Chapter 2 Lorna Now
Lorna’s entire team seemed almost giddy when she announced she’d be taking some time off.
“Thirty days?” Kendra, the newest hire, asked with more enthusiasm than she had ever shown for work. It was practically a squeal.
Lorna affirmed it was thirty days, although she was already plotting how to shorten that time.
She reluctantly named Lance (Most Likely to Microwave Fish) as the team leader.
He wasn’t the best salesperson, but he was the most organized of the bunch.
Suzanne was determined not to let Lorna leave until she explained herself.
“I just don’t understand why I was given Most Punchable Face.”
“It was a joke, Suzanne. A bad one,” Lorna said. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, but why did you say it about me?” She looked around pointedly at her colleagues. “Does everyone think my face is punchable?”
“I’m sorry to you all,” Lorna said before anyone could answer. “I was just trying to be funny in a letter to my sister.”
“What is funny about me looking like a serial killer?” Sheldon asked curtly. “What does that even mean? Is it my hair? It’s my hair, isn’t it?” he said, running a hand over his old-style flattop.
None of the other team members made eye contact with him.
They were saved from having to respond when human resources showed up.
Beverly Rich, who was assigned to Lorna’s team and who had “sat in” on more than one meeting, was grinning like this was a birthday party and she was about to blow out the candles.
“Time to go, Lorna,” she said cheerfully, and gestured to the exit.
“Right.” Lorna picked up her things. “So listen, guys,” she said as Beverly put her hand firmly on Lorna’s elbow and began to steer her toward the exit. “I’m really sorry. I know this is sudden, but I will be back, and we will make our goals, and we will get our bonuses. Don’t worry!”
No one said a word until the exit door closed behind her. Then Lorna heard several people start talking at once.
Was she really that bad?
She walked out into a blistering, bright day, her box in her arms. What, exactly, was she going to do now?
She spotted Raymond, the guy who panhandled at the intersection in front of their building every morning, and walked over to him.
She handed him her Driskill coffee thermos and the snack bag she kept in her bottom desk drawer for late nights.
She was tired of Fritos anyway. “Looks like I’m going on a little vacay,” she said.
“For real?” Raymond asked, taking the proffered items. “Never knew you to go on vacation.”
“I know,” she said morosely. “I don’t know who will bring you donuts on Fridays.”
“Hmm,” he said, looking thoughtful. “I’ll figure out something. Enjoy yourself. You deserve a break.”
He had no idea. “Take care, Raymond. Mean streets of Austin and all that.”
“Aw, they’re not so bad,” he said as he ripped open a bag of Fritos.
She walked on, her box a bit lighter without that Driskill thermos that leaked half the time. Why give out thermoses that were going to leak, anyway? How did that say staff appreciation ? It said careless, thoughtless, and cheap to Lorna.
On the drive home, her anxiety turned to nausea.
This was a huge miscarriage of justice, and therefore, according to her self-help books, an “opportunity.” Stand up for yourself!
She should have fought back. She should have admitted she knew she wasn’t funny, that she’d made a terrible mistake, and yes, she was easily annoyed, but that didn’t mean she ought to be put on leave for a month or that she had a problem.
Had anyone taken the time to consider what they stood to lose in sales without her there?
Of course they hadn’t, because that would have been her job.
She knew, without a doubt, that she could peddle workflow software better than anyone.
She was not the problem.
She turned onto her street in Central Austin, where the old live oaks with their long and twisty limbs created a canopy.
Halfway down the block, she pulled onto a gravel patch for parking carved out of what once had been a grand lawn.
The patch held exactly four cars. Or, rather, three cars and one giant truck that forced them all to park so close they had to squeeze their bodies out of their doors.
That gravel patch was something else to be angry about.
It was an eyesore before the beautiful, pink-brick Georgian home.
This grand house had once belonged to her grandparents.
When she was a child, her family spent weeks during the summer and holidays here.
In her preteens, they’d moved in and lived here until her mother sold it.
Then it had been chopped up into four separate apartments.
That was before the paint on the wooden window frames had peeled and the trumpet vine had grown wild up one corner of the house.
Before the bricks in another corner had begun to crumble and one of the chimneys needed to be patched.
Before that strange, musty smell permeated the central hall.
And yet, despite its run-down appearance, the house was still impressive.
She slumped down petulantly in the driver’s seat of her car.
Her breath had grown short, a sure sign she was getting rage-y.
Her entire plan to buy back the house was in jeopardy now.
She’d been saving for so long, since the moment she saw the For Rent sign on one of her weekly drive-bys a couple of years ago.
She’d stalked this house like it was a cheating husband until she was finally able to snag one of the apartments.
Her great-grandfather, a honcho at the University of Texas in his day, had bought it when houses in this neighborhood were being built to accommodate the university elite.
Both floors boasted a wide center hallway, constructed to encourage airflow in the days before air-conditioning.
The rooms were spacious, the ceilings high and ornate.
The floors solid oak. The backyard was deep and ran to a small creek tributary where Lorna and her sister, Kristen, used to catch frogs and minnows and an occasional garden snake.
When she and Kristen were girls, Nana would wake them up for pancakes and French toast, served with happy faces made using fruit and whipped cream.
On spring afternoons, Nana would lay a quilt in the backyard, then serve them an English tea with finger sandwiches.
The tea was iced, but Lorna still felt like a princess.
In the winter, when it rained, Nana and Papa would create a scavenger hunt for the two of them, leading them to all the nooks and crannies in the house where they’d find little objects, like an empty Zippo lighter, a thimble, a deck of playing cards.
When all the items were found, they were awarded with candy and permission to watch their favorite TV show— Full House .
Later, after her parents divorced, Lorna, Kristen, and their mother moved in with Nana, who was a widow then.
Papa had died from a lung ailment as best Lorna could recall now.
Lorna and Kristen had the two rooms on the top floor at the back of the house.
Kristen learned how to climb out those windows and down a tree within a few weeks.
Lorna had been too clumsy and too fearful of falling to try.
There was an old tomcat that came by every day and slipped into a hole in the skirting around the house and lived beneath them.
Nana was allergic to cats, so they’d never had pets, but Lorna pretended that tomcat was hers.
She walked every day to a small neighborhood school while Kristen was bused to a bigger middle school.
Every Halloween, they had the spookiest house, all of them eager to decorate with ghosts and witches.
On the porch, they kept cauldrons of punch and candy.
In the summer, their yard was the prettiest and most inviting—green grass, flowers in the window boxes, a tire swing beneath one massive oak.
But the yard began to fade when Nana couldn’t tend it anymore.
Barn swallows built their nest in the swing.
Lorna had believed they would live happily forever in that big rambling house.
But then Kristen ran away, and Nana accidentally drank herself to death, and Mom sold the house and moved them into a garage apartment, and this house was chopped into four apartments with cheap, tacky baths and kitchens added in.
Lorna now lived where the dining room and kitchen used to be. The space had been unforgivably mutilated, a bath installed in what had once been the large walk-in pantry. She intended to restore the house to its former glory when she owned it.
And she would own it.
Last year, her landlord, Mr. Contreras, he of the bushy crop of white hair and bushier mustache, mentioned he was looking to sell in the next couple of years, as the old house needed lots of expensive repairs. Lorna had told him then and there that she would buy it from him.
He’d looked down at her like a grand priest from on high. “Now why would a woman like you want to own a pile of bricks like this?”
She didn’t know what a “woman like you” was supposed to mean. “It could be restored.”
“Not without cash, baby. A lot of cash. The foundation alone would set you back twenty-five grand, and that’s using one of my contractors.
Not to mention the property taxes are skyrocketing in this neighborhood.
Nah, you don’t want this. No one will be able to afford a property like this except a developer. You a developer?”
“No. I sell workflow software.”
Mr. Contreras chuckled as if she’d meant that as a joke. But she hadn’t, because she was Not Funny. “Find yourself a good man and move to the suburbs like everyone else, sweetheart.”