I blinked and saw the landscaping contractor. “Should I send my estimate over to Surani? She’s the usual point person for us,” he told me.
“No, you can just give it directly to me,” I answered, and he didn’t seem overly confident about that. Which was the correct response: he shouldn’t have been confident, since I was basically scamming everyone. I was going to try to push this through just like I had with the new lockers, the new flooring, the gym equipment, the sideline heaters, the benches, snow blowers…
Judas Priest. Maybe I needed to slow down. Mr. Gowan had never given me any indication of the budget for the Office of Special Projects, or even if there was any budget at all. He had signed the requests I’d submitted to him and they’d all been approved, no matter what the amount. But this, regrading and redoing the entire Junior Woodsmen field, would have been the biggest ask yet.
“Cate?”
Now I looked over at Ed. “It’s all fine,” I said. I’d always accomplished everything that I’d wanted in my life, and I could do this, too. I had my apartment, which was almost perfect. It would be, once I had installed pictures and drapes. And I’d done amazing things in school, although I hadn’t gotten the internship I’d wanted, and of course I hadn’t gotten to be the valedictorian. The guy who’d received that honor had been smart and also popular, but I hadn’t always meshed well with everyone. My first roommate in college had moved out because she got annoyed by my neatness, like having standards was some kind of problem?
But if I mentally catalogued my list of accomplishments, which I did sometimes, I could count up a lot of them. I could get the Junior Woodsmen field done, too.
“This is great,” I told Ed. “See you tomorrow?” We had plans to meet at one of the concession stands at Woodsmen Stadium, and I planned to buy him a beer. I got an employee discount…I realized that I hadn’t thought about concessions at this field, though. Hot chocolate and handwarmers could have been very popular.
I drove back to my office and found that, to my surprise, I wasn’t the only person in there. Mr. Gowan’s door was closed, but he heard my entrance and called, “Come.”
I did, like an obedient dog. “Hello,” I told him. “I didn’t realize that you were back.”
“I’ll be at the game tomorrow,” he answered. I felt a moment of panic about his ticket, since I’d taken it, until he continued, “I’ll be in a friend’s box.”
Then the panic got worse.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked me. He pointed to his monitor and I walked around the desk to see what he meant. He was actually checking his inbox, and he was indicating an email he’d received from someone in the accounting department that asked about an invoice. I recognized it immediately, since the name of the payee included the word “lockers.”
“Hm, that’s interesting,” I answered blandly. “I’ll take care of it.” I held my breath but that was apparently all he needed—he wasn’t actually curious about what it was, he just didn’t want to have to deal.
“Good.” He looked through the window at the back of the fence and I figured that we were done, but he piped up again with another question. “Do you know a woman named Victoria? She works for the Woodsmen.”
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Why?”
“What do you know?”
“Her department is across the hall,” I said. “You can use the employee directory to find out information about people.”
I had to show him how to find that, since he’d never heard of a directory, and then he typed in her first name using his index fingers. There were actually three Victorias in the organization.
“This is the person that I know,” I said, pointing to her picture. “But I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”
“Hm.” He tapped his lip with his finger. “There’s nothing interesting.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Thank you. That’s all,” he told me.
It was something to ask Victoria about, but she wasn’t there when I stopped to see her on my way up to Accounts and Payroll. I needed to straighten out the issue with the invoice for the lockers. It wasn’t a big deal, of course, except that it was for equipment that wasn’t actually approved by my boss.
I found the author of the message as he was getting ready to leave for the day. “Mr. Gowan doesn’t check his email very often,” I told the guy. That was true. “If you contact me directly, you’ll get a faster response.” That was also true, but it was also sneaky. He only nodded and typed something, saying he’d made a note.
Before I went back downstairs, I checked to see if Kiya was in her cubicle. I hadn’t been sure how to deal with her, because I didn’t really need friends and if she was angry, that was (of course) her issue to solve and not mine.
But I went to see her anyway. “Hi, Kiya.”
She glanced up. “Oh, hi.”
“I just came by to say hello,” I let her know. “Also, I think this problem between us has gone on long enough.”
“What problem?”
“The thing about Channing,” I said. “I’m really sorry that he turned out to be an asshole but I wish you weren’t mad at me about it. I didn’t know that he was cheating, not before I saw him at dinner with that woman, and Ronan didn’t know anything about her either. But I’m sorry anyway because I think that you deserve better.”
