Chapter 6 #3
“I’ll be honest with you,” Joyce said. “I’m not hiring a Hadley.
I don’t need a Hadley. I don’t care about your family’s name, and I certainly don’t care about your husband’s money.
I’m hiring the woman I watched today. That’s all.
If you came to Boston, it would be your name on the door. Nobody else’s.”
Your name on the door.
Caroline looked down over the rail at the atrium.
At the tree, and the Santa line, and the gold star on the marble floor under the mistletoe.
At the brass clock, keeping time since 1924.
Her great-grandfather had bought that clock.
Her father had started the lighting. She had grown up on this floor.
She had run the candy counter at sixteen and dressed the windows at twenty-two.
And for three years, every single morning, she had walked in through the loading dock knowing, somewhere under her ribs, that she was walking into a building her husband owned.
She had never said it out loud. Not to her father.
Not to Stephanie. She had barely let herself think it.
She had just worked. She had worked every season as if the store could be sold out from under her if she failed.
As if someone might come in one morning and tell her, kindly, that they were going in a different direction.
Someone had tried to, a week ago. Brittany had stood in her office and offered to carry the floor.
“I can’t leave Hadley’s,” Caroline heard herself say.
Joyce looked at her over her gold glasses.
“Can’t?” she said. “Or haven’t?”
Caroline opened her mouth and nothing came out.
Joyce reached into her handbag and took out a card. It was plain white, with her name and a phone number and nothing else. She set it on the table between their coffee cups.
“Don’t answer me now,” Joyce said. “You’ve got a Snow Ball tomorrow night and a store to run for two more weeks.
Think about it until after Christmas. Call me whenever you want.
Call me at two in the morning if that’s when you figure it out.
I don’t sleep much.” She stood up and pulled on her gloves.
“I’m getting the seven o’clock train home.
It was a pleasure to watch you work, Mrs. Bradshaw. ”
“Caroline,” Caroline said.
Joyce smiled.
“Caroline,” she agreed. And she went down the mezzanine stairs and across the atrium and out into the blue December dark.
Caroline sat alone at the little table with the card and two cooling coffees until Luz came and stood beside her.
“So,” Luz said. “Who was she?”
“The president of Everly’s.”
Luz was silent for a long moment.
“The one in Boston,” Luz said.
“The one in Boston.”
“And she wants you to go work for her.”
Caroline picked up the card and looked at it.
“Luz,” she said, “I don’t know.”
Luz took off her reading glasses and let them hang. She looked at Caroline, and her face did something complicated and sad and proud all at once.
“Yeah, you do,” Luz said quietly. “You just don’t want to know it yet.”
* * *
“Take it,” Stephanie said.
It was nine o’clock, and they were sitting on the floor of Stephanie’s living room with a pizza box between them, because the couch was already pulled out into a bed and neither of them could face putting it back. Joyce’s card was on top of the pizza box. Stephanie had read it about ten times.
“You don’t even know what it pays,” Caroline said.
“You told me what it pays. I nearly choked on a mushroom. Take it.”
“It’s Boston.”
“It’s three hundred miles from him,” Stephanie said.
“And from her. And from the gold star and the mezzanine and the board he runs.” She pointed a slice of pizza at Caroline.
“Caro. Listen to me. A woman who’s run stores for thirty-five years got on a train at six in the morning to watch you work.
She didn’t come for your dad. She didn’t come because of Connor’s money.
She came for you. When is the last time anybody did that? ”
Caroline didn’t answer.
“I’m serious,” Stephanie said. “When?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. It was when you were twenty-two and you did those windows with the flying reindeer, and the Inquirer put you on the front of the Sunday section. And then you met Connor. And then the store got in trouble. And then Connor bought it.” Stephanie put the pizza down.
“And ever since then, you’ve been the girl who works in the store her husband saved.
That’s what people say at parties. I’ve heard them say it. ”
It went into Caroline like a thin blade.
“That’s not fair,” she said.
“No,” Stephanie said. “It’s not. That’s my whole point.”
Caroline picked up the card.
Joyce Bannerman. A phone number. Nothing else.
She thought about Lily asleep in the little wooden house.
Mommy, I was home. She thought about the escalator full of singing kids, and the woman in the camel coat lifting her coffee cup across the atrium like a toast — how, for one cold second, she had taken her for Brittany, back again, come to take something else.
She thought about a door in Boston with her own name on it.
“I have to get through the Snow Ball,” she said.
“That’s not a no,” Stephanie said.
Caroline looked at the card for a long time. The radiator banged. Down in the yard, somebody’s Christmas lights blinked on and off.
“No,” Caroline said. “It isn’t.”