I'm Fine and Neither Are You(53)

I cried until I looked like I’d just gotten a facial from a swarm of yellow jackets. Then I wiped my eyes and continued my drive back to the office.

After ducking into the lobby bathroom to splash water on my face and reapply makeup, I returned to my desk to discover that during the hour I was away, Yolanda had emailed twice and left me a voicemail. She was on vacation for the week, but had met a potential donor while traveling and needed me to speak to him. Immediately.

I was about to call her back when the phone rang again.

“Where have you been?” It was Yolanda, of course. “Sheryl said you went to a meeting, but there’s nothing on the books.”

Naturally, she had checked our shared calendar. I wouldn’t be surprised if she began requiring us to implant GPS chips into our forearms so she could have ops on us at all times.

“I’m here now,” I said. “How is your vacation going?”

“The Lake Michigan shoreline is teeming with potential donors, Penelope. You should make the trip. The PD I want you to call is John Sterling. He’s number three at Xerox. He got his MBA from Columbia but his daughter had a lifesaving aortic arch repair at the Children’s Hospital. Obviously, major potential donor. Are you memo-ing this?”

My IM box popped up; it was Russ, who was confirming our meeting—an actual, on-the-group-calendar meeting with the graphic designer who was working on a new fundraising campaign—at two.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here, Yolanda.”

“Good.” She rattled off a number and an email address. “And Penelope? Don’t blow this.”

I stared at the phone. Sanjay told me to be direct. If this backfired and we had to take up residence at his parents’ house, this was on him.

“Yolanda, if I had actually blown one opportunity in the past seven years, I’d feel that comment was warranted,” I said. “But since I haven’t, I’m going to assume you’ve confused me with someone else. I’ll call Sterling today. And rest assured, I won’t blow it. Talk soon.” Then I hung up.

I could just barely make out my reflection on my computer monitor. Wavy hair, laugh lines, shoulders sloped from so many hours at a desk: these were features I recognized.

But if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn there was another woman looking back at me. And if I was honest—a practice I was starting to question—I was a little bit afraid of her.





TWENTY-ONE

A single secret is like a lone roach. You know there will be more—it’s only a matter of when. After learning Jenny’s marriage was a wreck, the revelation about her addiction was more an inevitability than a real surprise. And though I hated to think about it, I was pretty sure those weren’t the only things she had hidden from me. Keeping secrets of that magnitude would have required too much maneuvering for her to be truthful all the time.

What I had not anticipated, however, was that one of the secrets that would shake me out of my stupor wasn’t Jenny’s.

It was Sanjay’s.

“I’ll pick up the kids tonight,” I told him as I was getting dressed for work on Thursday. His job interview was later that afternoon.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed in the T-shirt and boxers he’d slept in. “No, I can get them. I can’t imagine the interview would go past five, and it’s only a couple of miles from camp.”

“But you have band,” I pointed out. “You’ll need time to change and get to Christina’s.”

“I don’t have band.”

He had a weird look on his face. Which I told him.

“I’m not trying to be weird,” he said, shrugging. “I quit.”

“What? When?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“When you took me out to dinner, you said you were just skipping a night.”

“At that point, I was just taking a break. Last week I decided it was permanent.”

I had a sinking feeling in my gut. “This is about the list, isn’t it? And your job interview. You think you’re not going to have time to write, so you’re already cutting back on the stuff that makes you happy.”

“It’s not about that, Penny.” His voice was flat.

“Then what’s the problem?”

His pupils were so large they almost enveloped his irises. “Christina.”

My pulse was whooshing in my ears. For all my evangelizing about honesty, the second Sanjay said the name of his band’s keyboardist, it struck me that some things in life—many of them, really—are better left unsaid. “What do you mean, Christina ?”

“There was . . . tension.”

The look on his face made it clear said tension was not of the artistic variety. I felt sick. “Are you having an affair?” I whispered.

“No,” he said.

“What is it then? If you let me sit here and speculate, I can assure you my mind is not going to go to happy places.”

“She’s too flirty.”

Christina was the kind of woman who would bat her lashes at a blind man. “Yeah, so?” As I stared at him, the picture slowly became clear. Sanjay would not have quit if this was just about her giggling at him or him wondering what she was like in bed. “Were you falling for her?” I spat.