Emira booked Paula’s appointments and ordered her lunches and stood backstage at panels and speeches. But she also rubbed the backs of Paula and other middle-aged adults as they cried and swore in private (she handed them tissues and told them it was okay). While her own news segment on WNFT was the gateway to the highest-paying position of her life (eighteen dollars an hour—she also received free lunch), Emira later found it funny that she once considered her four-minute segment on Philadelphia local news “a big deal.” The interview cut just after Zara announced Yeah, das right! And aside from a few YouTube compilations of Local News Interviews Gone Wrong, no one Emira’s age saw it. Not even Shaunie or Josefa; Emira made Zara swear.
Three days before Emira turned twenty-eight, her boss called her into her office. Emira sat down across from her and opened up her notebook, ready to take instructions or a lunch order, but Paula told her to put it away.
“You’ve been here for almost two years, yes?” Paula confirmed. After Emira nodded, she added, “When are you planning on leaving?”
Emira blinked three times and smiled. “Leaving?” she asked. Something Emira appreciated about Paula was her directness, but in moments like this, Emira was both grateful and afraid, because Paula always meant what she said. Emira squinted and asked, “Am I getting fired right now?”
“God, no. But Emira,” she said, “I’ve never had an assistant who wanted to continue being my assistant for more than two years. Basically, if you stayed on for much longer, it would mean I’m doing something wrong.”
Emira sat back and laughed. “Okay, well . . .” She looked at Paula’s desk and a picture of her family. “I can’t believe I’m saying this . . . but I actually think I’m okay.”
Maybe she wasn’t by her girlfriends’ standards (Shaunie was engaged, Josefa was teaching at Drexel, Zara made enough money to get a two-bedroom apartment and pay rent for both her and her little sister), but Emira really was doing okay. She’d gone to Mexico for Zara’s birthday, all five days. She’d stuck to her New Year’s resolution to make her bed every day. She had a savings account, which she dipped into often, but not so much that it didn’t exist. And she’d added two new recipes to her dinner circulation, both of which were Crock-Pot meals, but still. Emira also liked Paula and her kid. Her boss was fairly rude to everyone except for her, and Emira went to work feeling paid and protected.
But Paula seemed disappointed in Emira’s contentment. “Good bosses shouldn’t make you happy in a job that they wouldn’t want to do themselves,” she said. “It’s my job to make you so miserable that you’re forced into finding something that brings you joy, and then I help you seal the deal. So . . . your goal for the next year is to learn how to properly hate your job, and find something else that you wouldn’t hate doing. Got it?”
Emira said, “Got it,” and went back to her desk. She would stay on as Paula’s assistant until Paula retired.
It would take Emira four more years to receive Shaunie’s starting salary of $52K, but Emira came to know the rare relief of having a boss who was so consumed with her assistant’s success that she was never derailed by the idea of being Emira’s friend. That day, after she walked out of Paula’s office, Emira went back to her desk and clicked an open window on her computer. She clicked Add to Cart and Check Out on a loveseat for her apartment, upon which she and Zara would spend an entire weekend painting their nails and watching two seasons of America’s Next Top Model.
After her news segment, Emira didn’t hear from Kelley for six whole days. She told herself that she and he were too different, that they drank too much when they were together, that she didn’t know why she tried to date a white guy who lived in Fishtown anyway. Technically, Kelley had won. Emira very publicly stuck it to Mrs. Chamberlain with a remix of his breakup line, which, despite her paraphrasing, she thought he could use as an opening line if he decided to try calling her one more time. But when he did finally contact her, one week after she quit, it was a clunky and trite text of encouragement that Emira did not enjoy.
Emira. Holy shit. I just saw your clip from the news.
I know things are weird right now, but I’m so proud of you.
I always knew you could do it.
Despite being more broke than she’d ever been in her life, and still grieving the loss of Briar Chamberlain, this complimentary sentiment promptly made it final: there was no way that she and Kelley would ever recover from the acknowledgment that he’d been right about Mrs. Chamberlain. Forming a relationship again would somehow dictate that he could be right about everything else, when really, he had a lot to learn. Emira never texted him again. His name in her phone remained Don’t Answer.
Emira did see Kelley again, but he didn’t see her. On a Saturday summer morning, when Emira was twenty-eight years old, she went with Shaunie to a farmer’s market at Clyde Park. The girls got separated when Shaunie spotted a truck with kittens for adoption, and Emira roamed the produce tables, taking in the smells and looking for her friend. For a moment, Emira thought she spotted the back of Shaunie. But she quickly realized that it couldn’t have been Shaunie, because this person was holding Kelley Copeland’s hand. Next to a table of soy candles and bottled honey, Kelley stood next to a light-skinned black woman with fresh coils of dark hair. She turned and Emira took her in. There were gladiator sandals on her feet, a small gold septum ring in her nose, and a basket hanging on her arm filled with root vegetables and essential oils.
“Babe, gimme two seconds,” she said, touching Kelley’s arm. “I’m gonna see if I can sign up to sell my shea butter here next week. Can you hold this real quick?”
Emira watched her hand Kelley a smoothie. When he accepted it he grinned and said, “Okay, miss.”
In another lifetime, Emira would have texted Mrs. Chamberlain to let her know she’d run into Kelley. She would have typed, You won’t believe who I saw, and Mrs. Chamberlain would have texted back, Tell me everything. Because even though Kelley been right about her, Alix had been right about him too. If things had gone differently, Emira would have also texted Mrs. Chamberlain a picture of her new couch, and Mrs. Chamberlain would have been ecstatic. Sometimes Emira thought that if she’d learned how to say Mrs. Chamberlain’s first name, that maybe she would have calmed down a bit. But they hadn’t gone differently. And like Emira, Mrs. Chamberlain was a grown human person with choices and decisions, and the funds to order sushi at least two times a week. Emira would think of Mrs. Chamberlain many times on election night, and pray that she had enough room in her heart for both a devastating failure and her firstborn child.
That same year, four months after she spotted Kelley, Emira walked to pick up a bridesmaid dress for what would become Shaunie’s first wedding. It was three days till Halloween, but it was a weekend, and children walked the sidewalks in costumes and masks, pillowcases and buckets in their hands. There was a carnival in Rittenhouse Square, and along a brick ledge that bordered the sidewalk sat mini-pumpkins that had been decorated by what looked to be mini-hands. They were covered in glitter paint and feathers, and they were drying in the sun. Down at the far end of the four-foot-tall ledge, five-year-old Briar was dressed as a hamburger, reaching up on her tiptoes, and struggling to reach a pumpkin doused in green.