Chapter Twenty-Three
Four years ago
There was a time when Helen temporarily misplaced her first marriage, a time when her best laid plans for life and love crumbled
into six months of sadness she couldn’t understand. She just knew there were too many nights when she climbed out of bed because
she felt like crying, the painful source of unknown origin, and she went into the living room to wipe her tears in secret.
And there were too many mornings when she and Tyler rode the elevator together to floors four and seven in the same office
building, still at their same jobs, and he was content with that—but deep down, she just . . . wasn’t.
Helen was almost thirty, Tyler was thirty-two, and they had saved money. Buying a house was the next logical step.
So they walked through Craftsman cottages in Phinney Ridge and townhouses in Fremont, crunching on the orange and yellow autumn leaves on front porches, and real estate agents said things like “The bones of this one are really great,” and “You’re going to love this built-in pantry,” while Helen silently crunched numbers in her head.
They could afford a place like this, but only barely.
Not so very long ago, buying a house together had sounded like the most exciting thing in the world, but now that it was upon
them, Helen couldn’t think of anything more soul-crushing.
Helen put a mint on her tongue. The vapors hung in the air and made her nose sting. Her heart rate was rising, yet she was
simultaneously exhausted, and the mint gave her a needed little kick for the upcoming phone call.
She was now a senior manager, and she even had her own office at the marketing firm: No more cubicle! Better pay! She oversaw
a team of fourteen employees, and their biggest client was Boom Now Energy Drinks. The caffeinated drinks were full of chemicals,
artificial flavors, and food coloring, and they had flavors in refreshing names like Passion Guava Party and Goodtime Goji.
The clock said eight minutes to eleven when her phone rang. Stan at Boom Now always called early or late, never on time.
“This is Helen,” she said into the receiver.
“I don’t have all day for this call,” Stan said. He never announced his name, as if Helen should know his disembodied voice
anywhere. “We need to get down to brass tacks, Helen.”
“Brass tacks. Let’s go.”
“It looks like shit. Nobody’s gonna pick up the can in the store if it looks like that.”
It was the eighteenth can design Helen’s team had done, each new design based on Stan’s highly specific feedback.
“Nobody’s going to pick up the can at all, Stan, if we don’t finalize a design,” she said, then laughed lightly because Stan
liked direct, blunt communication, so long as she let him be the alpha.
“Don’t be upset, Helen, but it’s not your team’s best work.”
“Do you have specific changes?”
“For starters, I said turquoise, and this looks more like seafoam green.”
Helen put her head down on her desk and thought, Here we go again.
Stan continued, “I don’t know what brainiac thought yellow text would look good on seafoam green.”
She inhaled slowly and said nothing, because Stan himself had suggested yellow.
“The press release is too long.”
Because he’d asked for additional information about the company to be added in.
“It reads like an eight-year-old wrote it. Okay, that’s unfair of me.” Stan laughed. “More like a nine-year-old.”
She lifted her head. I think you’d be happier with a different firm, Stan. It’s time we parted ways.
That’s what Helen wanted to say. That’s what she almost did say. But she had already talked to her boss, Darius, about saying
these things to Stan. Darius had reviewed the contracts and determined the firm would have to return the $140,000 that Boom
Now had already paid.
“That doesn’t sound like a very good contract,” she had said.
Her boss had given her a look, so she’d shut her mouth then.
And she shut her mouth now too and called an impromptu working lunch in the conference room with her team to discuss new ideas.
During the meeting, Mariana kept messing around on her phone until finally Helen snapped, “Is that work-related, or are you
texting right now?”
“Sorry.” Mariana’s face turned red, and she put her phone down on the conference table. “I was just wondering if everyone
is doing costumes next week for Halloween.”
Helen blinked. “The company allows it, yes. But I don’t know about everyone.”
Mariana was a bubbly twenty-two-year-old with Betty Boop eyes, and she was dating a guy named Javier who was on another team at the firm.
Once Helen had become aware of it, she couldn’t stop seeing their burgeoning romance. The placement of their cubicles meant
both passed by her office often, and she regularly viewed them through her glass wall. All their little looks they thought
were so cloak-and-dagger. The way they rested their hands side by side on the cubicle wall during all-office meetings and
touched fingers every so often. How they’d wait for each other in the hallway at lunchtime so they could go off together.
Yesterday, she had seen them come back to the office with lollipops in their mouths. Lollipops!
Most days, Helen didn’t have time to take lunch outside the office with Tyler anymore because of the Boom Now account. Besides,
they couldn’t waste their money on restaurant food anyway. They were saving up for the house. Sometimes they met on the rooftop
deck for fifteen minutes with their sack lunches. The lunches were always better when Tyler was the one who packed them, but
still, she was getting tired of turkey sandwiches, apples, peanut butter crackers, hummus with carrots, and snickerdoodle
cookies.
After the meeting in the conference room, Helen tossed the remains of her sack lunch in the staff kitchen garbage can. Back
at her desk, she saw the email in her inbox from Tyler with a link to another real estate listing, and she deleted it without
clicking it.
Helen’s knee was hurting her. She hadn’t specifically injured it, but she felt the pain radiating deep beneath her kneecap
on some of her runs with Tyler. And when they’d tried to hike Tiger Mountain, they’d only made it up two miles before she
said they needed to turn back. She was going to have to skip next week’s Turkey Trot 5K Run downtown. The city stores were
already stringing up their holiday lights, but to her it was turning into the season of melancholy.
“You should go to physical therapy,” Tyler said.
They were standing side by side in their apartment’s cramped bathroom, sharing the pedestal sink, and Tyler was spitting little streaks of red into it.
“I don’t have time for physical therapy,” Helen said. “Do you have to floss your teeth so hard?”
“What?”
“It sounds like you’re demolishing your gums,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Flossing like that causes gum erosion.”
“You’re a dentist now?”
“No, but the way you floss is really fucking aggressive.”
Tyler looked at her and shook his head. “Jesus, Helen.” Then he walked out of the bathroom so he could finish demolishing
his gums in the kitchen.
These days, Helen didn’t feel like answering her mother’s phone calls, but having a return call hanging around on her to-do
list was even worse, so when she heard the ringing and saw Mom on the screen, she reached for her cell. Her mother was probably just calling to coordinate Christmas plans anyway.
But instead, her mother said, “Oh, Helen. It’s bad news. Genessa has cancer.”
“What do you mean?”
Genessa was her cousin, and Helen only saw her at large holiday gatherings, but Genessa was six years older than Helen, and
people six years older than her weren’t supposed to get cancer. Genessa had been trying to get pregnant, and now she had cancer
instead?
“It’s stage one breast cancer, so they can probably just cut it out. No chemo, thank God,” her mother said.
“Oh, that’s good.” Helen suddenly felt guilty as she realized that she felt just as relieved for herself as she did for Genessa.
She didn’t like the idea of her blood relatives getting cancer that young.
“Have you been doing monthly breast checks?”
Helen had not. “Of course,” she told her mother.
That night, when Helen lay down to sleep, she carefully felt her breasts and her underarms, and she told herself she would
check them monthly going forward.
The next month, she forgot.
And then she forgot again.
She just didn’t want to think about cancer at thirty.
As the new year unfolded, Helen tried to keep herself distracted with work. She was creating a marketing plan for a portable,
waterproof Bluetooth speaker when she heard the receptionist’s voice rising in degrees, moving toward her down the hall.
“Sir! If you just hold on . . .”
Stan from Boom Now burst into her office. He was clutching a bunch of papers.
The receptionist, right on his heels, said, “Sorry!”
“It’s fine,” Helen said, but she could feel the heat creeping up her neck. “I don’t have a meeting on my calendar, Stan. Did
you try to schedule one?”
The receptionist scurried out of the room, and Stan sat down in the chair across from Helen. He tossed the papers on her desk,
and she saw they were the rough outline her team had created for a television commercial.
“What is your degree in?” Stan barked.
Helen pressed her tongue between her teeth so she wouldn’t grind her back molars. Her dentist had threatened her with a mouth
guard if she didn’t stop. “Communications.”
Stan smirked. “That’s ironic.”
“Why is that ironic?”
“You have a communications degree, but you seem to have a difficult time communicating your ideas clearly.”
“Is there someone else on my team with whom you think you might click better?” Helen spoke with forced composure. “Perhaps I could set you up with a different point person for a while. We could try that out.”
Stan insisted there was no one else he wanted to work with, and then he lectured her for a good ten minutes on teamwork before
abruptly standing and collecting the papers. “I’m glad we’ve come to an understanding. I’ll be in touch.”
And then he was gone.