I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I knew enough about government agencies to guess this wasn’t usual. I kept my face neutral, though, and said, “Super, send her back,” with the same inflection I’d used when I’d thought it was a call. I didn’t want to encourage Verona, who was acting as if this were reality TV and she’d bagged a juicy cameo. Ye gods, these millennials.
“She doesn’t have an appointment,” Verona said. “I offered her some coffee, and I ran to tell you.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Just bring her here, then go push back my conference call.”
I came out from behind my desk while I was waiting and took a quick peek in the outsize mirror hung behind the sofa. My hair was sleek, and I hadn’t eaten off my lipstick. I looked professional, and by the time Verona returned, I also looked pleasant and calm. Relaxed mouth, eyebrows down, easy in the shoulders.
“Sharon Watson here to see you,” Verona said, ushering in an attractive black woman, heavyset and tall, about my age.
I hadn’t left anyone of that name a voicemail. Curiouser and curiouser. Ms. Watson wore an inexpensive navy suit and a string of pearls that were too large to be anything but costume. She had on pearlized earrings, too, flat and wide like silver dollars. Her navy pumps were sensible but flattering, much like her short haircut.
“Thanks, Verona,” I said, dismissively enough to be definitive. She backed out, slowly. I waited until my door closed all the way before I stepped toward the woman with my hand out. “Hello, I’m Paula Vauss.”
She took it, saying, “Oh, I know who you are. And you know me.”
I didn’t, though. Not until she smiled at me. Her mouth stretched wide in her pretty face, showing me a huge wall of slightly overlapping teeth. Then I knew her.
“Hello, Shar,” I said, cool as I could manage it. Twenty years older, with a different last name, but it was Shar. She was my past, rising around me, and she was also impossibly here and now. She was exactly herself, but taller, stouter, and wearing braces on her big teeth, the transparent kind. They hadn’t quite finished their job yet, but that didn’t stop her from grinning wide, enjoying my shock. I had to work hard to make my voice not tremble as I asked, “You’re with DFCS?”
“Yes. A lot of us end up doing social work,” she said. I wasn’t sure who us was. She must have seen it on my face because she clarified. “Former foster kids. When the system works, we tend to want to pay it back.” She gave me a long, scraping look, from my blowout to my bitch heels, and then cast another, even louder speaking glance around my office. She put those big teeth back on full display and added, “Not you, though, huh.”
I felt my own smile starting to go sharky. I hadn’t seen Shar since she was thirteen years old, but she was still an instigator.
I resisted her bait. I wasn’t going to throw down with my pro bono work, metaphorically unzipping and then calling for a ruler so we could measure our respective virtues. Not only because I would surely lose against a woman whose life’s work was in Social Services. It was more important to understand why she had come here; I thought she’d taken the potshot to get a rise or a feel for me, so her visit had to do with Hana. This could not be a simple case of auld lang syne. Not with this timing, and the Shar I remembered had not been remotely sentimental.
I kept my voice sweet and said, “Apparently not. Please, sit down.” I waved her to the sofa instead of the client chairs, and I took a seat on it beside her. I didn’t want the desk between us, which could read as adversarial or patronizing. She sat very straight, but I thought that was due to good posture, not a fighting stance. I was having trouble reading her. Hell, I was having a little trouble processing, period. “Your last name is changed. It used to be . . .”
“Roberson,” she said.
“That’s right. So you got married?”
“I sure did.” Shar had a satchel purse with her, large enough to double as a briefcase. She’d dropped it by her feet when she sat down. Now she fished her phone out of a side pocket and pulled up a picture to show me. In it she stood arm in arm with a tall, broad-faced black man with a mustache and a comfortable belly. Three boys of varying sizes clustered around them. “You married, Paula?”
“Nope. Never married, no kids,” I said. I couldn’t tell if this was another gauntlet, but it was not an arena where I’d ever felt competitive.
“Well, looks like you’re doing all right, in your own way,” she said, chuckling.
That threw me. It sounded good-humored—almost kind—and I was still looking for her angle. The last time our paths had crossed, we had been mortal enemies. Of course, we had also been children.