Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Fifteen minutes later, when Helen had seen him to the door, she turned to acknowledge Mona’s direct, skeptical stare with as much of a poker face as she could muster. She knew it wasn’t worth much, her poker face; people had told her so all her life. “What the hell was all that about?” Mona said.

Helen smiled nervously. “Turns out that man works at—”

“I know where he works. I Googled him while I was sitting out here by myself staring at that closed door. So what did he want?”

Helen walked to her desk but did not sit down; she put her hands on the back of her chair. “Do you want to go out and have lunch today?” she said.

Mona pulled her head back. “What,” she said softly, “you mean together?”

Helen nodded soberly.

Mona looked around the surface of her desk, picking things up and putting them down again. She looked at her watch: it was only about quarter past ten. “Listen,” she said, “if it’s bad news, just please give it to me now, I’m not good at waiting. I don’t know why people always think you need to be eating something when you get bad news.”

“It’s not bad news,” Helen said. “It’s … well, it’s either good news or no news.” By which she meant, though of course Mona could not have known it, that if Mona was not amenable to the offer, in any of its forms, they would turn it down, and things would go on as they had been.

“Okay, then,” Mona said, without much confidence. “I’m going to make you take me someplace nice, though, if you’re gonna torture me like this.”

“No problem,” Helen said, smiling.

Five minutes later, Mona grabbed her bag and said, “The hell with this. There’s a Hot and Crusty on the corner. Let’s go.”

When they were seated at a tiny Formica table for two with their coffees and a gigantic cranberry muffin cut in half, Helen told her that Teddy Malloy had come to buy out the business and to offer them both jobs at Malloy Worldwide, jobs whose salaries, she now realized, she had neglected to inquire about, though they seemed bound to be better than what the two of them were currently taking home.

“You mean you,” Mona said. “It’s you he wants, not both of us. He didn’t even talk to me. Why would they need me anyway? I’m good, but I’m sure they got people who can do what I do.”

“Well, he does,” Helen said. “He wants to hire us together.” She took a long sip of her coffee and watched Mona pick a hunk out of her half of the muffin. “Although he did present an alternative offer, for you. If you didn’t want to go work there, he would offer you a severance package.”

“A severance package?” Mona said combatively. “So I’d be fired, is what he means.”

“Well, sort of. It’s not your usual deal. He’d offer you a year’s salary.”

Mona stopped chewing for a long moment, then hurriedly resumed until she could repeat, “A year’s salary?”

Helen nodded. “Also COBRA benefits for up to a year if you needed them. So that’s pretty generous. But, Mona, I don’t want you to feel like you’re being—”

“Done,” Mona said, and she laughed. “Sold. Accepted. Let’s call this old dude right now before he regains his senses or dies or something.”

Helen felt stricken. “Just like that?” she said. “You don’t need to think about it? You’re not curious what this Malloy place would be like, or what it might be like to do what we do at a place with some resources?”

“Someone offers you a year’s salary,” Mona said, “you take it. That’s just basic sense.”

“But don’t you — don’t you want to keep working?”

“Who says I won’t keep working? I’ll get another job of some kind. There’s lots of them out there. I’m not the type to sit around and do nothing. But if I play it this way, then it’s like I have two salaries for one job. Why would I … What?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you crying ?”

“No,” Helen said, though she was a little.

“Good Lord,” Mona said. She sat back in her undersize chair and stared at Helen less in sympathy than in puzzlement. “It’s just a job. For you, too, I mean. There’s lots of jobs out there a smart, hardworking person can do. Jobs are for making money, so you can take care of your own, and maybe give them something nice once in a while that you didn’t have. Isn’t that what it’s about? You’re a single mom, you must know what I’m talking about.”

Helen nodded, and wiped her eyes with a scratchy paper napkin. “Sure,” she said, “but we built something together. We kept something alive. You and me, just the two of us. Doesn’t that mean something to you, at least a little bit, besides just a paycheck and health insurance? I mean, I know we aren’t really friends, but I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

Mona reached across the tiny table and squeezed Helen’s fingers. “It don’t mean I don’t like you,” she said. “I do. But in my opinion? You have always gotten worked up about the wrong things.”

Helen nodded and squeezed Mona’s hand, eager for it to be over now. When they got back upstairs, she went straight into Harvey’s office and shut the door; she phoned Teddy Malloy to accept his offer, left a message for Scapelli the lawyer, and then she took a deep breath and called Harvey’s son. “Cool” was all Michael said, though in a cracked tone suggestive of shock; then he asked her how soon he could expect the check, not out of avarice or impatience, she could tell, but out of need. It wasn’t important that he be grateful. It was more that she was hoping that what she had just done for him had cemented a bond between them. But she was never going to see him again either. She could tell just from the quaver in his voice that it was too much money for him, that he knew he was going to blow it. He had no one to help guard him against himself. But she had to be able to let these relationships go. They were never all that real to begin with, she told herself, notwithstanding her sadness over their end. You couldn’t feel responsible for everybody.

“THERE’S A HEALTH CLUB on the third floor,” Yvette said; “your key card opens it. If you need a locker, send me an email and I’ll get you set up. It’s twenty-four hours, with the exception of the pool and the Jacuzzi, for obvious reasons.” Nothing was obvious to Helen about any of this. She just kept trailing behind Yvette, who was the office manager and who looked like a catalogue model, nodding and making noises of assent and wishing that the needlessly comprehensive tour of Malloy Worldwide’s facilities would terminate at Helen’s own desk, which she was eager to get behind and gather herself a little. She carried over her shoulder a new soft briefcase that had in it only a New York Times , a pen, a yogurt, and a plastic spoon.

“On the fourth floor is the staff cafeteria,” Yvette continued. She walked like most people ran. “You’ll get another card — a lot of cards, right? — that’s good for the employee discount there. You can pay cash if you want, though most people just have it deducted from their paycheck. The food”—she turned around to confide in Helen—“is really good, I have to say. I mean you know it’s just to encourage you to stay in the building and take shorter lunches, but still. The whole place is nut-free, though, for obvious reasons, so you’d have to go outside the building if you’re, you know, desperate for nuts.”

A glance into the cafeteria, occupied at this hour mostly by people waiting in line at the cappuccino bar, was enough to tell Helen that she probably wouldn’t be eating there all that often. She was now immersed in the world she had taken notice of when she first started job hunting in Manhattan, the world where people her age were nowhere in evidence, where she was, or felt, old enough to be everybody’s mother; she did not see herself sitting at one of those long tables in one of those clusters of skinny women in their twenties, complaining about whatever it was such creatures thought they had to complain about. Only some of them were from Malloy — they shared the building with, among other enterprises, a casting agency and a website devoted to shopping. The notion of cheap food did still have a strong pull; Helen had to keep reminding herself that she had not just a new job but a new salary, and so saving a few bucks on lunch was no longer the imperative it had been just a few weeks ago. Still, she thought she would bring her lunch most days.