—
Pauline McGhee steered her Lexus LX right into the handicapped parking space in front of the City Foods Supermarket. It was five in the morning. All the handicapped people were probably still asleep. More importantly, it was too damn early to walk more than she had to.
“Come on, sleepy cat,” she told her son, gently pressing his shoulder. Felix stirred, not wanting to wake up. She caressed his cheek with her hand, thinking not for the first time that it was a miracle that something so perfect had come out of her imperfect body. “Come on, sweet pea,” she said, tickling his ribs until he curved up like a roly-poly worm.
She got out of the car, helping Felix climb out of the SUV behind her. His feet hadn’t hit the ground before she went over the routine. “See where we’re parked?” He nodded. “What do we do if we get lost?”
“Meet at the car.” He struggled not to yawn.
“Good boy.” She pulled him close as they walked toward the store. Growing up, Pauline had been told that she should find an adult if she ever got lost, but these days, you never knew who that adult might be. A security guard might be a pedophile. A little old lady might be a batty witch who spent her spare time hiding razor blades in apples. It was a sad state of affairs when the safest help for a lost six-year-old boy was an inanimate object.
The artificial lights of the store were a bit much for this time of morning, but it was Pauline’s own fault for not already buying the cupcakes for Felix’s class. She’d gotten the notice a week ago, but she hadn’t anticipated all hell breaking loose at work in between. One of the interior design agency’s biggest clients had ordered a custom-made sixty-thousand-dollar Italian brown leather couch that wouldn’t fit in the damn elevator, and the only way to get it up to his penthouse was with a ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour crane.
The client was blaming Pauline’s agency for not catching the error, the agency was blaming Pauline for designing the couch too big, and Pauline was blaming the dipshit upholsterer whom she had specifically told to go to the building on Peachtree Street to measure the elevator before making the damn couch. Faced with a ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour crane bill or rebuilding a sixty-thousand-dollar couch, the upholsterer was, of course, conveniently forgetting this conversation, but Pauline was damned if she was going to let him get away with it.
There was a meeting of all concerned at seven o’clock sharp, and she was going to be the first one there to get in her side of the story. As her father always said, shit rolls downhill. Pauline McGhee wasn’t going to be the one smelling like a sewer when the day was over. She had evidence on her side—a copy of an email exchange with her boss asking him to remind the upholsterer about taking measurements. The critical part was Morgan’s response: I’ll take care of it. Her boss was pretending like the emails hadn’t happened, but Pauline wasn’t going to take the fall. Someone was going to lose their job today, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be her.
“No, baby,” she said, pulling Felix’s hand away from a package of Gummi Bears dangling from the shelf. Pauline swore they put those things at kid level just so their parents would be bullied into buying them. She had seen more than one mother relent to a screaming kid just so he’d shut up. Pauline didn’t play that game, and Felix knew it. If he tried anything, she would snatch him up and leave the store, even if that meant abandoning a half-filled shopping cart.
She turned down the bakery aisle, nearly smacking into a grocery cart. The man behind the buggy laughed good-naturedly, and Pauline managed a smile.
“Have a good day,” he said.
“You, too,” she returned.
That, she thought, was the last time she was going to be nice to anybody this morning. She’d tossed and turned all night, then gotten up at three so she could run on the treadmill, put her face on, fix breakfast for Felix and get him ready for school. Long gone were her single days when she could spend all night partying, go home with whoever looked good, then roll out of bed the next morning twenty minutes before it was time to get to work.
Pauline ruffled Felix’s hair, thinking she didn’t miss it a bit. Though getting laid every now and then would’ve been a damn gift from heaven.
“Cupcakes,” she said, relieved to find several stacks lined up along the front of the bakery counter. Her relief quickly left when she saw that every single one was pastel with Easter bunnies and multicolored eggs on top. The note she’d gotten from the school had specified nondenominational cupcakes, but Pauline wasn’t sure what that meant, other than Felix’s extremely expensive private school was brimming with politically correct bullshit. They wouldn’t even call it an Easter Party—it was a Spring Party that just happened to fall a few days before Easter Sunday. What religion didn’t celebrate Easter? She knew the Jews didn’t get Christmas, but for the love of God, Easter was all about them. Even the pagans got the bunny.
“All right,” Pauline said, handing Felix her purse. He slung it over his shoulder the same way she did, and Pauline felt a pang of angst. She worked in interior design. Just about every man in her life was a flaming mo. She’d have to make an effort to meet some straight men soon for both their sakes.
There were six cupcakes in each box, so Pauline scooped up five boxes, thinking the teachers would want some. She couldn’t stand most of the faculty at the school, but they loved Felix, and Pauline loved her son, so what was an extra four seventy-five to feed the fat cows who took care of her baby?
She carried the boxes to the front of the store, the smell making her feel hungry and nauseated at the same time, like she could eat every one of them until it made her sick enough to spend the next hour in the toilet. It was too early to smell anything with frosting, that was for sure. She turned around and checked on Felix, who was dragging his feet behind her. He was exhausted, and it was her fault. She contemplated getting him the bag of Gummi Bears he’d wanted, but her cell phone started ringing as soon as she put the cupcakes on the checkout belt and all was forgotten when she recognized the number.
“Yeah?” she asked, watching the boxes slowly make their way down the belt toward the slope-shouldered cashier. The woman was so large that her hands barely met in the middle, like a T. Rex or a baby seal.
“Paulie.” Morgan, her boss, sounded frantic. “Can you believe this meeting?”
He was acting like he was on her side, but she knew he’d stab her in the back the minute she let her guard down. She’d enjoy watching him pack up his office after she produced the email at the meeting. “I know,” she commiserated. “It’s horrible.”
“Are you at the grocery store?”
He must have heard the beeps from the scanner. The T. Rex was ringing up each box individually, even though they were all the same. If Pauline hadn’t been on the phone, she would have jumped over the counter and scanned them herself. She moved to the end of the checkout and grabbed a couple of plastic bags to expedite the operation. Cradling her phone between her ear and shoulder, she asked, “What do you think’s gonna happen?”
“Well, it’s clearly not your fault,” he said, but she would’ve bet her right one that the bastard had told his boss that very thing.
“It’s not yours, either,” she countered, though Morgan had recommended the upholsterer in the first place, probably because the guy looked thirteen and waxed his gym-toned legs to shiny perfection. She knew the little tart was working the gay connection with Morgan, but he was dead wrong if he thought Pauline was going to be the odd girl out. It had taken her sixteen years to work her way up from secretary to assistant to designer. She’d spent endless nights at the Atlanta School of Art and Design getting her degree, dragging into work every morning so she could pay the rent, finally getting to a position where she could breathe a little, could afford to bring a kid into the world the right way—and then some. Felix had all the right clothes, all the good toys, and he went to one of the most expensive schools in the city. Pauline hadn’t stopped with her boy, either. She’d gotten her teeth fixed and laser-corrected her eyes. Every week she got a massage, every other week she got a facial, and there wasn’t a damn root in her hair that showed anything but sassy brown thanks to the girl she saw in Peachtree Hills every month and a half. There was no way in hell she was giving up any of that. Not by a long shot.
It would serve Morgan well to remember where Pauline had started. She’d worked the secretarial pool back before wire transfers and online banking, when they kept all the checks in a wall safe until they could be deposited at the end of the day. After the last office remodel, Pauline had taken a smaller office just so the safe would end up in her space. Just in case, she’d even had a locksmith come in after hours to reset the combination, and she was the only one who knew it. It drove Morgan crazy that he didn’t know the combination, and it was a damn good thing he didn’t, because the copy of the email covering her ass was locked behind that steel door. For days, she had conjured countless scenarios of herself opening the safe with a flourish, shoving the email in Morgan’s face, shaming him in front of their boss and the client.
“What a mess,” Morgan sighed, going for the dramatic. “I just can’t believe—”
Pauline took her purse from Felix and dug around for her wallet. He stared longingly at the candy bars as she slid her debit card through the reader and went through the motions. “Uh-huh,” she said as Morgan yapped in her ear about what a bastard the client was, how he wouldn’t stand by while Pauline’s good name was dragged through the mud. If anyone had been around to appreciate it, she would’ve feigned gagging herself.
“Come on, baby,” she said, gently pushing Felix toward the door. She cradled the phone to her ear as she took the bags by the handles, then wondered why she had bothered to bag the boxes in the first place. Plastic boxes, plastic bags; the women at Felix’s school would be horrified on behalf of the environment. Pauline stacked the cupcakes back together, pressing against the top box with her chin. She dropped the empty bags in the trash, and used her free hand to dig into her purse for her car keys as she walked through the sliding doors.
“This is absolutely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my career,” Morgan groaned. Despite the crick in her neck, Pauline had forgotten she was still on the phone.
She pressed the button on the remote to open the trunk of the SUV. It slid up with a sigh, and she thought about how much she loved the sound of that tailgate lifting, what a luxury it was to make enough money so that you didn’t even have to open your own trunk. She wasn’t going to lose it all because of some pretty-boy butt waxer who couldn’t be bothered to measure a fucking elevator.
“It’s true,” she said into the phone, though she hadn’t really paid attention to what Morgan was stating as the God’s honest. She put the boxes in the back, then pressed the button on the bottom of the trunk to make it close. She was in her car before she realized that Felix wasn’t with her.
“Fuck,” she whispered, closing the phone. She was out of the car in a flash, scanning the parking lot, which had filled up considerably since she’d been inside the store.
“Felix?” She circled the car, thinking he must be hiding on the other side. He wasn’t there.
“Felix?” she called, running back toward the store. She nearly slammed into the sliding doors because they didn’t open quickly enough. She asked the cashier, “Did you see my son?” The woman looked confused, and Pauline tersely repeated, “My son. He was just with me. He’s got dark hair, he’s about this tall, he’s six years old?” She gave up, mumbling, “For fucksakes.” She ran back to the bakery, then up and down the aisles.
“Felix?” she called, her heart beating so loud she couldn’t hear herself speak. She went up and down every aisle, jogging, then running like a madwoman through the store. She ended up at the bakery, about to lose her shit. What had she dressed him in today? His red sneakers. He always wanted to wear his red sneakers because they had Elmo on the soles. Was he in the white shirt or the blue one? What about his pants? Had she pressed his cargo pants this morning or put him in jeans? Why couldn’t she remember this?
“I saw a child outside,” someone said, and Pauline bolted for the doors again.
She saw Felix walking around the back of the SUV toward the passenger side. He was wearing his white shirt, his cargo pants and his red Elmo sneakers. His hair was still wet in the back where she had smoothed down the cowlick this morning.
Pauline slowed her pace to a fast walk, patting her hand to her chest as if she could calm her heart. She wasn’t going to yell at him, because he wouldn’t understand and it would only make him scared. She was going to grab him up and kiss every single inch of his body until he started to squirm and then she was going to tell him that if he ever left her side again she was going to throttle his precious little neck.
She wiped away tears as she rounded the rear of the car. Felix was in the Lexus, the door open, his legs dangling down. He wasn’t alone.
“Oh, thank you,” she gushed to the stranger. She reached out to Felix, saying, “He got lost in the store and—”
Pauline felt an explosion in her head. She collapsed to the pavement like a rag doll. The last thing she saw when she looked up was Elmo laughing down at her from the bottom of Felix’s shoe.