DIED 2013
I WAS TWENTY-FIVE WHEN I met her at the software company in Austin; she was thirty-two. (I only mention our ages because what I’m about to say could lead you to believe we were in high school.) She had perfectly straight, shiny, light brown hair, a sun-kissed complexion, a wide smile, and big blue eyes; she wore slim jeans and a pressed Oxford button-down every day. Her handwriting was beautiful and her office impeccably organized; though I couldn’t read computer languages, I can only imagine how elegant her programs were. She had grown up in Virginia—sweet Southern drawl, check—married her childhood sweetheart, and moved to Texas. Now they hosted our company parties in an airy A-frame on the wild outskirts of town. Needless to say, the spices were in alphabetical order. In a previous incarnation, she had probably invented Feng Shui.
In addition to all this, she was gentle, unassuming, kind, a very shrewd investor, and an animal lover. She meditated at her desk twice a day, which allowed her to work fourteen hours at a stretch with focus and accuracy. She and the boss, who was the company’s founder, CEO, and president, were often holed up in her office coding bug fixes long into the night.
Can you even imagine the tempest in our teapot when it was revealed that the boss was splitting up with his live-in girlfriend, who also happened to be the VP, and The Neatnik was leaving her husband, childhood sweetheart turned successful attorney, so they could be together? I may have been just a tiny bit less surprised than everyone else, as a few months earlier I had seen the two of them getting out of her black Mazda RX-7 in the parking garage. Some said her marriage wasn’t sailing as smoothly as it seemed. But still.
Of course there were varying opinions and conflicting loyalties. Though I felt for the VP and understood the general outrage, that it was in The Neatnik’s character to have conducted this secret affair, then go public and explode her whole life—that is something I will always admire. That is love, baby.
Soon the lawyer was back in Virginia and the boss was ensconced in the A-frame. He got her into his macrobiotic obsession, but she still threw great parties, now featuring seaweed-stuffed mushrooms that took days to prepare. After the software company sold, she became a substitute teacher at the local high school. Probably Feng Shui’d the classrooms, fed everyone vegan cupcakes, and taught the kids TM.
I don’t even know how to say that she died of uterine cancer less than a year after diagnosis. Partly to convince myself that it was true that she was gone, I flew down to help my boss with her memorial, held on what would have been her sixty-second birthday. One last sunset on the deck, one last margarita, or five. Oh, sweet Neatnik, goodbye.