It’d been almost three months since her fateful breakfast with Beau at the Horse Feather, and she needed a plan. Janey worked best when she had a strategy and the tools to implement it. The fact that she was a forty-year-old woman with one job on her résumé was not lost on her. She was aware that the depth of her experience might not make up for the lack of breadth and variety. What were her actual skills anyway? She knew how to build a business from the ground up. She was a whiz at global branding and marketing. She was able to manage large and tender egos with aplomb.
In Janey’s management classes in B-school they’d created decision trees, elaborate “if this/then that” scenarios. If you increased the number of brick-and-mortar stores of your business, then you might see more customers and increase brand awareness, but you’d also have a large capital expenditure. If you fired all your employees and moved all of your sales onto your website, then you could forgo large capital costs, but a thousand people would be out of a job. Janey had disliked these scenarios because they never assigned any judgment to a particular outcome. Everything was black or white. Life was anything but. She doodled a decision tree of her own on the back page of the American Way in-flight magazine, just past the list of newly released movies and artisanal gluten-free snack options that cost twenty dollars.
If she fought Beau for her old job, she’d have to work side-by-side with a business partner she no longer trusted or even liked. If she simply walked away from B she would get a small payout and be forced to watch Beau drive their beautiful business into the ground. There had to be a middle ground, but she didn’t know what that looked like yet. Janey accepted another glass of champagne from the flight attendant and let the bubbles do the job of quieting her mind. Alcohol was probably off-limits for the week of wellness, so why not indulge in a second glass? A spacious yawn escaped her lips.
She had said no to the invitation to go hipster bowling with Jacob the night before. On the couple of occasions she met his friends (all of them under the age of thirty), they’d made her feel astonishingly unhip, due mainly to their passion for suspenders and Amish-farmer beards and eclectic choice in hobbies. Instead she texted Hugh to meet her at the new Japanese whiskey bar down the street from her house. He’d written back in less than a minute, telling her he’d cancel a late meeting and come to see her. He was so pleased she’d texted! He used three exclamation marks!!! They had yet another wonderful evening together, talking about his work and hers. She divulged everything she knew about the chocolate industry. Sweet had been a milk chocolate company for so long, packing as much sugar into the product as they could. But she liked what Hugh was saying about good indulgences. Maybe the company should be looking at dark chocolate options and different kinds of treats. They had the market share. Every American kid had grown up on Sweets. Now they could give them something a little healthier.
She put the decision tree away for the time being and flipped open this week’s New York magazine. The cover line made her smile—“The Good Kind of Fat.” Inside was a personal essay from Matilda Singh, one of Hollywood’s most popular young actresses. She also happened to write, direct, and star in her very own network sitcom. CJ had long claimed the two were related in some complicated way, but Janey was used to CJ claiming a relation to most famous Indians.
When she first started out in network television, Matilda was on the chubbier side, although the one time Janey met her in person at a Golden Globes party at the Beverly Hilton, she realized it was true that the camera did add at least fifteen pounds. Matilda was curvy, like CJ, but wore it well and frequently posted Instagram photos of herself in crop tops and short skirts with the hashtags #RealWomenHaveCurves, #NoShameinMyGame, #SexyBitch. This essay in New York mag was in response to a recent scandal where another magazine, Blushed, had Photoshopped Matilda’s curves so much that she was virtually unrecognizable. The actress raged on social media about the retouching, and the magazine had been forced to apologize, albeit very carefully. They released their own statement, also via Twitter, explaining that their art department would sometimes excise a stray hair or a pimple and that they were sorry it was not to Ms. Singh’s liking. They said nothing about slicing off both of her hips and elongating her legs by several inches. Matilda’s writing was clean and concise as she railed against Hollywood’s perpetuation of unhealthy body stereotypes. The actress talked about her own fitness regimen and diet, which did include some spin classes and yoga, dark chocolate, leafy greens, mainly Swiss chard (god, Audrey was good), and French fries. She was adamant that she didn’t want to live in a world where she couldn’t eat French fries.
Me neither, Janey thought. No woman should have to live in a world without French fries. But wasn’t that exactly what she’d been doing for the past three months? Hadn’t she allowed Beau to try to dictate how she should look, what she should weigh?
Janey leaned back into the seat, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the sound of the plane’s wheels thudding down onto the runway as the entire flight erupted into raucous applause. The humidity hit Jane like a tidal wave when she stepped out of the plane and walked down the stairs to the boiling black tarmac. She pulled her hair into a high bun, brushed her bangs out of her face, and hoisted her bag higher onto her shoulder. Janey had limited herself to a single carry-on. Stella promised she didn’t need much more than workout clothes, a couple of flowy dresses, and a sweater to ward off an evening chill.
Just past customs, in the arrivals hall, Stella towered at least a foot above the scrum of resort drivers holding their laminated signs for guests and the taxi drivers competing for who could shout the loudest at the tourists. Stella had her own sign that simply read SWEET, a wide smile, and a perfectly knotted Hermès scarf. She wore a white tank top that could have cost a dollar or a hundred dollars and a battered pair of ripped jean shorts. Janey was jostled by a group of sombrero-wearing Pi Kappa Alpha brothers from the University of Alabama. One of them grabbed the soft flesh of her backside before pumping his fist into the air and yelling, “ROLL TIDE!”
“Hellooo!” Stella cut through the cacophony, helpfully grabbed Janey’s carry-on, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “How was the flight? Did you sleep? No worries if you didn’t. You can spend the rest of today settling in and lounging. The others don’t arrive until tomorrow.”
Twenty minutes later the women were in Stella’s rental car. “I could only get stick shift, so brace yourself.” Stella warily shifted the car into a higher gear. “Tell me about last night’s date with the good earl. He texted me. Hugh is smitten with you, Janey Sweet. Very smitten.”
Janey couldn’t help but smile at the mention of Hugh’s name.
“He’s wonderful.”