Chapter 15
He laced his fingers together and rested his chin on them. “Hm. I’m sensing some anger.”
“No. No, I’m not angry,” I answered.
Mr. Gowan released his two index fingers and tapped them against his lower lip. “I’m noticing animosity. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t agree,” I said. My voice sounded slightly loud, though.
He tapped again. “I’m definitely picking up hostility.”
Well, he was right, maybe for the first time in his stupid life.
I was feeling hostile and angry. There was a lot of animosity.
In fact, I was ready to take one of his nice drapes and strangle him with it, but I had always been a person who did a good job of disguising my emotions.
When I hadn’t been picked in PE classes, when my roommate freshman year had announced that she couldn’t stand to live with someone like me, when I had gotten over thirty rejections from the jobs I’d applied to as college graduation was approaching—no one would have been able to see how much those things had hurt.
I had hidden my feelings very, very well.
But apparently, my boss could see them now. “You wanted to talk to me,” I reminded him. He’d given up on calling “come” and he had walked to the door and asked me if I would join him. “Is there something specific you wanted to discuss?”
He looked away from the window and met my eyes and, just for a moment, I flashed back to our flight to Utah.
He had stared dejectedly out of the airplane window when two of his friends had teased him about being a useless drunk in college and not having a real job, while the third had guzzled bourbon.
And I had jumped in and defended him. Despite my current hostility, his obvious misery was having the same effect on me: I felt pity. “Mr. Gowan, do you want to talk about something? Something small now, that will turn into a large, unavoidable issue in a few months?” I clarified.
There was definitely news to discuss. Victoria had opened up to us, her friends, again at lunch. “I’m going to keep the baby no matter if he wants to be in our lives or not,” she’d announced.
Taylor had looked horrified. “Are you sure? You have options!”
“No, I want to. Beau doesn’t have to be a part of anything.” He had still been refusing to talk about it, she’d explained, so she’d cut him off. It made working across the hall a little awkward but she didn’t care. “I’m just going to ignore him for the rest of my life.”
“Really?” Kiya had asked. “So, he won’t even know his child? What about support payments?” She’d sounded skeptical.
Victoria had shaken her head. “I told my parents and they’re going to help, and my brother is going to move in with me.”
“After he gets out of rehab?” Kiya had wondered next.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but it could be a lot of stress on someone who’s already…
oh my God. I’m sorry.” Because Vic had started to cry really hard, right there in the lunchroom.
We hadn’t brought it up again after that, except to repeat that we were here for her.
Now, when I reminded him of Victoria and their baby, Mr. Gowan stared out of the window again but he dropped his hands. His chin dropped too as he hung his head lower. “You should call me Beau,” he said. “When you say ‘Mr. Gowan,’ it sounds like you’re talking about my father.”
“Ok,” I said, the word sharp. “If that’s all you wanted to tell me—”
“Victoria says that you two are friends. She told me that she had explained our situation to her work crowd. She told me before, when she was still talking to me.”
“If by ‘situation’ you mean her pregnancy, then yes. I’m aware of it,” I answered.
He rubbed his stomach, as if he was the one with the baby in there. “I’m still married,” he said. His voice sounded different, lower and a little shaky. “We’re definitely getting divorced but there are complications.”
Impregnating another woman was definitely a complication. “Ok,” I repeated. “I’m not sure what you want from me.”
“Could you talk to her? Because she blocked me and I don’t want to go across the hall and bother her. I don’t want to make her mad. Is that good in her condition? But she’ll listen to you,” he said.
Why was this my new role? It hadn’t worked very well for Channing after I’d relayed his message to Kiya.
She had gone ahead and met with him, and he’d apologized.
Then she had asked the same question that I had previously voiced: why was he sorry?
And the answer was that he was sorry they weren’t together.
But neither of them had changed their minds about what they wanted from each other.
She’d shaken his hand and said she cared about him so much, but they had different goals.
Then she’d told him goodbye, for good. I had been impressed by her clarity and resolve, but when I’d told her so, she’d only cried harder.
There had been a lot of tears lately in the lunchroom.
“I’m not an intermediary,” I told Mr. Gowan—Beau. “You could write her a letter and leave it at her desk, or you could mail it.”
“I do know where she lives.”
He did, because it had turned out that he’d been staying with her when he wasn’t off traveling to another exciting place.
It explained his improved appearance after his period of dishevelment when his wife had kicked him out of his former home, but Victoria had said that he’d also found an apartment for himself.
He did have a job for which he received a salary so he should have been able to afford it, unless he was spending every cent on his vacations.
And I was getting more and more nervous about whether he was going to keep this job, anyway.
“A letter,” he mused. “You know I’m very slow at typing.”
I picked up something from his desk to help him along. “Here’s a pen. There’s paper in your top drawer,” I also pointed out.
He opened that and seemed surprised by the contents he discovered there: a few stray binder clips, a legal pad, and the Woodsmen employee ID badge that he’d had to replace three times, because he always lost it. “There it is,” he told me.
How had he been getting into this building? Well, he wasn’t often here…it brought up questions. “Mr. Gowan—Beau.” That felt strange. “There’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“Yes?”
“How are you able to travel so much?” I asked him.
He sat up straight and tapped his lip again. “I’ve always been intrigued by the vagabond lifestyle.”
“That doesn’t work when you have to work and it’s also very expensive.”
He dropped his hands and slumped. “I go with my friend Nolan, the one who owns the plane you rode on. He’s the tall guy who vomited,” he explained further. “He likes to have someone along for the ride and no one cares what I do here.”
That led to my next issue. “Are you going to be fired when you’re divorced?” And why hadn’t he been fired already?
“Celestine doesn’t want to pay alimony. My current income supports her argument that she shouldn’t need to. It would also look bad in court if she had me fired right now, but later, when everything is over…” He trailed off.
Right, later they could let him go and the Office of Special Projects would probably dissolve, which meant that my job would disappear.
Which meant that Victoria wouldn’t have his income if she ever did ask for child support, and that the future improvements for the Junior Woodsmen would fade away, too.
I still hadn’t gotten funding for the field drainage and resurfacing project, which couldn’t happen immediately since fall was here and winter was just around the corner.
But if I had everything set up for spring, then maybe it could go ahead even if I wasn’t around.
I left him to his correspondence and returned to my desk.
I needed to send out résumés to other companies and other departments here, except I wouldn’t be able to transfer if anyone found out that I’d been (basically) siphoning money to pay for all the Junior Woodsmen stuff.
I put my face in my hands, and then took a deep breath and sat up straight.
This was not the time to fall apart. I had been the one who had saved the Winter Dance, when the two girls who were supposed to run it had neglected to do anything except make posters with their own faces on them.
I had gotten a DJ, purchased decorations, formed a committee to put those up, and then…
I hadn’t attended, because I didn’t have friends or a boyfriend to accompany me.
But I’d heard afterwards that it had been a great time.
I job-searched until five, and then I left before my boss emerged from behind his closed door. I had plans for the evening. I rushed outside, then rushed back in for the coat that I’d forgotten. It was freezing!
Ronan had laughed when I’d met him at his house, and he shook his head again when we arrived at our destination and he was helping me out of that coat. “It’s not bad weather,” he chided. “You’re wearing a sleeping bag.”
“You must be from a warmer climate,” Morgan Hurley said sympathetically. She and her husband were having Woodsmen people over for dinner and I was included because of my soon-to-be roommate.
“No, you won’t be,” Kiya had corrected me when I’d dropped that term over lunch. “You’re going to be housemates, because you’re not going to share a room. Right, Cate? Right?”
Right, housemates. We would be by the middle of this month, when I moved out of my apartment and into the extra bedroom at his place.
We’d already decided what I’d pay in terms of rent and utilities (less than what I paid now and a number that I didn’t think was enough), what I could store in his garage (my mattress and bed), what I would sell (the couch I disliked), and how we would park in the driveway that was only wide enough for one car (he would leave his behind mine, because he was in and out a lot more than I was). It was all working out great.