I sank into my chair, feeling numb and a little out of my league—for the first time in years. Retiring—Rhonda was retiring.
And she wanted me to take her place.
My chest constricted in panic.
A few minutes later, Juliette—a petite white woman with braided blond hair, big doe eyes, and cherry-red lipstick—trudged back to her cubicle, red-eyed and sniffling. She sank down at her desk. “W-we broke up again . . .”
Absently, I grabbed my tissue box from under the desk and offered her one. “That’s rough, friend.”
3
Home Sweet Home
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take my vacation—I did. Every year for the last seven years, I’d taken that week and I’d flown off to some distant part of the world. I just . . . didn’t want to be the girl who kept looking around airports for a woman with an azure-blue coat and a loud laugh, waving her large heart-shaped sunglasses for me to catch up.
Because that woman didn’t exist anymore.
And neither did the girl who loved her unconditionally.
No, she was replaced by a woman who worked late on a Friday night because she could, who would rather attend work functions than first dates, who had a spare pair of tights and deodorant in her desk drawer just in case she pulled an all-nighter (not that she had yet). She was always the last one in the building, when even the motion-sensor lights thought she’d gone home, and she was happy.
She was.
I finally logged out of my work computer, stood from my chair, and stretched, the fluorescent light above me flickering to life again. It was around 8:30 p.m. I should get going before security started to make their rounds, because then they’d tell Strauss and Rhonda, and Rhonda had this policy against working late on Fridays. So I grabbed my purse, made sure that Rhonda had everything on her desk for the Monday morning meeting, and left for the elevator.
I passed one of the company bookcases—the ones where people put freebies of extra galleys and final copies. Novels and memoirs and cookbooks and travel guides. Most I’d already read, but one caught my eye.
Destination Travel: New York City
It must have been a newer one, and there was a delicious sort of irony to reading a travel guide about a city you lived in. My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.
I thought—for a split second—that my aunt would love a copy, but when I took it off the shelf and put it in my purse, reality hit me again like a brick to the head.
I thought about putting it back, but I felt so ashamed for forgetting that she was gone that I quickly left for the elevator. I’d donate it to a secondhand bookshop this weekend instead. The lone security guard at the front of the building looked up from her phone as I hurried past, not surprised at all to find me working so late.
I walked to the subway station, and headed uptown to the Upper East Side, where I got off the train at my stop and pulled out my phone. It was a reflex by now to call my parents on the walk from the station to my aunt’s apartment building.
I never used to do this, but ever since Analea died, it’d become a sort of comfort. Besides, I think it helped Mom a lot. Analea was her older sister.
After two rings, Mom answered with a “Tell your father that it is perfectly acceptable to finally move my exercise bike into your old room!”
“I haven’t lived there in eleven years, so it’s absolutely okay,” I said, dodging around a couple looking at Google Maps on their phone.
Mom shouted, making me wince, “SEE, FRED! I told you she wouldn’t care!”
“What?” my dad called faintly in the background. The next I knew, he was picking up the phone from what I assumed was the kitchen. “But what if you come home, baby girl? What if you need it again?”
“She won’t,” Mom replied, “and if she does, she can take the couch.” I massaged the bridge of my nose. Even though I’d been moved out since I was eighteen, Dad hated change. My mom loved repetition. They were a match made in heaven. “Isn’t that right?”
Dad argued, “But what if—”
I interrupted, “You can turn my room into anything you want. Even a red room, if you want.”
“A red . . . ?” Mom began.
Dad said, “Is that the sex dungeon in that movie?”
“FRED!” Mom shrieked, and then said, “Well, that is an idea . . .”
My father said, with a sigh that weighed about as much as all thirty-five years of their marriage, “Fine. You can put your exercise bike in there—but we’re keeping the bed.”
I kicked a piece of trash on the sidewalk. “You really don’t have to.”
“But we want to,” Dad replied. I didn’t have the courage to admit to my dad that home wasn’t their two-story blue vinyl house on Long Island anymore. Hadn’t been for a while. But it also wasn’t the apartment I was walking to—slower and slower by the minute, as if I didn’t really want to go at all. “So how was your day, baby girl?”
“Fine,” I replied quickly. Too quickly. “Actually . . . I think Rhonda is retiring at the end of the summer, and she wants to promote me to director of publicity.”
My parents gasped. “Congrats, sweetheart!” Mom cried. “Oh, we are so proud of you!”
“And in only seven years!” Dad added. “That’s gotta be a record! Why, it took me eighteen years to make partner at the architecture firm!”
“And it’s just in time for your thirtieth birthday, too!” Mom agreed happily. “Oh, we are going to have to celebrate—”
“I don’t have the job yet,” I quickly reiterated, crossing the street to the block where my aunt’s apartment was. “I’m sure there will be other people in the running.”
“How do you feel about it?” Dad asked. He could always read me in this alarming way that my mom absolutely couldn’t.
Mom scoffed. “How do you think she feels, Fred? She’s ecstatic!”
“It’s just a question, Martha. An easy one.”
It was an easy question, wasn’t it? I should feel excited, obviously—but my stomach just couldn’t seem to unknot itself. “I think I’ll be more thrilled when I finally finish moving in,” I said. “There’s just a few more boxes I have to situate.”
“If you want, we can come this weekend to help,” Mom suggested. “I know my sister probably left a lot of junk hidden places . . .”
“No, no, it’s fine. Besides, I’m working this weekend.” Which probably wasn’t a lie—I’d find some work to do this weekend. “Anyway, I’m almost home. I’ll talk to you later. Love you,” I added, and hung up as I turned the corner and the towering building of the Monroe came into full view. A building that housed a small apartment that once upon a time belonged to my aunt.