma’s pill. Or drunk so much wine last night, or those margaritas in the airport.
She sneaks a look at her watch.
Four ten.
A minute later, she looks again.
Four fifteen.
How is that even possible?
The man motions for her to sit down and clears his throat in a way that says, We’re too busy for small talk. “Okay, Charlene, show us what you’ve got.”
“It’s Charlotte.”
Less Makeup seems embarrassed by her boss’s rudeness, or just his businesslike-ness. “So how did you first get interested in flowers?”
Charlotte wishes she’d let her boss be as rude or brusque as he wanted. She’s all for any approach that will speed this up.
“I meant Charlotte. Humble apologies. I haven’t had my fifth cup of coffee. Or my first cocktail. And the crazy thing is, I can’t ask one of you to get it. Not unless I feel like having a long heart-to-heart with human resources about mistreating my female employees. Oops. I mean . . . coworkers.” He waits for the laughs that don’t come.
“No worries,” Charlotte says. A phrase she despises. To be alive at this moment and not to be worried would be clinically insane. And she’s always worried, no matter what her therapist says.
She produces her portfolio, and they riffle through the sketches that look like what they are: drawings she made in a taxi. Charlotte sees the sketches through their eyes: palm trees drawn by insomniac toddlers.
The man and More Makeup nod. Their faces are masks of pure nothing. Less Makeup (Charlotte wishes she’d registered their names—how will they stay in contact if she gets this job, which she probably won’t) says, “Well . . . I guess we can work with these.”
Charlotte says, “I was thinking about long black and red stems, vaguely . . . ikebana. Though no one will think ikebana unless they’re thinking harder than anyone’s ever thinking when they walk into a party space.”
“Not me,” says the man. “Me, I’m thinking like crazy. I’m thinking, How soon can I blow this clam shack and get home in time to watch the game?”
“Now that’s inappropriate,” says More Makeup. “And not funny.”
Less Makeup mimes being deep in thought. “You know, the ikebana meme might not be so bad. Let’s not forget the tsunami. Not a major tsunami this time, not a headline grabber. But a wall of water, nonetheless.”
The man says, “I’m going to guess that no one has forgotten the tsunami.”
The women turn back to Charlotte. It’s the women against the man now, three against one, though it’s just a game. At the end of the day—this is the end of the day, Charlotte thinks, fighting down a mini-surge of panic—he’s the boss.
Charlotte says, “We’ll keep with just a few red leaves and blackened palm trees, a combination of real and artificial, ghostly and vital. I know a guy who can do wonders with bare branches. I’m thinking something . . .” (Charlotte also hates that phrase, I’m thinking something, so much that she says it twice.) “I’m thinking something . . . a little Halloweenish, post-apocalyptic, not ugly or depressing but still perfect for this time of catastrophic weather events.”
“Now we’re heating up,” says the man. “I’m beginning to get excited. Am I even allowed to say that these days? That I’m getting . . . excited?”
“You can’t be too careful,” Less Makeup says mirthlessly.
Eager, helpless Charlotte smiles. She steals another glance at her watch.
Four thirty.
This is taking forever. She’d assumed they were busy people. But they (the guy, anyway) are enjoying this. As if they have all the time in the world.
Just then she gets two texts in a row. Bing bing.
“I need to check this.” Her voice is almost a moan.
“Kids?” says Less Makeup, with a patient little frown.
“One child,” Charlotte corrects her, sounding like the grade school teacher she has no desire to sound like.
First text from Eli: Stuck in theater.