Chapter 5
“It was perfect! I never had so much fun.”
I heard the other girls agree with her that their weekends had been amazing, too. Kiya had gone on a hike with the guy who was now absolutely her boyfriend—they’d had the talk and confirmed. Then he’d made her dinner!
“Aww!” Taylor said. “I love that story.” She had driven somewhere to see a minor league baseball game with friends and it had been so fun, too, despite the rain.
“The weather was a little hard on the hike,” Kiya admitted. “What did you do?”
There was silence and I waited for Victoria’s answer.
“Hello? What did you do over the weekend?” Kiya asked, and I glanced up to see why their third friend wasn’t responding.
They were all looking in my direction.
“Are you talking to me?” I asked, and three heads nodded yes.
“You work across the hall from me, right?” Victoria asked. She touched her hair, as if remembering our previous conversation about my highlights and how I’d pretended that they were natural. They were, but I was willing to ignore her doubt.
“Uh, yes. I’m Cate. With a C,” I added, because I thought they might appreciate it.
They did. “Oh, that’s pretty,” Taylor said, and introduced herself and her friends. I already knew their names, since I’d been eavesdropping on them for weeks as we all ate in the employee lunchroom. “You always sit at that table,” she went on. “Do you want to move over here with us?”
“Uh, yes,” I repeated. I picked up my stuff and did that.
“This is cute,” Victoria said. She pointed at the swirl design on my cooler bag.
“Thank you.” To prove that I wasn’t a gatekeeper (like she’d thought I was about my hair stylist), I told her where I’d gotten it and she checked her phone to look at the other designs.
“I need a new one because my stupid brother lost mine,” she explained, and we all said that was too bad. “He took it to a concert on Saturday to keep his beer cold and he got drunk and came home without it.” She sighed. “How was your weekend?” she asked me.
“Fun,” I answered, echoing what they always said. “I worked on my friend’s car. He needed some help with one of his floor panels and he’s not very experienced with MIG welding.”
They stared at me. “And you are?” Kiya asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “My dad was a welder and I learned from him.”
“That’s cool,” Taylor said. “That means melting metal, right?”
I opened my mouth to explain the types of welding before I decided that the best answer was shorter. “Yes,” I told her. “We worked out and made dinner, too.”
“I need to go to the gym,” Victoria said sadly. “We’ll be on the beach soon.”
That statement seemed premature to me. May was a slightly warmer month here, but nowhere near bathing suit weather. I still had on a sweater.
“Where are you from?” Kiya asked me.
“I moved around a lot. What about you guys?”
They talked about themselves and some of the information I already knew from eavesdropping, but I nodded and listened, very interested.
Kiya told me about missing her family, who all lived in a suburb north of Detroit.
Victoria was from here but Taylor was from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
They laughed when she imitated the accent there, and I smiled and didn’t say that they all talked pretty much the same.
To my ears, the difference was minimal but it wasn’t a bad thing.
“Oh, shit! Look at the time,” Kiya said suddenly, and then we all had to rush back to work.
Actually, I didn’t have to do that, but I went with them out of the lunchroom at a very quick pace and returned to the Office of Special Projects.
I did, in fact, have a special project to work on.
I had learned the day before that the roof repairs had been approved for the Woodsmen practice facility.
It had taken weeks to hear back and the actual work wouldn’t start until after the Woodsmen players were done using the building for their summer preseason training, so that they wouldn’t get disrupted in any way.
I had met with a pest control specialist, a plumber, and an electrical contractor out there, too, and I had even more ideas, things about landscaping and drainage (for the front of the building but also the back, where the field was located).
But the special project that I was currently working on was specific to the Junior Woodsmen, not the building as a whole.
I reviewed the forms that I’d printed out, making sure that I had completed everything correctly—although I was depending on the fact that my boss wouldn’t look too closely at what I’d typed there.
They were ready to go, so I was ready to commit fraud. I went to his door, which was closed even though the two of us were the only people here and I never bothered him. Since we never accomplished anything, what would we have had to talk about?
But now, I had something to say. “Mr. Gowan?” I called as I knocked.
“Come,” he answered. I had never liked that response.
“I have a few forms for you,” I said. “Things to sign. You know how I’ve been driving out to the practice facility a lot.”
“Oh, right.” He was looking at his computer as he answered me and in the reflection in the glass behind him, I could also see the video he had paused.
The frozen image was a topless woman holding up her breasts for the camera, her very large breasts.
How dumb was he to watch porn at work? I did admire the crystal-clear picture, though.
He had a different monitor from every other one that I’d seen in this building, larger and with better resolution.
As I’d expected, he didn’t look at my forms as he scrawled his name on them with the pen I’d also provided. He ignored emails and couldn’t be trusted to sign electronically, so paper was always the way to go.
The thing was, my fuel reimbursement was only one of the requests that he’d just approved. I’d been tricky and it seemed like it had worked: the Junior Woodsmen would now get a new refrigerator along with several other big-ticket items. “Thank you,” I said briskly, and turned to go.
“Cate.”
Oh, no. Had he actually read the documents? “Yes?” I asked.
Mr. Gowan stared out the window, his hands interlaced beneath his chin. He released his two index fingers and tapped them together. “I have a question for you.”
Judas Priest. “Yes?” I repeated.
“Do you think that I need drapes in here?”
“Drapes?”
“Curtains,” he translated. “This window lacks something.”
It lacked a good view, because he was looking at the back of a fence.
But maybe he was aware that moving to an upper floor, where the team leadership had offices, was beyond his reach.
“I’m not very good at decorating,” I admitted.
I knew this was true, not because of the home décor videos that put me to shame, but because of hanging out with Ronan.
He actually had curtains, or drapes, or whatever you wanted to call them.
I had been thinking of adding them to the windows in my apartment.
“It lacks a certain gravitas,” Mr. Gowan went on.
“Curtains would give it gravitas?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “This whole space is lacking. I would like it to be more akin to my house.”
“Sure,” I said absently. I was fighting the urge to put my papers behind my back to hide them. There was no need to act suspicious just because I’d done something wrong.
“All right. Let’s go.” He stood up. “We’ll take my car so I don’t have to sign another fuel reimbursement.
” He actually pointed to the sheets in my hand and I had to physically stop myself from shoving them under my sweater like a shoplifter.
And was he implying that it was hard to write his name? He hadn’t done one other thing all day…
Wait a minute. “What did you say?” I asked. “You want to go somewhere with me?”
This was very unusual. Besides my first day at Woodsmen Stadium, when he’d wanted us to sit in a conference room to discuss my responsibilities, we’d never left this office together.
Even when we’d met in that conference room, it hadn’t lasted very long.
It wasn’t only because he couldn’t think of any responsibilities to talk about—he had also forgotten to book the room so other people came in for their scheduled meeting and we’d had to leave.
But now, we were walking out to the parking lot together, a different one from the employee lot that I used.
This was for managers only. Mr. Gowan had started talking (again) about his golf handicap, and although it was strange that he wanted us to go somewhere together, his focus on topics other than work was totally normal.
It allowed me to breathe out a sigh of relief because he hadn’t noticed that he had approved other things along with my fuel reimbursement.
Besides the new fridge to keep their food safe, I was also going to purchase new fitness equipment for the Junior Woodsmen weight room, commercial grade stuff that was going to last and wasn’t rusty and covered in rat crap.
Ed, Ronan, and the players who had been regularly working out with us had compiled a wish list of machines and I had researched and chosen various models.
The Office of Special Projects was finally working on a project, even if the guy in charge of it wasn’t aware.
I had figured that it was better to go around him rather than run the risk of him saying no, or more likely, ignoring me.
He’d been overwhelmed by the idea of the comprehensive survey that I’d done, and he’d refused to discuss any of the issues I’d found and presented.
It was easier to accomplish this in my own way, which was how I was used to solving life’s problems. I liked to do things without interference and exactly how I chose.