“That’s what it’s called,” I said with satisfaction. “I was trying to remember the name of the kind of blanket you put on a couch. It’s one of the things that Mr. Gowan had me bring back to the office, along with a toothbrush.”
“Is he sleeping at Woodsmen Stadium? Why did he want you to go along to collect that crap?”
“I think it was because he needed someone to do the manual labor. He wanted to stand on my back so he could take down the drapes, since we didn’t have a ladder.”
“I didn’t notice footprints on your coat, so I guess you said no.”
“I said no,” I affirmed. “I don’t have a problem with telling people that.”
“Good for you,” Ronan said approvingly.
I didn’t have a problem saying no. As I went to bed that night in my clean, unstained sheets in my apartment with no random handprints on the walls, I thought about the important times I’d used that word. I had told my dad no, that I wasn’t moving again. It was how I’d stayed at the same high school for my entire senior year. I had gotten a job that paid for some of the cost of the motel room he rented for me, and he had agreed to help out and send money to cover the rest. I had said no, I’m notinterested in you, when my coworker at the student bookstore in college had asked me out a few times. He had been a nice guy but I hadn’t liked him in that way.
At least, I really hadn’t thought so, but then his new girlfriend had started to come by during our shifts to say hello or to bring him treats. He had lit up like a candle when he’d seen her outside the store’s window and he’d practically run to meet her, and I’d thought that I might have made a mistake. What if I had been the one to make him light up like that?
I’d said no to a lot of things, and sometimes my refusal hadn’t made any difference. No, that’s wrong and you’ll need to recheck my transcripts and recalculate my GPA. I refuse to be the salutatorian. That was what I had told the principal, but then I’d been the one giving the first speech at our high school graduation and watching Warren Marc-Wolsey get the applause as valedictorian. I’d said no to other people who had ignored me and done exactly what they’d wanted, like the word meant nothing at all. It was only two little letters, after all. They had been insignificant when someone with more power was saying yes.
And that was why I’d learned to go around the rules to make my life easier. If my dad’s sheets were stained? I could figure out where housekeeping kept the clean ones and do a switch myself, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the problem of paying for them (again). Just like the situation with Mr. Gowan and the new gym equipment, some things were better taken care of quietly. I was a taker-carer. I was an accomplisher and an achiever, even ifmy job in Special Projects hadn’t allowed me to do those things. Now I was.
I rolled over onto my side and thought. I did need to be careful about what I was doing at my job because I planned to work for the Woodsmen team indefinitely—maybe until I retired. I would be careful and I would also learn more about football. That meant I had an activity for Sunday and it wouldn’t feel like the day was long and empty.
On Monday at work, I listened to Kiya talk about our dinner, how we had been surprised by each other’s presence and how great Channing had been. Victoria and Taylor totally supported her but I wondered about him.
“You’re from here, right?” I asked Victoria. So was he. “Did you know him before?”
No, not well. “It’s a big area,” she reminded me and it was, geographically. “We went to different high schools but I’ve seen him around.”
“There’s no gossip,” Kiya said happily, but then she looked across the table at me. “Did Ronan say something about him?”
I thought quickly about what to tell her. “He said that he and Channing never share personal stuff. He made fun of me for thinking that they sat around and drank wine, telling secrets,” I answered. I didn’t need to pass along his concerns about his friend settling down with one woman. Ronan could have been wrong and also, I didn’t want to get in the middle of their relationship.
The three of them laughed and next, Victoria told us about her brother, the one who had puked into her lunch bag. He had a girlfriend and was being an idiot about her. “As his big sister, I have to step in and tell him to stop acting like such a douche, partying all the time and ignoring her,” she said. She continued to tell me about the mistakes he was making as the two of us walked back to our floor. “He’s going to lose her, but that could be an important life lesson.” She shrugged. “That’s what my grandma told me when I complained to her about how much he’s going out and treating people badly.”
“Life lessons kind of suck,” I mentioned and she nodded.
“Yeah…that’s your boss, right?”
I turned and watched him walking toward us, from the direction of the elevators. “I think he’s trying to move our office to one of the upper floors,” I said. I didn’t think that would work out for him, but I also would have appreciated a view.
“He’s good-looking in an older-guy way,” she mentioned.
“Do you think so?” I said hello as he walked past us, and Victoria smiled at him. Mr. Gowan didn’t seem to notice either of us. “He’s married, though.” I felt that should have been enough to curb her interest so I wouldn’t also have to add “I think he’s pretty dumb” and “he doesn’t seem to have any skills besides golf and maybe skiing.”
“Hm,” she said. “Yeah, I remember when he married Celestine Whitaker. I heard that they met at a spa at their college and she got her family to hire him.”
That was what I had already assumed about Mr. Gowan’s position here. “They had a spa at their college? How do you know all this?”
“It was a fancy school, and most people know about the Whitakers,” she told me, shrugging. “I haven’t seen Celestine around for a while, though.”
“They travel a lot,” I said. “They’re always going somewhere.”
But after we said goodbye and I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t know if “they” did anything together. I had never seen any evidence of Mr. Gowan’s wife—not like she’d have been hanging around our office, but he didn’t have a picture of her on his desk, he didn’t mention her name when he talked about his various trips, and there hadn’t been signs of her habitation in their house, either. In fact, there weren’t many signs of human habitation there at all, but it seemed unlikely that a woman who had gone to a college with its own spa would have lived in a place with no furniture. But if Victoria’s story was right, he was a spa person himself who seemed to be weathering it.
I went to my desk and, with an absence of things to do, I looked up Celestine Whitaker and her husband, Beau Gowan, delving much deeper than I had before. I saw pictures of their wedding in France, which looked incredible. Was that a castle? No, they called it a chateau. Mr. Gowan had fifteen groomsmen and Celestine had matching bridesmaids, and I had no idea how they’d managed to accumulate so many beautiful friends. I imagined myself in one of the matching dresses, carrying a mini-bouquet. How cool.
And as for what she was doing now…I searched but didn’t find too much besides her name listed as “patron” for a few different charities. One had recently held a luncheon in La Jolla, and I remembered that he’d been there, too, pursuing what he liked to call a “vagabond existence.” There were pictures of that and she looked a little older than in her wedding shots, but still so pretty. Physically, they matched very well because Victoria was right. Mr. Gowan was good-looking, too.
“Cate? Come,” he called from his office.
