Mrs. Fletcher(22)

“You wanna come?”

Amanda glanced at her computer screen. “I kinda have to finish this article.”

“No worries,” Eve said, retreating from the doorway. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

*

The final chunk of the workday felt endless, that infinitely expanding space between four thirty and five, when there was nothing left to do but surf the web and pretend to look busy in case one of her co-workers wandered by in the hallway. In a more humane and rational workplace—one of those Bay Area tech companies with ping-pong tables and espresso machines and nap rooms that she was so sick of hearing about—she could have called it a day and headed out into the fresh air, but the Senior Center was old-school government work. You got paid for keeping your ass in the chair, not for the quality of your ideas or the tasks you accomplished. It was one more example of how upside-down everything was. Wouldn’t it be a lot fairer if drones like her got to have the flexible hours and the hipster amenities? The people with the six-figure salaries could buy their own damn macchiatos.

On reflection, she wished she’d accepted Eve’s half-serious invitation to join her at Roy Rafferty’s wake. Not that it would have been much fun, sitting in a funeral home at the tail end of a beautiful fall afternoon, but at least they would have been able to drive there together, maybe go out for a drink afterward. Just a chance to hang out a bit, get to know each other a little better outside the context of work.

Amanda wasn’t sure if she wanted Eve to be a mentor or a friend, but there was room in her life for both. Or maybe she was just missing her mother—it had only been six months since her death, though most of the time it felt like yesterday—and looking for a substitute, an older, wiser woman to lean on for emotional support, not that Eve was anywhere close to her mother’s age, or had shown any interest in being part of Amanda’s support system. If anything, she seemed a little sad herself—Amanda had totally caught her crying in her office that one time, though Eve had denied it—which just made Amanda like her that much more, and wish they could slip past the rigid, artificial boundary that separated boss and employee, and find a way to meet each other as equals.

*

She was clicking through a viral list she was pretty sure she’d seen before—29 Celebs You Totally Didn’t Know Were Bi—when the phone rang. Her laptop clock said 4:52, late enough to make the call seem like an imposition, if it wasn’t some sort of emergency.

“Events,” she said cautiously. “Amanda speaking.”

“Hello, Amanda,” said the sandpapery female voice on the other end. “This is Grace Lucas.”

“Okay.” The name meant nothing to Amanda. “Can I help you?”

“You don’t know me,” Grace Lucas continued. She sounded a little off, possibly medicated. “I’m Garth Heely’s wife.”

Of course you are, Amanda thought irritably. When you had a job like events coordinator, there was always someone making your life miserable. At the moment, for Amanda, this someone was Garth Heely, an obscure local author scheduled to speak at the Senior Center’s monthly lecture series in November. A retired lawyer, Garth Heely had self-published three novels featuring Parker Winslow, a silver-haired sleuth who plies his trade at Sunset Acres, a senior living community with an unusually high murder rate. Amanda had read them all—it was her job!—and they were better than she’d expected, except that the killer in all three books turned out to be a person of color—a Jamaican nurse in Trouble in Sunset Acres, an Indian urologist in More Trouble in Sunset Acres, and a Guatemalan physical therapist in Mayhem in Sunset Acres. When she’d pointed out this unfortunate pattern—diplomatically, she thought—Garth Heely got immediately defensive, telling her he was fed up with all this PC crap you heard nowadays, everybody so focused on the color of everybody else’s skin, rather than the content of their character. Then he suggested that maybe she was the racist, lumping all non-white people into a single category, as if there were no difference between Kingston and Calcutta.

Have you ever been to Calcutta? he demanded.

Amanda admitted that she hadn’t.

Well, I have, he said. And believe me, honey, it ain’t a bit like Jamaica!

Amanda wasn’t surprised by his attitude of aggrieved innocence. It was something she’d gotten used to, working at the Senior Center. A lot of old white people acted like it was still 1956, like they could say whatever they wanted and not have to take any responsibility for their words. Soon after she’d gotten hired, she’d called out a couple of women for using the N-word in casual conversation—they were both knitting baby sweaters—and they’d looked at her like she was making a big deal out of nothing, since there were no black people within hearing range. There rarely were; Haddington was that kind of town.

Garth Heely wasn’t an out-and-out racist, just a prosperous, occasionally charming white man of a certain age, blind to his own privilege, predictably smug and condescending. The only thing that surprised her was what a diva he had turned out to be, considering that he was a writer no one had ever heard of, with an Amazon ranking somewhere in the millions.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“I’m calling on behalf of my husband,” Grace Lucas said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to cancel his speaking engagement.”