The Wrong Drink
The barista handed me the wrong drink and I almost said something.
It was 7:48 on a Tuesday, and I had been rehearsing the same three sentences in the elevator mirror, the cab, and now the line for coffee, which was the last place a person should be caught moving her lips. The pitch was good. The pitch had been good for two weeks. What I needed wasn’t a better pitch. What I needed was for Marcus to look up from his laptop when I delivered it.
“That’s actually mine.”
A man behind me in line. I turned, and he smiled in the unhurried way of someone who had never once in his life worried about being late.
“You can keep it, though,” he said. “You look like you need it more than I do.”
“I have my own.”
“Then you have two. Even better.”
I took my actual drink from the counter and walked off without answering, which I regretted by the time I reached the revolving door. Not because I owed him anything — I didn’t — but because I had been rude on a morning when I needed to be sharp, and rudeness took something out of me that sharpness needed.
The pitch went fine. Marcus looked up twice. I went back to my desk and answered forty-three emails before lunch, which was a metric I had started tracking the year I turned twenty-six, around the same time I stopped tracking other things. Steps. Wine. The exact shape of a face I had once known better than my own.
Jazz came by at one. She brought a salad I hadn’t asked for and the gossip I had.
“New client,” she said, sitting on the corner of my desk in a way that would have gotten anyone else written up. “Big one. They’re announcing tomorrow but I heard last night.”
“From who.”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.”
“Jazz.”
“Fine. Priya in legal. She was drafting the paperwork until midnight.” She speared a tomato. “It’s huge, Lee. Like, restructure-the-org-chart huge. And whoever lands it gets walked straight to partner.”
I didn’t say anything, because I wanted it too badly to say anything, and Jazz, who had known me since we were nineteen, registered the silence and patted my knee and changed the subject.
She asked about the weekend. I told her my dad was flying in for my mother’s birthday, and my voice did the thing it always did when I talked about him, the involuntary softening, like I was a girl again and he had just walked into the room. Jazz heard it and smiled. Everyone’s father should be loved like that, she said once, years ago. I had agreed, and never told her how lucky I knew I was.
That night I came home and ran a bath I didn’t get into and ate cereal standing over the sink. I went to put my earrings away and saw them — the ones I almost never wore, gold hoops, small, the kind of thing a girl in college might have lingered over at a market and decided she couldn’t afford. I did not remember putting them on that morning. I did not remember taking them off, either, which meant I must have, at some point, between the cab and the bath. I held them in my palm for a moment and then dropped them back into the dish.
I didn’t think about him. I had not thought about him in a long time.
My phone buzzed on the counter. An email, marked urgent, from Marcus.
Need you in tomorrow at 8 sharp. The new partnership signed last night. You’re on the lead team. Client’s name is Damian Evans.
I read it twice. Then I picked the earrings back up, because my hands needed something to do, and I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and I did not cry, but I did not move for a long time either.
