What You’re Actually Worth
On day thirteen Jo emailed Corinne Lasker and asked for the third week.
It took four minutes to write and she rewrote it twice, and the finished version was two sentences long and entirely professional, and she sat looking at it in her sent folder afterward with the clear understanding that she had just done the single most dishonest thing of the last two weeks.
Not because the request was unreasonable. Lasker had offered three weeks unprompted, and four if she needed them, and had said so in a bakery in front of a witness. It was dishonest for a simpler reason. Jo did not need more time to decide.
She had four questions for Lasker and one for Raval and a marked-up shareholders’ agreement in her bag, and somewhere on a subway platform on Tuesday evening she had stopped considering the offer and started preparing to accept it, and she had not told one single person on earth that this had happened, including the man she had eaten dinner with every night since.
She needed the third week to tell him.
The reply came back in nine minutes. Of course. Take it. Say hello to the Hartford problem for me.
Dani was on nights that week, which meant she was awake at odd hours and available only as she was ever available, in the small overlap where their schedules crossed. Jo came home at eight on Thursday to find her at the kitchen table in scrubs, eating cereal, forty minutes before she had to leave.
“You’re home,” Dani said. “Twice in a week. Should I be flattered or worried.”
“Flattered.”
“Worried, then.” Dani pushed the box across.
Jo sat down and ate dry cereal out of the box with her fingers, which was a thing she had done in this kitchen for six years and would probably do for however many more there turned out to be, and told her the rest of it.
All of it this time. Whose money. The bakery.
Vivienne on the sidewalk with her three sentences.
The printworks and the whiteboard and Raval not thanking her.
The number the headhunter had given her for the job she already had.
Dani listened without interrupting, which was not her habit and which Jo noticed.
“Okay,” she said, when it was done. “Can I ask a question that isn’t about the job.”
“That’s what everyone says before they ask about the job.”
“It’s not about the job.” Dani put the spoon down. “Where’s the paper?”
Jo did not answer.
“The paper, Jo. Two columns. You’ve been doing it since you were nineteen years old and I have watched you do it — on my floor when the second one folded, and at this table before the Kade interview, and in your room for two days straight in the spring when you walked out on him.
” Dani’s voice was entirely level, which was worse than if it hadn’t been. “Where is it.”
“In my bag.”
“Since when?”
“Since the Tuesday before the bakery.”
Dani sat back.
“Before,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You wrote a contingency plan for losing him before anybody offered you anything.”
“It’s not a contingency plan. It’s two columns. It’s what I control and what I don’t. It’s the same instrument I use on the Warrick Street inspection windows.”
“Do not do that.” Sharp, and then immediately not sharp, which was Dani all over. “Sorry. But don’t. Don’t put it next to a spreadsheet at work like it’s the same instrument. You know it isn’t. You’ve never once written whether I’m still standing after about a scaffolding permit.”
Jo stopped.
“How do you know what I wrote.”
“Because I’ve known you six years and it’s what you always write.
” Dani got up and put her bowl in the sink and stood with her back to the room for a second.
“That’s the whole thing, Jo. That’s the actual thing.
Every single time something in your life gets big enough to lose, you sit down and you make yourself ready to lose it, in ink, in advance, and then you carry it around, and you have never once in six years shown one of those pages to the person it was about. ”
“They’re not for anyone else.”
“I know. That’s what I’m telling you.” She turned around.
“You are the only person I’ve ever met who does grief as a preparatory exercise.
And I’ve watched it work. It’s worked every time.
The jobs, the apartment that fell through, your mother’s thing at Christmas.
Every time, you were ready, and you were fine, and you were fine so fast that nobody thought to check on you. ”
The radiator ticked. Downstairs somebody’s door went.
“And this is the first time it’s had anywhere to go,” Dani said.
“That’s what’s different. Every other time it was just a page in a bag.
This time somebody’s handed you a way to actually do it — a good way, a defensible way, a way where you get paid more and everyone congratulates you.
You don’t have to admit you were ready to lose him. You just take a very good job.”
Jo sat at the table with the cereal box in front of her and could not immediately produce a sentence.
“I want the job.” She made herself say it at ordinary volume, like a fact.
“I know you do. That’s what makes it so clean.”
“No. Dani. I want the job. On its own. Separately. If Alexander did not exist, if I’d never met him, that woman would still have offered me that seat and I would still want it, and I’d have taken it in a week and never thought about it again.”
“I believe you.” Dani picked up her keys.
“I believe every word of that, and it doesn’t help you at all, because both things are true at once and you keep trying to make one of them cancel the other.
He’s not why you want it. He’s what it costs.
Those are different columns and you know it, you’re the one who taught me the phrase. ”
“You’ve got ten minutes,” Jo said.
“I’ve got nine and I’m going to spend four of them on this.” Dani came back and sat down on the arm of the other chair, still in her coat. “When my dad was dying, you drove me to Bethlehem every Sunday for five months. Do you remember what you said to me in the car?”
“No.”
“You said: tell me the worst version and then we’ll know where the floor is.” Dani watched her take that. “It was the most useful sentence anybody said to me that entire year. I have repeated it to about forty families since, at three in the morning, in rooms you would not want to be in. It works.”
“Then I don’t see the problem.”
“The problem is you only ever say it to other people.” Dani stood up. “You’ll sit with a stranger and name the worst version out loud until they can breathe again. You will not do it in a room with somebody who loves you. You do it on paper, alone, and then you put the paper in a bag.”
Jo looked at the table.
“He’d be fine about it,” she said. “That’s the stupid part. He would take it well. He’d probably help.”
“I know.”
“So why can’t I.”
“Because if he takes it well, then there’s no reason left not to have told him three weeks ago,” Dani said, “and then you have to look at why you didn’t. And you already know why, and you’d rather not.”
She was at the door when she stopped.
“Show him the paper,” Dani said. “Not the offer. The paper. That’s the harder one and it’s the one that matters.”
Reagan called at eleven, which was late for her, and had the sound of a woman standing in a garage to be out of earshot.
“You didn’t call after the conversation.”
“There hasn’t been a conversation.”
“It’s been two weeks, Jo.”
“Two weeks and three days.” Jo said it before she could stop herself, and heard the number arrive in her own voice flat and unrounded, the way you say a thing you have been tracking hourly, and knew Reagan had heard it too.
There was a pause with a garage in it.
“Right,” Reagan said. “Sit down.”
“I’m sitting.”
“I’m going to ask you one question, and I want you to notice that it isn’t the one I usually ask.”
Jo waited.
“What do you want?”
And Jo opened her mouth to answer, and what came out was: “I want to be able to tell him without it.”
“No.”
“Reagan.”
“That’s not an answer to my question. That’s an answer about him.” Reagan’s voice did not rise. It never rose. “Try again. What do you want.”
“I want the job.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d be good at it and because nobody at Kade will ever.”
“That’s a comparison. You’re telling me what it’s better than.
” Something metal shifted, Reagan sitting down on a step.
“Jo. I’m going to say this once and then I’ll be nice to you again.
In eleven years I have asked you a hundred questions about your life and I have never once got an answer that didn’t have somebody else in it.
It’s always what a job is better than, or what a man is good about, or what our mother would have thought.
You are twenty-seven years old, and I have never once heard you say I want and then stop the sentence. ”
Jo stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear.
She tried it. She actually tried it, standing there, out loud, in an empty room at eleven at night: I want.
And found that the sentence went nowhere on its own, that it needed an object, and that every object she reached for came attached to a comparison or a person, and that the plain unqualified version, the one where she wanted a thing simply because she wanted it and did not have to justify the wanting by what it beat, was a sentence she did not appear to own.
That frightened her considerably more than the offer did.
“I don’t know how to do that,” she said.
“I know. I’ve known for about twenty years.”
“Why didn’t you say?”
“Because you were surviving, and you don’t take somebody’s crutch off them in the middle of the road.
” Reagan let out a breath. “You’re not in the road anymore, love.
That’s what nobody’s told you. You’re standing on a sidewalk with a good job and a man who’s decent to you and a friend who feeds you, and you’re still walking like the road’s coming. ”
“Can I tell you what I actually called about,” Reagan said.
“You’ve been building to it for six minutes.”