“Actually, can we just sit in the park?” Isabel said when they got out of the building. “Unless it’s too cold for you.”
Sabrina shook her head. “It’s fine.” They walked the two blocks to Madison Square Park in silence, stopping only so Isabel could get a coffee from the cart that was parked outside the Flatiron Building, and then they sat on a bench by the dog run. Isabel sipped her coffee and stared straight ahead. Was she going to say anything? Sabrina wasn’t sure what the protocol was here, so she decided to just stay silent and let Isabel take the lead. A man holding five small dogs on leashes—a shih tzu, a Pomeranian, a Boston terrier, and two who looked like Chihuahua/Jack Russell mixes—walked in front of them and the dogs started barking with excitement, pulling on the leashes, as they got closer to the entrance to the dog run. Sabrina watched as the man opened the gate and took off their leashes, and there was a tumble of fur as they entered the dog run as one swirling, yipping mass.
“Maybe I’ll just become a dog walker,” Isabel said suddenly. “Doesn’t that look fun, just hanging out with dogs all day and bringing them to the park?”
“I guess?” Sabrina said. “I dunno. Seems like it would be annoying in the rain and snow.”
“You’re right.” They were quiet again. “I don’t really want to be a dog walker. I’m just like…so done with how Mack has been treating me.” She took a sip of coffee. “I mean, the thing yesterday…No offense, but it’s, like, crazy that you are going to be reporting to him now.”
Sabrina bristled inwardly but told herself to stay calm. She’s just lashing out, she thought. Be the grown-up. “Why do you say that?”
Isabel turned to her. “Oh, come on, Sabrina.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he didn’t even want me to hire you. He said you weren’t a good cultural fit.”
“That’s crazy. I didn’t even meet with him!” Sabrina felt her voice go up. She had a tight feeling in her chest—not exactly like she was having a heart attack, although she wouldn’t know what that felt like anyway, so maybe it was a heart attack? “What does that even mean? Cultural fit?” But even as she asked, she knew: it meant not wanting to go to pole-dancing classes with her coworkers, it meant finding Mack’s weekly inspirational speeches corny, it meant thinking that snacks were not going to save the world. It meant not wanting your work to be your life or your life to be your work.
But Isabel didn’t respond. Instead, she burst into tears.
“What? Wait. Why are you crying?” The tightness in Sabrina’s chest was replaced by a different feeling of panic, and she had a flashback to when she and Dan brought newborn Owen home from the hospital and he started screaming, and she’d thought: Wait, oh God, what do I do now? She rummaged in her bag—surely she had a tissue in there amid the chaos: a nearly empty tube of Kiehl’s lip balm, a few Ricola wrappers from when she had a sore throat a couple weeks ago, a flyer for one of those hair salons that tried to get you to come in for a fifty-dollar cut and highlights, an expired MetroCard, the plug (but no cord) of an iPhone charger, one of Amelia’s socks, a bottle of water, her wallet, the access card for the office, and three pens. But no tissues. “Sorry. I thought I had a Kleenex.”
“It’s okay,” Isabel said, wiping her eyes on her jacket. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Do what? Cry? It’s fine.” She was trying to act like it was fine, like it was totally normal for Isabel to be crying, like it was totally normal to have just gotten promoted, like it was totally normal that she had this job in the first place. “At least you’re doing it out here and not in the office. No one’s looking at us. It’s fine. Besides, crying in public in New York is, like, a thing.”
Isabel turned to her, almost hopefully. “It is?”
“Oh, yeah,” Sabrina said. “Crying on the subway, crying in a restaurant, crying on a street corner because your boyfriend just dumped you, crying because you just walked by your ex-boyfriend’s apartment building…Crying on the subway is probably the worst, though,” she said thoughtfully. “Because you’re, like, stuck on this car with strangers and there’s nowhere to hide, you know? And people don’t really know where to look, but there’s always that one person—sometimes it’s an old lady, sometimes it’s another woman who’s been there, sometimes it’s a guy trying to hit on you—who tries to comfort you and you’re just like, Please leave me alone in my time of sorrow.”
Isabel laughed. “You’re funny.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Ugh, this is so gross. This is all Mack’s fault. We were hooking up, you know.”
Sabrina tried to look surprised. “Wow. That’s…that’s intense. Do you…do you think that’s why he’s acting out now?”
“Acting out,” Isabel said. “That’s one way to put it, I guess. I was going to say acting like a massive dick, but acting out works. I wish someone had told me that hooking up with the founder of your company was a bad idea.”
“You seriously needed someone to tell you that?”
Isabel shrugged. “I mean, no, but yeah? It’s just, you work at a place like TakeOff, everyone is hooking up with everyone—it’s, like, what you do. I just happened to be hooking up with the boss, I guess.” She paused, as though contemplating this anew. “Boss is such a funny word, isn’t it? Mack never calls himself the boss, but that’s totally what he is. I just never thought of him like that. He was just Mack, you know? Like, yeah, technically he was my boss—is my boss—but he never seemed like what I thought a boss would be like. You know, you picture a boss, like, some big fat guy chomping on a cigar.”
Sabrina laughed. “That’s how you picture a boss? No wonder you all have fucked-up ideas about work.”