I reach for the quarters on my desk and announce that I’m making a trip to the vending machine. “Want anything?” I ask, hoping that when I return, I’ll find the office empty. She says no thanks and I take off, down the all but deserted hall for the vending machine in our inadequate office kitchen. I press the button for the highly caffeinated drink I need, and crack the can open while making my way back to my desk.
I’m plotting the next steps in my “find Willow Greer” adventure when I step onto the metallic gold carpeting that separates my office from the ceramic tiles of the main hall. I find Cassidy on her hands and knees on the carpeting, collecting a dozen or so pens that fell. That roomy ebony sweater nearly drags on the ground, exposing the rest of the red bra that I previously couldn’t see: the low cut, the Chantilly lace, the underwire cups, a delicate front bow.
She’s holding my cell phone in her hand. I squint at the clock on the wall, 12:02 p.m., and my heart sinks.
“Heidi,” Cassidy says, holding out the phone to me. She’s smiling. But it’s not a smile that’s nice or polite. “For you. Hope you don’t mind. I answered it.”
HEIDI
“What is that woman doing answering your phone?” I growl into the phone, as Chris’s reluctant voice says hello, the tone of his voice—cautious and yet strangely chipper—saturated with guilt. I drift from the living room where Willow sits on the edge of the sofa, baby pressed to a dish towel on her shoulder, burping her with a steady pat, pat, pat to the back as I showed her to do. And yet I see that the baby’s face is pressed awkwardly to the towel so that I wonder how well she can breathe, her body sloping at an angle that looks anything but secure. Anything but comfortable.
“Hey, Heidi,” Chris says, an unnatural attempt at remaining calm, cool and collected. “Everything okay?”
I imagine that woman sitting in his bland, box-like office, listening to our conversation. I envision Chris, checking his watch, making some sort of blah-blah-blah hand gesture to Cassidy Knudsen, to indicate that my rant—why is she answering your phone; and why didn’t you tell me you were going to the office to work with her; and who else is in today? Tom? Henry?—has gone on for far too long. I feel the blood creeping up my neck, turning my cheeks to crimson. My ears burn. A headache begins to form. I place two fingers to my sinuses and press. Hard.
I click the end button, not quite as fulfilling as slamming a telephone into its base. I stand in the kitchen for a moment, breathing heavily, reminding myself of all the reasons I don’t like Cassidy Knudsen. She’s breathtaking. She’s smart, shrewd. Very chichi, as if she should be in the pages of a fashion magazine, and not staring at Chris’s insipid spreadsheets all the livelong day.
But the biggest reason I don’t like her? It’s quite plain and simple, really. My husband spends more time with her than he does with me. Flying to bustling metropolises around the country, spending the night in pricey, sophisticated hotels where Chris and I only ever dreamed about going, dinners at expensive restaurants that we saved for special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries and such, rendering them ordinary on days which were far from ordinary.
I hear her strident voice reverberating in my mind, the overly animated, “Hey there, Heidi,” as she answered the phone. “Chris just ran down the hall. He’ll be back in a bit. Want me to have him call you?” she’d asked, but I said no, I’d wait. And I did just that, staring at the time on the microwave clock for the four plus minutes it took my husband to return to his phone, all the while listening to Cassidy Knudsen tinker with the items on Chris’s desk, hearing a crash and envisioning her knocking over his pencil cup—the painted pottery one Zoe made years ago—pencils and his ballpoint pens tumbling to the ground.
“Oops.” She giggled, like a scandalous teenager.
I imagine that once Cassidy Knudsen was a cheerleader, one of those girls in the skimpy polyester skirts and the half shirts, dropping her pencil to the floor before the supposedly perverse male science teacher, reaching down from her chair spread eagle to reclaim it and then later claiming foul play.
While I gather myself to return to Willow and Ruby, I hear the squeak of a bedroom door, Zoe drifting from her bedroom hideout and into the living room. There’s silence, and then Zoe’s voice, a bit thorny and stiff.
“Were you ever scared?” she asks. I lurk in the kitchen, wondering what she means. Were you ever scared?
“What?” asks Willow and I picture the girl, still wearing Zoe’s clothing from the previous afternoon, now sticky with syrup and wrinkled with sleep. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa and as Ruby lets out the belch of a male drunkard, the girls snicker.
There’s nothing like a little gas to break the ice.