1. Erika w/ a “K” #2
I also can’t help but melt a little inside. Archer has been so supportive of me getting the floor on this one. I hadn’t stopped to think about this being his account. At least, he’s the main point on the Harmon account, under the executives.
If I’m successful today… when I nail this pitch, I’m taking on my first account at his level. He never even winced. He just dove in and helped me. When I consider ninety percent of our communication exists through sarcasm—and he left this off the docket? Awe. My bestie is a good friend.
“Speaking of fresh blood. Erika, we’d love for you to meet Tate. He’s a Princeton man. We snagged him from his program, and we’re lucky to have him.”
Swartz pushes the distinguished assistant in front of himself. The young grad is handsome, with dark skin, a perfect complexion, and a suit that cost more than my wardrobe. His smile is a dashing display that reaches the twinkle in his dazzling eyes as he firmly shakes my hand.
Do they teach that at Ivy League schools? I can’t help but wonder.
That and, if I’d gone there, would I be labeled as a ‘Princeton woman’? Maybe these two would’ve said, ‘Princeton gal.’ I wouldn’t know, as I’m not, in fact, an Ivy Leaguer.
Arch was right. Mr. Princeton is the last thing I need before walking into my proposal.
Go ahead. Say it. Say how you already got your doctorate in the master’s program before you finished your bachelor’s. This company is so ridiculously competitive.
I tune him out entirely as I smile at the higher ups.
Bells jingle on the conference room door behind Swartz and Sloan.
Christmas bells.
The office doesn’t decorate much, not on the executive floor anyway, and it makes me smile to hear them.
A warm, serene feeling drapes over me, and I swear, if I wasn’t certain the overhead speaker was playing its standard classical music fare, I could almost make out the tune to “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. ”
One by one, suits file into the conference room prepping for my proposal—and still nothing from my end.
I watch as Archer trails behind someone, then looks at me, does a double take, and looks at me again.
He waves and points to the men beside me trying to get my attention, his eyes bugging out until I snap back.
“Erika?” Swartz hums my way, one brow cocked higher than the other.
“Yes.” Shit. I zoned out.
“Anyway, we thought we’d put him straight to work. Tate’s got all of your briefs printed for the room, so you should be set.”
Tate hands me a thick file folder.
I look down, in what feels like slow motion from a high school 80s movie where someone’s lunch tray is about to fall on someone else’s head.
Then I see it: My title. My pitch. My handouts for the entire account team, and my name… Erica Amherst. Erica—spelled with a “C”—only my name is Erika with a “K.”
Don’t ask me why, but it’s perhaps one of the most important things in the world to me. And this fu— fish sticker misspelled it.
My name!
Four years with a company and they don’t even have the common courtesy to spell my name correctly on the biggest pitch of my career?
This is not good. Not good.
It’s a sign.
“They didn’t mean a permanent break. They just meant… not the Harmon account, and enjoy your holidays.”
Archer leans back on my desk and straightens his tear-stained tie. It’s practically soaked from me crying into his chest for the last forty-five minutes, which says a lot. Archer doesn’t do tears. “I don’t understand what happened. I even semi-warned you about the new guy.”
“Yes, Archer, as you ducked and ran. You left me there.”
“It was your big pitch. You needed—”
“To be able to stand on my own. Well, I did Arch, and just like Hector the Collector in our favorite Shel Silverstein poem… I opened up my trunk, and the people came, they saw… and called it junk.”
Hot tears stream down my face, and I begin heaving like a child to catch my breath.
“Time out. This can’t be where your Sidewalk Ends.”
Oh, but it is.
So much so, I can’t even laugh at Archer’s Shel Silverstein joke.
“What’s the matter with me? How could I fall apart like this?”
“It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad.
Okay, it was awful. Like watching a train wreck where only bear cubs survive, and they have nowhere to go once they roll out the windows of the crashed train, and realize they’re in some strange, faraway land.
Erika with a “K.” If you said that once in your intro, you said it seventeen times before everyone got their handout. ”
“And that’s the hill I chose to die on. They misspelled my name.”
I drop my head into my hands. “And did you see Swartz step out to take a call? That left two executives instead of my lucky number three.”
“I just don’t understand how you let them all get to you.” Archer shakes his head and stands as if he’s finally had enough and agrees that I’m a lost cause.
“Look at me, Archer. You said it yourself… they’re Ivy League and I’m… polka dots.”
We both look around my colorfully decorated office.
My cheesy artwork of framed city and street signs hanging on the wall.
The antique desk toy of an old man smoking a cigar and thinking on a suitcase, that serves as a candy dish.
When you raise him up, he blows out a puff of smoke.
My light pink office chair and matching keyboard and mouse.
The snow globes that line the back shelf behind my desk, and not just at Christmas, but year-round.
Archer gets stuck there, staring at the shelf where my coworkers have books. With his hands in his pockets, he zeros in on the snow globes, almost perplexed.
“They were gifts from Great Aunt Josie. They’re all the places she’s been, that she’d like for me to go someday.”
I look at Archer’s troubled face.
He presses his lips together and I sink back into the chair opposite my desk, just really taking in what I must look like to everyone else.
Archer smiles. To his credit, it takes a real friend not to kick you while you’re down. “Hey. Speaking of Great Aunt Josie. Did you ever open the package she sent?”
“Over there. It’s underneath the box of office Christmas decorations I haven’t gotten to yet—or won’t, now.”
“Let’s open it. On to new horizons.”
Archer starts to pull the tape off the priority mailer box.
“Sure, we can use the box to pack up my desk,” I offer.
“Who’s Helen Choi?” Archer squints to read the return address on the box.
“I don’t know. My great aunt’s attorney or best friend or something.”
“Right. Could be either, with her. Just like this could be a leaky snow globe, or a bat, or both. Here. You open it.”
Out of complete loss and emotional dread of walking out of my office with my tail between my legs for a mandatory extended holiday break, I oblige.
The box turns out to be quite large for only a Christmas card and a set of keys.
Merry Christmas, Darling. You’re up!
5706 Demitasse Drive
Blitzen, Kentucky 40027
“What is this?” Archer inspects the keys and takes the card out of my hand to read it.
“I guess she left me her place in Kentucky.”
“Is she dead?”
“Probably not.”
“That’s right. She’s moved onto her next ‘patch of the world.’ She’s not dead. She’s just… crazy.”
“I was going to say, eccentric.”
I look around my office again, from the guest chair I’m seated in, and wonder if I didn’t get my quirks honestly—from her. My grandfather’s sister is a bit of an Auntie Mame . I traveled with her often as a child and throughout my formative adolescence.
I never thought I was anything like her.
She’s so carefree and uninhibited. There’s not a second-guessing, buttoned-up bone in her body, but maybe I got the rest from her.
.. My wild ideas. Could it be in my genes?
The big dreamer personality that often puts me on an entire other planet than everyone else’s way of thinking.
Funny.
I thought that’s what an advertising firm was attracted to.
I guess I’m more off-brand than I knew.
I rise, and shove past Archer, who’s still inspecting my great Aunt Josie’s card, as if to find a sign of life or another clue in her handwriting.
My hands fall to the snow globe in the middle of the shelf—the most recent one she sent me, when she must have first arrived there.
Blitzen, Kentucky.
I trace my hand along the printed words on its base. This one is Christmasy… I shake the snow as a family of reindeer stare back at me beneath it.