I shake my head.
“The toughest people take it straight.” He hands me the mug, then says more brightly, “Go on in. She’ll be right with you.”
I open the door to our publisher’s corner office and step tentatively inside. Sue’s spa—as Meg and I call it—is the only office at Peony that doesn’t look like a romance publishing office. Every other employee has some variation of wall-to-wall bookshelves crammed with loudly colored spines, but Sue’s office is entirely white. The white desk is devoid of papers, the white leather chairs are smooth as cream, and the white modernist coat rack harbors three white cardigans, each one with some expensive flourish, like pale pink leather elbow patches.
The only pops of color come from three large hanging ferns and three framed photographs of sons who look like mini-Sues but with braces. I’ve never met Sue’s kids before, but I have seen her water her plants, and her surprising devotion to them lets me know she’s a really good mom.
I’m doing this square breathing trick Meg taught me, trying to stay calm as I settle into Sue’s white guest cloud, when a man pops up from behind Sue’s desk. We scream at the same time.
“Rufus, what the hell?” I hiss. I can hiss at him because he’s my friend. It’s a love hiss. “What are you doing here?”
“Um, my job?” he says, rolling out his neck, which is always sore because he over-Pilates because he has the long-standing, unrequited hots for Brent, the instructor at Pilates World.
“Well, get out! Come back later. I have a meeting.”
“Sue’s printer broke,” he says, fiddling with some cables in a way that makes me suspect he won’t be done anytime soon. “Just because I’ve had to resurrect your hard drive from the underworld—is it three times now?—does not mean I don’t also perform valuable IT for the rest of this company.”
“In my defense—”
“Oh, I dare you.” He shakes his head in pity.
“Mercury was in retrograde!”
“Permanently?” He laughs. “Why are you hissing so much?”
“I hiss when I’m nervous,” I hiss, glancing out the open door. “Frank used the word fired.”
Rufus rolls his big brown eyes, which reassures me. A little. He thinks this is absurd. Then again, he doesn’t know about Noa Callaway’s egregiously missed deadline.
“Why would you get fired?” Rufus pauses. “Do you think anyone else saw you stealing those office supplies last month?”
“It was a box of tissues!” More hissing. I can’t not at this point. “I had bronchitis!”
“Lanie.” Sue sweeps into the office, passing me to hang up her white cardigan—this one has a kind of corset look going on at the back, which only Sue could make look classy.
“Good as new, Sue,” Rufus proclaims, setting Sue’s printer back on its shelf below her desk.
“Always with the words I like to hear, Rufus,” Sue says, taking a seat across from me on her white couch.
“I’ll just be going.” He says the words I want to hear, mouthing good luck to me as he closes the door.
“How are you?” Sue asks me once we’re alone.
“Good. Fine.”
With her pearls and capsule uniform, with her silver-blond, chin length hair always looking like it’s just been drybarred, Sue is so put together that even after all these years, it can strike fear into my heart to look at her. Once, the two of us were escorting an author to an event at a mall in a Westchester suburb. We had an hour to kill before the signing, and Sue bought me a fancy spatula at Williams Sonoma, telling me I’d never make a French rolled omelet without it. I feel like she can look at me and sense that, two years later, I have never swatted a fly without it.
“How are things shaping up for the launch?”
“Brilliantly.” I take out my phone to show her the photo I’d taken earlier for Alix. This picture is worth a thousand of the words I’m too nervous now to say.
“I wish I could make it,” Sue says.
“We’ll splash the launch all over social media. It’ll be like you were there.”
Sue smiles cryptically at the image going black on my cell phone before looking directly at me. The smile fades.
“Listen, Lanie,” she begins, “what I’m about to say isn’t going to be easy for you.”
I hold my breath, gripping my armrests. If she fires me, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. Ryan tells me all the time how many jobs there are out there that I’d be great at, but that’s because he wants me to move to D.C. I don’t want another job. I want this one.
Sue opens a folder on her lap, flips through a few pages. Torturing me.
“Shoot. It’s not here.” She rises and goes to the door, sounding slightly piqued. “Frank? The document?”
There’s scuffling outside and Frank’s apologetic murmurs. While Sue waits at the door, I look away, as from a surgeon about to amputate one of my limbs. I face her oversized windows and watch the snow falling on the café awning across the street.
And of course, this is the view I’d have while getting fired. That café is the place where I got this job, seven years ago.
I was twenty-two, just out of college, and wildly optimistic. The week before graduation I had come across a job posting online:
Editorial Assistant, Peony Press.
By then, I was an English minor, but for all intents and purposes, still pre-med. In an instant, my plans to move home and spend the summer studying for the MCAT? Poof. Gone. This was a sign. I was never meant to be a doctor. I was on this earth to bring more stories like Ninety-Nine Things into the world.
I took a Greyhound up to New York. I slept on friends’ parents’ couches in various boroughs, and waitressed at a Greek diner while I waited for Peony Press to call.
They didn’t. Nor did any of the other publishers where I applied for jobs.
By September, my couch prospects and my dad’s patience ran out in the form of a plane ticket home. The day before my flight back to Atlanta, a visitor arrived in Queens. I stood on my friend Ravi’s mom’s fire escape, squinting into hazy sun at what appeared to be my grandmother.
Lest any cookie-baking, tissue-up-the-sleeve images form in your mind, let me set you straight: My bubby Dora is a fighter. She survived Auschwitz, and after her family immigrated to America, she became one of three women in her graduating class at Yale School of Medicine. When she gave me The Talk in eighth grade, it was a weekend-long celebration, culminating in popcorn and a screening of Dangerous Liaisons. For as long as I can remember BD has drunk exclusively from a coffee mug that reads BADASS MOTHERFUCKER.