The Assistants(72)

Lily manages our accounting. She’s chilled out a bit. Sometimes she even forgoes her Lean Cuisine meals and joins the rest of us for lunch at AlMar or Superfine. Her cardigan with giraffes on it is still in common rotation and that is totally in accordance with our dress code.

Wendi is in charge of digital everything and anything that has to do with a computer. A video of her band’s most recent single, “Kiss Your Stock Options Good-bye, I’m Going to Set You on Fire Now,” has developed a cult following among a newly forming anarchist subset of Assistance members, a fierce and loyal superfan group who call themselves the WendiChanimals. You can recognize them by the two pink horns dyed into their bangs.

Ginger runs PR, which suits her much better than being a legal assistant pursued on the regular by an in-heat Glen Wiles. It’s incredible how no longer having to worry about getting your ass grabbed can really free up a girl’s mind. Ginger transformed herself into a self-taught public relations maven faster than you can say end-user deliverables. She regularly lectures the rest of us on the importance of our horizontals and verticals (insert sex joke here) and our target media. I used to think Ginger was just a mean girl all grown up; now I know it for a fact—but mean girls make excellent publicists, especially when they’re smarter and more determined than any mean man you’ve ever met.

Emily has done everything possible to milk her five minutes of fame. She has finally (like Diane von Furstenberg) become the woman she always knew she wanted to be. Her main responsibility is coordinating the nonprofit’s fund-raising (i.e., asking rich people for money, which she naturally rocks at). But she’s also turned herself into a much-sought-after public speaker. At the moment, she’s preparing her talk for a TEDx event, which she’s hoping to parlay into a guest spot on the Ellen show, which she’s hoping to parlay into her own show—a reboot of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous called Emily Johnson’s Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams. What sort of accent she would put on for such a show is still up for debate.

I mostly keep quiet, running the less glamorous behind-the-scenes aspects of the nonprofit. Holding meetings, making decisions. And I’m surprisingly good at it. After the long and complicated route to getting here, I’ve finally arrived at a place disarmingly simple: I’m happy. Because it feels good to do something positive with my days.

My assistant is a brilliant, fresh-faced young woman just out of college. After a year of her dedicated service (not to mention keeping us up-to-date on the coolest new apps, the latest bands we’ve never heard of, and the correct pronunciation of words like GIF), we’ll pay off her $72,000 student-loan debt, in full. Then we’ll promote her.

Yesterday, she buzzed me while I was going over a spreadsheet and staring out my window at the water tower.

“There’s someone here to see you,” she said. “It’s . . .” Her voice dropped off.

Fearing she’d passed out, or suddenly come down with a nasty bout of narcolepsy, I went to the doorway.

She was fine. But standing across from her, with his hands on her desk, was—I understood why her voice had dropped off.

“Robert.” His name caught in my throat, too.

“Tina,” he said. “Or should I call you Ms. Fontana now?” He pointed at the doorway I’d emerged from. “That your office?” He marched toward it.

“Yes.” I followed him inside and closed the door behind me. “Please, have a seat,” I said in the freakiest role reversal of my entire life.

I sat at my desk.

Robert was dressed in a gray Armani suit, white dress shirt, and navy-blue knit necktie—which I recognized as his uniform for when he had a meeting with the board or a public appearance. Did he put on his best clothes just to come see me?

“It’s been some time,” he said, stretching his legs out in front of him and crossing his ankles above his freshly shined shoes.

I brought my voice down to a whisper. “If you’re here about the documents, you don’t have to worry.”

“No, no I’m not,” he said.

“Because if I were going to—”

“I know.”

He shifted in his chair, loosened his necktie. “You’ve done really well for yourself, Tina. It’s good, it’s good. I’m proud of you.”

A knot formed in my throat. As if the one he loosened from his neck had passed directly into mine.

“I never meant to hurt you,” I blurted out.

He leaned in, hands on his knees, and I became terrified in an old and familiar way.

“I’m not much of an admirer of in-your-face attitudes,” he said. “But I have to concede that y’all put a pistol ball in me. I’ve got a certain amount of respect for that.” He leaned back in his chair again.

I could tell that he was yearning to put his leg up on the desk. But he couldn’t, because it was my desk.

“Anyhow, I’d call us even. What do you say?” He extended his hand for a shake.

I took his hand firmly in mine. “Even I’m not sure about,” I said. “But you’ve got yourself a truce.”

“Well aren’t you just tough as a boiled owl!” Robert tugged hard on my hand, like he didn’t want to let it go so easily. “Is that a bottle of Herradura A?ejo I’m looking at back there?” He nodded at the shelf behind me.