Love Handles (8 page)

Chapter 5

B
ev sat in the hard chair across from Ellen’s empty desk and inhaled slowly through her nose, telling herself she had nothing to be afraid of. She looked at her watch. Exhaled slowly out of her mouth. Two minutes, she’d said. Almost thirty minutes ago. The drive up from Orange County had taken seven hours, two more than expected, and she’d come directly to the Fite office in San Francisco eager to get her conversation with Ellen over with. Her nerves were intermingled with exhaustion and hunger and thirst. She should have stopped for an early meal first, and the thought of a tall glass of iced tea was driving her mad.

Should she get up and go look for her aunt? She lifted her bag to her lap and confirmed her water bottle was still empty. She organized the gum, pen, cell phone, and notebook again. Took out the cell, scrolled through her contacts, glanced over her shoulder at the door, reaffirmed her ringtone and backdrop settings, put it back in the bag next to the wrinkled pack of spearmint sugarless. She had already eaten off her lipstick seven times and worked a thread loose on the hem of her blouse.

There was no reason to be afraid of her mother’s sister. Ellen wouldn’t be happy to hear the deal was off, but she’d adjust. And in time, the family would have the opportunity to develop a closeness they hadn’t had in Bev’s lifetime.

Ellen strode into the room and dropped a binder the size of a late-model microwave oven on the desk.

No big deal.

“Please tell me,” Ellen said, clipping the ends of her words as she eased herself into her chair, “that I misunderstood your little message.” She fixed Bev with a laser gaze.

Bev tried to keep her posture casual, but her long, awkward legs twitched like a gazelle, ready to bolt across the urban savanna out to her RAV4. “I am sorry, Ellen. I know you must be very disappointed.”

Ellen held up her hand, the white tips of each French-manicured finger reminding Bev of Elmer’s glue. “Sorry? Please,” she said. “You went back to your boring little life and starting thinking this one would be more exciting. Right?”

“That’s not—”

“You got to dreaming of yourself as someone glamorous and special,” she continued. “Your own fashion company! Wow! What a bomb!”

Bev’s anxiety turned cold. “That is not it.”

Ellen made a disgusted noise in her throat. “I don’t have time for this.” She shoved a paper towards her. “Here’s my final offer. Take it, or I walk.”

“You what?” She flinched inwardly at the anger in Ellen’s smooth, beautiful face, then slowly reached for the paper.

“Look at that. All itemized. I tried to keep it simple.” Ellen flipped open her laptop screen. “This is your last chance to get anything out of a confused old man.”

Bev glanced down at the sheet in her hands with two bullet-pointed paragraphs. One listed a promise of a lump-sum cash payment of a hundred thousand dollars. The second was titled “Cabin In Tahoe” and noted an address, website, and appraisal value of nine hundred and sixty thousand.

She gave up on the relaxed breathing and gaped at her. “I couldn’t take this. You don’t have to give me anything. I just want to work here.”

Ellen turned a wild gaze on her. “I can make some very talented people interested in this company, pros from real companies. In New York, a real city. I want to get Fite into the big leagues too much to let Ugly Betty come in here and mess it up for fun.”

Bev sat up taller, her pride stinging. “I’m not going to mess anything up.”

“Exactly.” Ellen handed over another paper. “Here’s where you sign.”

Bev smoothed the first paper over her lap with her palms, making no move to take the contract Ellen shoved towards her. Two weeks ago, she’d been happy to give Ellen whatever she wanted, but now she knew she’d been too hasty. She met her eyes. “I’m not signing anything. I’m sorry.”

Ellen looked at her watch. “If you don’t sign that within the next five minutes, I’m going to hand over my resignation, effective immediately. Without me or my father, an over-promoted, color-blind jock will be the only person with any executive experience in the company. On an average day I work thirteen hours, but compared to my father I was a part-timer. An hour from now, an email will go out forwarding all calls and complaints to you. If they can’t find you, they’ll page you over the PA—which is even wired into the bathrooms. Which is good, because that’s where you’ll be hiding.”

Bev’s palms were damp; she wiped them on the sides of her thighs. Maybe she was fooling herself—seduced by a fantasy, of false glamor, of being the boss—but she hadn’t driven all the way up from L.A. just to give up in the first five minutes. Besides, Ellen had to be bluffing. “What about Richard? The CFO?”

“He hasn’t been allowed back in the building since our first little negotiation.”

Bev felt a surge of guilt. And anger. She doubted Liam even felt guilty about that. “I see.”

“Take it.” Ellen stood up to glide the paper over to her. “You can’t possibly expect me to offer you anything more.”

“If you really think I’m that bad for Fite, why leave? Why not stay and protect it from me?”

Sinking back down into her chair, Ellen’s hard face twisted into a half-smile. “You’ll learn your lesson soon enough,” she said. “And I’ll get Fite then.”

“You think I’ll give up and sell to you anyway.”

“Not sell. Give,” she said. “Three minutes.”

Bev looked down at the paper in her lap, studied the numbers, the address in Meeks Bay.
I bet it’s beautiful.

Ellen smiled.

“You just have this kind of money lying around?” Bev asked. Having had a salary of less than thirty thousand a year, Bev couldn’t conceive of what it would be like to have so much all at once.

“Daddy may not have been clear-headed at the end, but before that he knew which one of us really loved him. He was understandably generous.”

Bev shook her head, dispelled the fantasy. She would never be able to live with herself. The last thing she wanted were deeper divisions in her family. “If you let me work alongside you, Fite would pay my salary. You wouldn’t have to give up anything.”

“Just everything that matters,” Ellen said. She clicked the end of a pen, flicked it across the desk like a spear.

“I can’t take this,” Bev said.

“Two minutes.”

“Ellen, please reconsider. I’m not going to mess anything up. I’m an organized, intelligent person, I work hard, I—”

Ellen blew her nose loudly into a tissue and walked across the room to an open file box. With her back to Bev, she lifted an ornate ceramic vase filled with peacock feathers off a shelf and began wrapping it in newspaper.

Jesus, what a bitch.
Her mother had given up on her only sister thirty years ago. Even now, after the funeral of their father, she expressed no regrets about their cold war. Bev stared at Ellen’s narrow, rigid back and thought,
I can see why.

So maybe a family reunion was unlikely. But Ellen had to be bluffing about quitting. After a lifetime of working at Fite, she couldn’t just walk away—

“Sixty seconds.” Ellen dropped the box on the floor with a thud.

“I’m not going to sign it like this.” Bev struggled to think fast enough. She fell back on what she knew best. “How about I get us a snack, and we can talk about it—”

“Last chance, Betty.” She strode over to her. She’d slung a large bag over her shoulder and held the box in her arms, the peacock feathers curving up behind her left ear like green and purple iridescent antlers.

Bev glanced at the papers in her lap and got to her feet. “I can’t, Ellen. Surely you can wait—”

“Just sign it.” Eyes fixed off into space, Ellen waited, unmoving.

Bev studied her cold, bored profile. She sat back down. “No,” she said softly. “Not like this.”

Alarm flickered across Ellen’s forehead, then vanished. Without meeting Bev’s eyes she bent at the knees, plucked the paper out of Bev’s grasp, and strode out of the room holding her box.

Bev sat in the empty office, the chaos of unfinished designs—bolts of fabric leaning in corners, sketches and photos on presentation boards, samples piled up on racks and conference tables—scattered around the room like abandoned children. The phone rang, and off behind her she heard the PA echo through the hall asking for somebody whose name she didn’t recognize.

“Whoops,” Bev whispered.

I
t was time. To everything there was a season, et cetera et cetera. Liam lifted the overflowing box under his desk and hauled it to the door.

You're a sentimental dork
. He was done with this business, thanks to Ed, yet he was carrying home mementos like an eighth-grade girl.

He looked down into the box at the sketches and tear sheets—a Macy's ad for the first pair of Fite the Man shorts he'd designed on top of the pile—and reassured himself he could hardly leave behind the evidence of his Achilles heel. Ellen would probably move into his office before lunchtime and comb over every inch, mocking and taking and destroying like a ravenous, sarcastic locust.

Better off taking it all home and recycling it at the condo. Nobody knew him there, nobody knew Fite or Ed Roche or his damn descendants, and nobody cared.

Nobody.

With the edge of the box digging into his ribs, Liam paused near the door and turned around to look around the office, where he’d spent most of his adult life. Right after the Olympics, with Dad finally in his grave and nothing more for Liam to do but maintain a pulse for his mother and brother and sister, Ed had offered him the job at Fite and saved him from God knows what. Law school, probably. He wished he had the brains for engineering, but he didn’t. Other jocks went into broadcasting, but he knew he didn’t have the charm or patience for that bullshit, though his old friends did very nicely every four years when another Olympics rolled around.

He might have to consider that after all. His salary at Fite had been good, but hardly enough to retire on. To stay in the Bay Area, which was a given, he’d be taking a pay cut—if he could find a company to take him in. He wasn’t a fashion guy, he was a jock—an asset at Fite Fitness, but not at Levi’s or BeBe or any of the other apparel companies in town. And though it was common knowledge he didn’t have an MBA, only Ed had known the worst of it—that he’d never finished his BA, either.

“Damn.” He dumped the box on the floor where he stood and thought of Rachel, Jennifer, even Darrin. Wayne, George at the back door, Alfred in the grading room. Sure, he was short on options, but any one of the lower staff people would hurt more than him with the sudden loss of a paycheck.

He bent over and rested his forehead against the door, cursing Ed for leaving him without the tools he needed to get the job done. He remembered the gleam in Ed’s eye, telling him about his granddaughter. Well, the tools he was willing to use, anyway.

“Damn.” He couldn’t bring himself to walk away. Maybe he wasn’t the warmest boss in the world, and most of the people at Fite probably thought he was a bastard, but he wasn’t going to screw them over the way Ed had screwed him. He had to stick around as long as he could, if just to write stealth recommendations for Ellen’s casualties.

He banged his head against the door and gazed down at his new Nikes, absently calculating their make and reverse-engineering the midfoot overlay. Just as he was about to bend over and take one off to bring to the shoe merchandiser, he heard a knock.

If he hadn't been inches from the door, he wouldn't have heard it at all. Just a tap, then a pause, then another tap. A chill tickled down his spine, and he stood up straight, the midfoot overlay forgotten. “Yes?” he barked out, not as irritated as he sounded. Nobody at Fite would knock on his door. Nobody would dare.

Silence. He thought he heard the sudden exhalation of breath and, impossibly, he imagined the scent of lemon blossoms. Vowing his next job would be for a publicly held corporation with thousands of employees and absolutely no family ties amid staff whatsoever, he flung open the door. “You.”

Her face, with its impossibly clear complexion, so similar to Ellen’s but without the severity of expensive makeup, peered up at him. “You, yourself.”

He turned away, shoving aside his curiosity about the woman, wondering how he—even with his acute senses—could have possibly smelled her through the door. She must have doused herself in Lemon Pledge that morning. Yet he couldn’t resist inhaling the scent deep into his lungs before striding over to his desk, surprised she'd come by to see him in person. Ellen had walked over too, of course, but she liked to gloat, and his impression of Bev Lewis had been that she'd avoid conflict.

Which is why he knew she wouldn't withstand Ellen's final offer.

“Stop in to say goodbye?” He lounged back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk.

She lingered in the doorway, tilted her head, and said nothing. His attention dropped to the cheap suit she wore, the same ugly one from her previous visit with faded black jacket that didn't match the darker black pants. His professional eye took in the poor, baggy fit at the waist that hid whatever body she had underneath—tall but soft and obviously nonathletic. A before picture. The woman off the street.

Not their customer.

“You should drop by some of the SOMA showrooms while you're here,” he said. “Pick up some new pieces for your apartment. Your new apartment. Or house, perhaps?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Furniture. Home furnishings. That kind of thing. San Francisco has some cutting-edge designers.”

She was still frowning. “You think I'm here to go shopping?”

“Let's not waste each other's time.” He turned to his computer, where he’d been copying over his personal files to a thumb drive. When they'd accidentally loaded Illustrator on his PC, nobody thought he'd actually use it. Nobody but Ed knew he had, or that he'd loaded the custom sketching software too, and flown to Denver for a private tutorial to learn it as well as anyone. Better. “Ellen's new offer was probably a fair one. You obviously needed the money.” He realized now that was what Ed must have intended all along; Ellen learns her lesson, and his lazy but wholesome granddaughter gets the windfall.