Chapter Ten #2
Someone knocked at the office door. It was one o’clock. They should be opening back up for afternoon hours. Barb and Jenna didn’t even blink.
“We aren’t complaining,” Barb said, “we’re worried.”
“You’re not being assertive, you’re losing patience,” said Jenna.
“What could cause you to lose patience?” Barb asked.
“You’re so patient you make my teeth ache,” Jenna put in.
“The only explanation we could come up with was cancer—”
Jenna shook her head. “Cancer was Barb’s explanation. It’s always that or cyberkidnapping.”
Barb whipped her head around and glared at Jenna with a look of betrayal. “You’re the one who said cyberkidnapping.”
“I said trauma from sex trafficking, not cyberkidnapping.”
The knocking on the office door continued.
“We should open the door. I have a one thirty—” Josie stopped talking. They weren’t listening.
“And I told you if Josie was getting sex, she wouldn’t be so tightly wound,” Barb argued.
Tightly wound?
“I hope you aren’t equating forced sex with—”
“Of all people, you should know I would never—”
Did she come off as tightly wound?
“…because some people’s menopausal symptoms don’t interfere with their sex lives…”
“…taking my words out of context…”
One kiss wasn’t enough to unwind a woman who had gone without sex for almost five years. One very long, very hot, very unforgettable kiss.
“…everything about sex…”
“…everything about sex…”
Josie daydreamed for the one hundredth time about what would fully unwind her and in how many positions it might occur.
“Excuse me?”
Barb and Jenna, who were pointing at each other’s faces, now twisted in their chairs to point at Ben, who’d emerged from his Zoom meeting with the dazed expression most people wore after an hour of the provost’s corporatespeak.
“Was there a meeting I didn’t know about?” he continued, the dazed expression morphing into one of panic.
“We were staging an intervention with Josephine,” said Barb. “Trying to get to the root of her abrupt change in personality.”
This was getting ridiculous.
Ben tilted his head. “I thought you’d settled on some sort of traumatic brain injury?”
“What?” Josie stood, furious. “I don’t have brain trauma, I don’t have any trauma, and I haven’t been kidnapped, and I’m certainly not a sex slave,” she snapped.
“Well, we know that, don’t we?” Barb said out of the side of her mouth to Jenna.
Goddammit.
“I’ll tell you what I am, though,” Josie said, yanking open the bottom drawer of her desk and pulling out her purse. “I’m taking a mental health day. My mental health is suffering from the trauma of inappropriate workplace psychoanalysis.”
Ben scratched his head. “I don’t remember that being an approved condition for…ah…” He spluttered to a stop at the look Josie gave him. “Well. Okay, then. You…go do what you must to get better.”
“Go shopping,” said Jenna.
“Take yourself out for a milkshake,” said Barb.
“Don’t worry about the audits,” Ben called as Josie yanked open the office door and three students came spilling in. “Not to worry. No worries at all. Just, don’t worry they aren’t finished—”
Josie slammed the door behind her and stalked out of the Admin Building.
Cyberkidnapping.
Sex slave.
Traumatic brain injury.
Gahhhhh.
Josie wished she knew what her face looked like so she could re-create it the next time she wanted someone to get out of her way.
Like a woman who has been cyberkidnapped and suffered a traumatic brain injury, no doubt.
Students scattered the instant they caught her eye and even the hypersocial Sam the Hot Dog Guy ducked behind the umbrella of his cart.
Rage took Josie as far as the doors to the pre-K room, but she stopped there. It would be hypocritical to give Gloria a hard time for disrupting Amos’s routine and then do the same thing. Instead, she walked off campus toward the surrounding neighborhood.
Three blocks in and Josie came to an avenue lined with cafés, small stores, a few hairdressers, and an ice cream shop she and Amos visited often in the summer months.
Maybe a new haircut? Treat herself to a fancy latte?
The choices overwhelmed her as she peered in the window of a vintage clothing shop.
Their mannequins were elegantly styled, complete with seamed stockings and shiny patent leather pumps in contrast to Josie’s faded Old Navy pencil skirt and tired-looking Reeboks.
One of the lush red dresses glowed in the afternoon light. Slightly boxy in the shoulders, it narrowed to a point at the hem, with rhinestones adorning the belt buckle. The kind of dress the Scarlet Witch would wear when off duty.
“Red is not your color.”
Josie’s head reared back when Maddy’s reflection appeared in the window behind her shoulder.
“That dress isn’t your size, either,” Maddy continued.
Josie had been thinking the same thing. Obviously, women hadn’t had hips in the 1940s.
“Hello, Maddy,” Josie said warily.
There was the tiniest smudge in Maddy’s lipstick, and the reminder the tenants’ association president wasn’t perfect made Josie happy.
“Is this where you shop?” Josie asked, gesturing to the red dress in the window.
“Sometimes,” Maddy replied. She stood next to Josie and peered at her reflection in the window, fixing the tiny smudge of lipstick with her pinkie. “I appreciate the structure of the fashion from the postwar period.”
Nodding—because of course Maddy liked structure—Josie looked around. Most of the people on the sidewalks and in the shops were college students.
“Do you work around here?” Josie asked.
“Work,” Maddy repeated. “Employment, you mean.” Today she wore a large-brimmed black hat beneath which her hair was covered with a black scarf.
If indeed there was hair under the scarf.
Baldness could explain why Maddy covered her head.
Maybe she was self-conscious about the condition and that’s what made her frosty.
“I mean, it seems as though a lot of the tenants work from home,” Josie said. “I wasn’t sure what you did.”
“Yes,” Maddy said slowly, staring at Josie as though she’d asked about her personal finances or something. “I work from home.”
Josie smiled but Maddy kept giving her the hairy eyeball, saying nothing else.
Walk away, Josie’s brain hissed. Go home and do something productive like clean your windows or scrub your baseboards.
Normally, Josie would let her brain browbeat her into leaving, but her kiss with Pax had sparked something more than a little bit of sass in her step.
Once upon a time she’d had confidence in herself.
Not only the confidence to catch a cute boy’s eye but confidence enough to take charge of her life, to turn around when she’d reached a dead end and start over somewhere else.
Fuck you, brain.
“The weather looks good this weekend,” Josie said. “Maybe the garden committee could meet again and finalize plans?”
Maddy’s frown was a master class in muscle control. Not a single wrinkle pulled at the corners of her mouth or between her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. “Oh, yes. The garden committee. Now, that’s an experience I cannot wait to repeat,” she said.
Last week’s meeting had gone from chaotic to downright acrimonious despite Maddy’s premeeting planning.
No one could agree on what to plant, or where to plant things, or even if they needed plants.
Raphe kept insisting on a night garden and Joey Z.
was worried about strange smells, which made no sense.
Any chance there might have been for agreement was derailed by the animus between the cheerleaders and Denis, who kept calling Josie “the new guy.”
“Is it the garden interesting you, or the amount of time you spend with Pax keeping you involved?”
Whoa.
Maddy’s voice remained even and there was no sign on her face she’d asked the question for any reason other than curiosity.
“Ummm.” Josie’s brain short-circuited, whether because of what happened with Pax last night or with awe at Maddy’s bluntness, Josie didn’t know.
“It’s not…”
Maddy’s smirk sliced through Josie’s spine like a blade. She had a way of tilting her head that made her look like a falcon eyeing a mouse from far up in the sky.
Focused.
Predatory.
A terrible thought occurred to Josie.
“Are the two of you together?” she asked Maddy. “Because if you are, you need to know…” Josie paused.
What was she going to say?
Need to know…you are pretty fucking lucky?
Need to know…in any fight over something Josie didn’t think she deserved, she would back down in an instant?
There was only so much fight a person had in them, and most of Josie’s fight went toward figuring out this parenting thing and not cracking under the pressure of getting by in a world that didn’t seem to give a shit one way or the other if folks made it through the day.
“I don’t need to know anything.” Maddy waved a gloved hand as if to disperse Josie’s words into the air.
“You are correct. We should have the garden committee meet again. I will draw up a schedule for planting that aligns with forecasted weather patterns so we take advantage of optimal growth conditions.”
Of course Maddy would figure out the best timetable by which to plant.
“Perhaps you will stay with us long enough to see the fruits of this labor,” Maddy continued. She set a gloved finger to her lips and smiled. “Ha,” she said in a tone bordering on cheerful yet remaining icy and intimidating, “…fruits of your labor. Clever, no?”
Josie nodded but Maddy had already turned on her heel and walked away without a word of goodbye or an explanation as to why she thought Josie and Amos might not still be in the building a few months from now.