Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Dimple stared at her.

“Fine,” Amina said with a scowl. “But I’m working until at least ten, so it will have to be afterward.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever. You sure you don’t want a ride home?”

“Nah.” They had reached Dimple’s old blue Chevy van, moldering in the parking lot like a wet elephant. Dimple opened the front door and climbed in. She looked ridiculously small in it, like a child playing grown-up. Even with her seat forward as far as it would go, her legs were barely long enough to reach the brakes and clutch.

“Call your mother,” Amina said when her cousin rolled the window down, and Dimple nodded even though they both knew she wouldn’t.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” Amina said, walking into Jane’s office the next day. Jane swiveled around in her chair, perfectly pressed into her black suit, her red pageboy swinging. She pointed to the phone cupped to her head and then to the chair across from her. Amina sat.

“Yes, but it was a bar mitzvah. How do you miss the hora?” she asked irritably. Amina turned her attention to the floor-to-ceiling view of the Puget Sound to keep herself from getting unnerved. It was easy enough to do in Jane’s office, the proportions of which (endless white walls, floor-to-ceiling windows) always made her feel like a gnat suspended in a glass jar.

The person on the other end of the phone was still talking when Jane hung up with a clatter. She frowned, repositioning herself in her seat. “I didn’t realize we had a meeting scheduled.”

“I’m having a family emergency and need to go home.”

“Emergency?”

“My dad’s not well.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Amina shifted, something about Jane’s relentless efficiency, her plucking gaze, making her feel like a liar. “It should just be a few days.” Jane turned to her computer, her mouth twitching as she read the schedule. She looked back at Amina. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, wait—”

“This is unacceptable.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Sure, it’s your father. What does he have? Kidney stone? Diabetes? Lung cancer?”

“No, but—”

“You told me you would see this through.” She rapped her desk with her index finger. “If I wanted someone to screw it up, I could have sent in Peter.”

“I’d leave on Monday.”

“Not to mention that I’ve already gotten two messages from Lesley expressing concern about your ability to handle her event.”

“Monday as in after the Beale wedding.”

Jane looked at her, coolly recalibrating.

“Monday through Friday,” Amina said, discreetly wiping her palms on her pants. “That should leave me pretty much clear, except for the Johnsons’ fiftieth-anniversary dinner on Thursday night.”

Jane turned back to her computer, pulling up the next week.

Amina cleared her throat. “Two messages?”

“Both ridiculous. I took care of it. But I need to know you’re on top of this.”

“I am,” Amina said, annoyance creeping into her voice. Jane looked amused.

“Looks like Earl is your best bet for Thursday. Peter is on vacation, and Wanda has an eighth-grade graduation party.”

“Eighth grade? Seriously?”

“I told you she’s hungry.”

Hunger, like loyalty and willingness to work unconventional hours, was a quality Jane valued in her staff. When she started the company ten years earlier, she had worked solo, talking her way into weddings by not charging for her time, just for her prints. It was a strategy that led her to build a devoted base within just a year. Now that Wiley Studios was a twelve-person operation, she was always looking for new growth opportunities. (“God willing,” she’d once murmured to Amina in a rare unguarded moment, “we’ll be shooting every event with candles on this side of the Cascades.”)

Not that Amina needed to prove herself to Jane as much as she had in the early years. If anything, the fact that she’d been given the Beale account was clearly a vote of confidence, even if the reality of dealing with Lesley Beale felt like a demotion.

“So what’s the Beales’ venue?” Jane asked, writing a phone number down on a Post-it.

“The Highlands.”

“Of course. How many times have you been out?”

“Three last week.”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “Nervous?”

“I’m not, I just—”

“Of course you are. Lesley is a legendary bitch. But please her and we become the go-to for the lot of them, and that will please me.” Jane slapped her hands on the desk, signaling the end of the conversation, and Amina stood. “Let me know if you can’t get Earl.”

Coming to work for Jane Wiley hadn’t been Amina’s idea. It was Dimple who had known Jane through mutual friends, Dimple who had gotten Amina the interview at Wiley Studios after her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had derailed, Dimple who had hustled her out of bed and into the shower five years earlier, claiming she had told her about the job interview the week before.

“Who cares if it’s events? You’ve just got to get out there again. Is this black thing your only suit?” her cousin had said while Amina stood under the pounding water, hungover, hating her.

“Out there” was Wiley Studios in Belltown, where Amina arrived that morning with a tightening forehead, her portfolio and résumé in hand. After a ten-minute wait, she was shuffled down the long hallway into Jane’s airy office, where a black notebook lay open in the center of a steel desk with a to-do list that numbered into the fifties. Amina’s name was number 14.

Jane had held out a pale hand. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Amina handed over her portfolio and looked away as Jane opened it, feeling, as she always did, that it was a little like watching a needle go into her own arm. Jane’s head bobbed over the pictures.

“What’s this?”

Amina glanced over. A smiling young boy’s face leaned so close, his features were almost blurry. In the background, his older brother sat in a cement stairwell, wearing a Knicks shirt and smoking a cigarette.

“That’s in Brooklyn. For an article on New York’s homeless youth.”

“Is that where you met Dimple? NYU?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Or, well, we met in New Mexico, but then we also went to NYU.”

“And then you followed her here?”

“She followed me here,” Amina said, bristling a little, and Jane looked up at her briefly before moving on. The next was an old woman with a puff of white hair, slumping into her lawn chair.

“Record heat in Queens,” Amina offered.

In the next, a young Asian man in a stained shirt clutched his stomach, his eyes rolled back.

“Bellingham hot-dog-eating champion dethroned.”

“Did I see this in the P-I ?”

“Yes.”

The next photo was of a police officer, a mother, and her son. The officer and the young woman faced each other, while the small boy leaned back against his mother, his hands cupping her knees. A dark look hung in the air between the adults, but the boy smiled, gleefully unaware, his mother’s hands slammed over his ears. His T-shirt had chocolate ice cream stains down the front.

“This?” Jane’s voice was pinched.

“The family of the firefighter who died last year.”

“One of the four in the warehouse accident?”

“Yeah.”

Jane lay the portfolio down. “Well, all we need now is a picture of someone actually killing themselves, and we’ll have a real party.”

Amina sat still, her face prickling with heat.

“Why didn’t you include that one?”

“I thought it wouldn’t be … applicable. To this job. Appropriate.”