“I have a little girl.”
“I do too. How old is yours?”
“Two, sir.”
“Ah, the most fun age. Mine’s a teenager this year.” He pulled out his phone and showed her a picture of a gleaming kid with a mouth full of braces. Connie found herself smiling genuinely at it, trying to imagine Sam that tall and lanky.
“Good luck to you,” she said, and Maclan laughed in earnest.
“It goes fast,” he told her in a wistful voice. “The days are long and the years are short, isn’t that the saying?”
“Yes, sir.” Connie thought of Sam alone at home, penned inside her gate in the bedroom as the sun set, checked on only sporadically by the next-door neighbor, and felt such a deep ache in her chest that it closed up her throat, made her unable to speak for a second. She was missing so much. Already, she had started to forget the feeling of Sam as an infant in her arms, the rhythm of rocking her warm little body, the way her baby skin smelled like sweet milk. Last night, when she was up late cooking in the kitchen, Sam had run out of the bedroom in tears and latched on to her legs without a word, and Connie had sat down on the carpet and hugged her close and hummed to her until Sam fell back asleep in her arms. Lately, with all of Connie’s overtime work, Sam had been having more of these nightmares. After putting Sam back down for bed, Connie had let herself have a good cry, wondering why survival had to mean she couldn’t be here for her daughter.
Maclan gave her a thoughtful look. “I’m in charge of all the floors here.Did you know that your work not only ranks consistently at the top for your floor, but all the floors?”
Connie heart lifted at his praise. “Thank you.”
“It’s earned,” he told her. Then he straightened and pushed away from the counter. “Keep it up.”
Several months later, on another night when Connie was working late and only a few other workers dotted the floor, a young assistant came up to her and told her that Maclan would like a word with her. Connie stripped the gloves off her hands, removed her protective coat and hung it over her chair, and followed the man to the elevators. They rode four floors up, to the top of the building, where he led her to an office at the end of the hall.
Inside, she saw filing cabinets and bookshelves lining one wall, an office desk positioned against another. A row of windows lined the third, and through them, Connie could see an unobstructed view of Angel City’s skyline, the clock against the Times building illuminated in anticipation of nightfall, the ups and downs of skyscraper silhouettes dotted with lights, and central to them all, the Winged Towers, now completed, their scalloped tops shrouded by low clouds.
Maclan looked up from his desk with a smile. “Another late night, Connie,” he said. He waved her over to sit across from him. “It must be hard, with your two-year-old.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, thinking of Sam waiting for her. She needed to hurry. Sam was probably hungry by now and starting to whimper. “But we manage well enough.”
Maclan nodded. “I won’t keep you late, then. I know your floor’s been talking for a while about the need for a manager to run quality assurance.”
“Yes, sir,” Connie said, but her heart was beating faster now. She tried to keep her excitement tempered, because who knew if this meeting was for a promotion, but her hands pressed together in her lap anyway.
“I apologize for the delay,” he said. “Was waiting on approval of a new budget by headquarters before I could make the promotions. But I’m sure you’re not surprised that I’ve called you in here.”
Connie allowed a bit of a smile to emerge on her face. She didn’t dare say it aloud until he did, but she imagined the raise all the same, the numbers in her bank account. An extra five hundred dollars a month would help her afford real childcare for Sam so that she wasn’t leaving her alone for hours at a time. It would let her rest a little easier, knowing she was no longerbreaking the law, no longer putting her baby in danger. It would give her a week of vacation days, an extra week of time with her daughter.
He studied her face, seemingly bemused by her growing anticipation. “Tell me about your life before you came here. What were you doing?”
She hesitated, her thoughts distracted momentarily by memories of a time she’d prefer to forget. “Not much,” she said humbly. “I was married, briefly, back in China. I did some odd jobs before I became pregnant.”
“What were your odd jobs?”
She shook her head. “Secretarial work,” she said, struggling to answer. “I sat several times for a calendar.”
“A calendar.” Maclan smiled. “A model?”
She smiled back, a little more nervously this time. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“I can see why.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. “Thank you, sir.”
He drew it out a little longer, tormenting her, before he said, “Normally, I reserve manager promotions for workers that have been with us for longer than a year. You understand why, of course?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If I promote someone so new to a senior position, the others feel slighted, and I have a discontented group of employees on my hands. But you work really hard, and I’ve been impressed with you. So there’s something bigger I’d like to offer you.”
Something about his words was starting to make her uncomfortable. But Connie stayed put in her chair and nodded.
