She was half an hour early for a ten o’clock meeting with a client in an old house on Thompson, converted into a coffee shop with a wavy wooden floor and surly staff. With a black coffee and a Danish before her, she was optimistic about the prospect of catching up on some work emails when she looked up and, to her horror, saw Beth Warden striding toward her table. Shit.
“Paula,” Beth said, her voice an octave higher than normal. “It’s been forever.”
She stood and forced a smile and accepted Beth’s embrace, kissed her on the cheek and sat back down. “Just getting caught up on some business,” she said.
Beth sat down as though she hadn’t heard and took a sip of her drink. “How is everything?”
This loathsome woman controls a significant portion of your finances, and now is not the time to throw scalding coffee in her treacherous face or to stab her hand with your pastry fork, she told herself. That day will come in the fullness of time.
“Everything’s great,” she said, confident that the pleasant expression on her face read as genuine. Paula was nothing if not a consummate saleswoman. She looked down at her tablet and her phone and gestured. “I’ve got quite a bit to get through before my client gets here.”
“The kids are running me ragged lately, between school and extracurriculars,” Beth said, as though Paula had asked. “Hey, was Danny ever in the Boy Scouts?”
The woman could not take a hint. “He was for a while, through St. Anthony. He gave it up in middle school.” Her phone rang, the vibrations making it dance on the table, and even though it was her boss, to whom she didn’t want to speak, she picked up. “Germaine, hi, you were on my call list this morning.” Until Beth had arrived, she hadn’t told a lie all day.
“Funny, seemed like you were avoiding me.”
“No, it’s just been a crazy week. I’m just about to meet with a client and going through some messages, you know how you get behind.” She gave Beth a sidelong glance.
“That’s why I’m calling, I can’t find the last of the paperwork on the Murray house. Did you get it filed?”
“Shit. This afternoon. Just as soon as I’m done with Dora Kenton. Before lunch.”
“Okay, kid. I’ve never known you to let these things slide.”
Once she hung up, she made a show of checking her emails rather than addressing Beth.
“You sure lead a busy life, Paula. I don’t know how you do it.” She reached across the table and put her hand on Paula’s. “By the way, I’m starting a memorial scholarship at Third Presbyterian in Britt’s name. I hope I can count on you for a thousand.”
A thousand! Good God, the balls on the woman. “You’ll have to ask Rigby, he makes all the decisions about those kinds of things.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, Paula, not very modern.”
“Division of labor. Do you want me to have him call you, or do you just want to wait until you run into him?” Paula said this with her most ingenuous smile, as though she didn’t know that Rigby and Beth met at least two or three times a week, mostly in the dark.
“Oh, I can call him, that’s fine,” she said.
Beth didn’t shut up or stand until the client arrived. Paula then spent forty-five minutes going through listings they might tour, and out of the thirty they discussed came up with a short list of only five. Afterward, driving down Thompson, she mulled over the possibility of confiding in Germaine. They’d been friends for years, and the burden of not having anyone to tell her real troubles to was wearing her down slowly. No doubt part of her sales slump was connected to it. But to admit to Germaine the kind of debt they were in, how close they were to losing the house, the fact that Rigby’s practice was down to a single client, that might actually make things worse. Instead of empathy for an old friend and protégée’s plight, she might feel contempt and anger for being put into a situation where one of her top agents was getting foreclosed on. And Germaine had never liked Rigby, always made it quite clear that she saw through the charm right down to the lying, cheating bastard underneath. For years Paula had tried subtly to change her opinion, but over time she’d come to realize that the old girl was dead-on about her husband’s character.
And now Rigby had some sort of cockamamie bullshit scheme, whose details he refused to share, that he claimed was going to pull the fat out of the fire and save the house. She didn’t want to hear what Germaine would certainly have to say about that.
Halfway to the office she drove past a bus bench with her own beaming face on it. Why couldn’t she live up to that stupid head shot? She pulled over to the curb and took her phone out of her purse.
Fuck it, I can tell Keith. Why not?
“Keith? Are you free this afternoon?”
“Got a lesson at one-thirty, I could meet you at three.”
The boyish enthusiasm in his voice thrilled her. The hell with Germaine, and the hell with Rigby. She was going to get laid and forget about all of it that afternoon.