Kimberly
I wasn’t looking for a miracle. I was looking for a paycheck. The miracle just happened to be standing in the elevator.
I stood in front of the spotted bathroom mirror longer than I had any business standing there, trying to decide whether I looked like a woman somebody would hand a job, or a woman somebody would hand a pamphlet and the number for a shelter.
The bulb over the sink was on its last legs, throwing everything a tired shade of yellow, and the faucet kept up its slow drip behind me like it had somewhere better to be.
The blazer helped. It was the one good thing I owned, navy, a little roomy in the shoulders because I’d bought it secondhand off a woman built broader than me, and it did the work of making me look like I had a plan.
I’d sewn the middle button back on twice and you couldn’t tell, which felt like its own small accomplishment.
The rest of me was harder to argue into shape.
I’d gotten my mother’s coloring, chestnut hair that had never once met a clip it couldn't wriggle out of, hazel eyes that went greener when I'd been crying, which I had been doing off and on since midnight, and a scatter of freckles across my nose. Today of all days I needed to look like a woman who balanced budgets and made the hard calls, not one you’d ask to produce a hall pass.
I wet my fingers and pressed down the worst of the hair, which lasted about as long as my patience for it.
I dabbed concealer under my eyes, where two bad nights had set up a permanent address, and I decided the freckles were beyond negotiation and would simply have to come along to the interview with me.
"You’re going to wear a hole straight through that mirror," Katelyn called from the kitchen. "It’s not going to change its mind about you. Come eat."
I went in. The whole apartment smelled like butter and toast and the cheap coffee we’d been buying since the budget got tight.
She had eggs going one-handed, sliding them onto the chipped plate she knew better than to throw out, and she looked me over as I came through the doorway and gave a satisfied nod, like she’d built me herself.
"There it is. The blazer means business," she said. "The blazer says, hire me, I have my whole life together, and I absolutely did not cry into a dish towel at midnight."
"I did not cry into a dish towel."
"The dish towel and I had a long talk this morning. It told me everything." She poured coffee into the mug with the faded sunflower, the one we’d had since the old place, and slid it across to me. "Eat. You cannot out-stare a billionaire on an empty stomach. Known fact. I read it somewhere."
"You did not read that anywhere."
"I read everything, Kim. Somewhere in those stacks there’s a book that says exactly that, and I have absorbed its wisdom by standing near it for two years.
" She dropped into the chair across from me with her own coffee and stole a triangle of toast off my plate, because she'd been stealing food off my plate her whole life and I’d have worried if she stopped.
For about ten minutes the apartment felt like a home instead of a place we were all holding our breath in. Rain ticking at the window. The radiator clanking like it was trying its best. My sister chewing my toast with deep contentment.
Then Penny’s door opened down the hall, and the two of us went quiet on instinct.
She shuffled out in the oversized pajamas she’d basically moved into, hair flat on one side, and the music from the night before had clearly worn itself down to a truce.
Katelyn pushed out a chair with her foot.
Penny sat. I slid the eggs in front of her without a word, because I’d learned that asking whether she wanted them was just a way of reminding her she was supposed to be too sick to want anything.
She picked up the fork and started eating. I looked very hard at my coffee instead of watching her chew like it was a small miracle, which to me, lately, it was. The steam off the mug warmed my face and gave me somewhere to put my eyes.
Katelyn lasted about ninety seconds.
"So how are you feeling this morning?" She tried to make it light. She really did. But there was a way you asked a sick person how they were feeling and a way you asked everyone else, and Katelyn missed the second one by a country mile.
Penny set her fork down. The little clink of it against the plate was the loudest thing in the room.
"I’m feeling like I’m nineteen and I slept eight hours and I would love to eat my eggs without filing a report.
" Her voice was flat at first. Then it rose, her chin lifting with it. "You don’t have to do this, either of you. You don’t have to tiptoe around me like the floor’s made of glass.
You don’t have to track every bite I take like you’re writing it down somewhere.
I’m not paper. I’m not going to tear if somebody talks to me like a regular person. "
"Pen, I was only asking."
"You were checking. You both do it, and it’s exhausting.
" Her eyes were doing the wet, furious thing again. "You look at me the exact way you looked at Mom right at the end. Like I’m already halfway gone and you’re just being polite about the timing.
" She stood, the chair barking against the floor.
"Well, I’m not Mom, and I am not dead yet, so could everybody please stop holding the funeral early. "
She stalked off toward the hall. Then she stopped, doubled back, snatched the carton of orange juice clean off the table, and carried it away with her like a prize of war, kicking her door shut. A second later the music came up, that same bass through the wall.
Katelyn and I winced at exactly the same time.
"She took the whole carton," Katelyn said.
"I saw."
"That’s the good juice. The pulp-free." She blew out a breath and dragged a hand down her face.
"Okay. That one’s on me, I poked the bear before breakfast." She said it like a punch line, but her voice went thin underneath, and I knew she was scared the same way I was, just better at folding it into something you could laugh at. That was Katelyn’s whole gift.
She could hand you a smile while she carried the worst of it behind her back, and you'd never know how much it weighed.
She came around the table and took my collar in both hands, fussing, smoothing a lapel that did not need smoothing. "There. Look at you. Terrifying and competent."
"I look like I’m about to ask a man for his loose change."
"You look like the responsible one. Which you are. You’re the one who always lands us somewhere with a roof on it." She held my shoulders and looked at me dead on. "So go land us somewhere again. Get us out of this hole. I know you will. You always do."
I let her believe it, because somebody in this family deserved to, and it might as well be the one who hadn’t slept either.
The responsible one. I’d been wearing that since before there was anything to be responsible about. Somebody had to, after our father decided that three daughters and a sickly ex-wife were more weather than he cared to stand around in.
He didn’t even bother with a real exit. Just a divorce, a forwarding address, and then a couple of years later a new wife and a new baby and, at last, the son he’d apparently been holding out for the whole time. He signed a Christmas card if the second wife remembered to put his name on one.
I stopped checking the mailbox for it somewhere around sixteen. You learned, eventually, to quit standing by a door that was never going to open, and to become the door yourself, for whoever was still on your side of it.
"Don’t let Penny live on stolen juice all day," I told Katelyn, pulling the door open. The hallway air came in cold and wet around my ankles.
"No guarantees. She took the whole carton like a hostage." She caught my sleeve before I could step out. "Go beg well. And text me."
"I always beg well."
I kissed her cheek, and went.
The Whitlock tower downtown was all glass and silence, money so old it didn't have to clear its throat to get a room's attention.
The lobby ceiling went up forever. Somewhere out of sight there were fresh flowers, the expensive kind, and the whole place smelled faintly of them over cold stone.
The floor was polished to a shine that made my resoled flats look like exactly what they were, and I caught myself walking carefully, like I might leave a smudge on it just by existing.
My footsteps came back at me off all that stone, too loud, announcing me before I’d said a word.
I told the young woman at the front desk I was there to see Mr. Whitlock. She’d barely opened her mouth to answer when the elevator behind her slid open, and the woman who stepped out of it took one look at me, and the chill in it reached me before she did.
She was polished to a high gloss, dark hair pulled back sleek off a face that was beautiful in a cold, expensive way and knew it down to the cent.
Tablet in one hand, heels sharp enough to file a complaint with.
They clicked across the stone in a fast, even count as she came, and she crossed that long floor like she held the lease on it, and she skipped hello entirely.
"I’m Mr. Whitlock’s secretary. Do you have an appointment?"
"No," I said. "But Mr. Whitlock…"
I didn’t get to the rest. The woman had already turned on the receptionist, her voice lifting just enough to carry across the floor.
"And you let her stand here? At my desk, asking for the CEO by name? You don’t let things wander in off the street, sweetheart.
That is the whole reason you have a chair to sit in. "
The girl flushed and dropped her eyes to her screen. "She said Mr. Whitlock knows her."