“Do you ever file a thing?” Kitty Sue asked Shirleen from her hands and knees on the floor.
Daisy and I were with her, alphabetizing a mountain of paperwork in twenty-six piles across the Nightingale Investigation’s reception area.
“It’s not in my job description,” Shirleen replied from her seat behind the reception desk, currently engaged in the difficult task of painting her nails a frosty grape.
Kitty Sue sat up so she was on her knees, she planted her hands on her hips, twisted to Shirleen and glared.
“You’re the receptionist!”
“Yeah? So?” Shirleen asked, not taking her eyes from her nails.
“Receptionists file,” Kitty Sue retorted.
“Filing people file. Receptionists answer phones and guard the door,” Shirleen returned.
Daisy looked at me and giggled. I pulled my lips between my teeth and tried not to laugh. Kitty Sue didn’t look like she thought anything was funny.
“This is my son’s livelihood,” Kitty Sue said as she got to her feet. “What if he needed something urgently and couldn’t find it?”
Shirleen threw her head back and laughed for a long time.
“That’s funny,” she said (unnecessarily) when she finished laughing.
“What’s funny? I’m being serious,” Kitty Sue shot back.
Shirleen leveled her amused gaze on Kitty Sue. “I practically gotta chain Lee to his chair to get him to fill out reports, type out notes and whatever other shit he’s gotta do. He hates paperwork. All the boys do. Badass mothers get fuckin’ grumpy when Shirleen rides their asses to get them to put pen to paper or, worse, fingers to keyboards. If it wasn’t for me, our invoices would be six months late goin’ out and no one would get paid. Including Shirleen. And Shirleen likes to get paid. I got two growin’ boys who eat me out of house and home and are always takin’ bitches to the movies and shit like that. I don’t get paid, I’m fucked and Roam and Sniff’ll look like beggars in front of their babes. Not… gonna… happen.”
“Well,” the wind, I could tell, had gone out of Kitty Sue’s sails, “the least you could do is help us now.”
“I will help you,” Shirleen replied. “I’ll tell you, you missed a pile.” And she nodded to a pile of papers at the end of her desk that was at least a foot high.
“Shit,” Daisy muttered.
That’s when I giggled at the same time the door opened and Ally and Indy walked in, laughing.
I sat back on my calves and smiled at them as they called, “Hey,” to everyone.
Not two months ago, I walked into this office feeling the frosty air, knowing they hated me and wishing I was one of them.
Now, I was sitting on the floor, sorting through Lee and The Boy’s confidential paperwork, having spent the day getting to know Brody (the computer geek and I mean geek), Monty (the guy who managed the surveillance room where, I was a bit weirded out to see they monitored Fortnum’s, which meant my meltdown there was witnessed by even more people than I knew at the time) and Shirleen.
Kitty Sue had come by with lunch. We ate. We chatted. She told me great stories about my Mom that only a best friend would know and she apologized about seven million five hundred thousand times about not “protecting” me throughout my life and not coming to see me after my father was put behind bars.
“I kept trying to figure out how to do it. What I should say,” she whispered to me, holding my hand. “I didn’t know what to say.”
I squeezed her fingers. “It’s done now, over. Don’t think about it.” I blew it off as if it was nothing so she would stop beating herself up and changed the subject. “You told me about my Mom, now will you tell me about Katherine?”
She smiled, let go of my hand, sat back and told me great stories about Katherine.
Later, Daisy came around, Kitty Sue spied the paperwork and we all got busy.
“What in the hell are you doing?” Ally asked, staring at the papers all over the floor.
“Filing,” I answered.
Indy turned to Shirleen. “I thought that was your job.”
“Do I look like a file clerk to you?” Shirleen’s eyes narrowed, clearly becoming frustrated with this topic.
“You’re sitting behind a receptionist desk,” Indy returned.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this anymore,” I cut in, trying to help.
“Does Lee know you don’t do the filing?” Indy, apparently, didn’t need my help.
Shirleen grinned. “That’s it. You talk to Lee about paperwork. You give him lip about paperwork. Now, that I’d like to see. Make sure Shirleen’s around when you talk to Lee about paperwork. He loves to talk about paperwork.”