Catherine had to ring Richard half a dozen times before he agreed to meet. After the third or fourth ignored call she thought about phoning from a withheld number, but couldn’t bring herself to stoop to such teenage tactics.
She shouldn’t have to, she fumed as she made her way to the bar to meet him. How dare he make her feel like this, like she was bothering him, when he was the reason she was having problems with the business in the first place.
It wasn’t just the anger she felt as she listened to his phone ring. Every time she thought about it she got annoyed. He was taking up way too much space in her brain lately. It was space she couldn’t spare. And space he didn’t deserve.
They were supposed to be best friends. Or so he said. Yet she wouldn’t treat a casual acquaintance like this, let alone a friend. So just how good a friend did that make him, really?
He was sitting at a small corner table in the crowded bar. Lately he’d started wearing V-neck jumpers with collared work shirts. It made him look a bit granddaddy. She wondered what Magda thought of that.
‘Whose turn is it to buy, mine or yours?’ he said when she sat.
‘Mine.’ She wasn’t about to give up one iota of control tonight. He was too good at exploiting an advantage.
‘I feel like an ale, please,’ he said.
She went to the bar and ordered a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
If he felt weird about not inviting Magda out with them, he wasn’t letting on. But Catherine knew him. To be that relaxed he must have her permission to be there. Richard was no rebel with a cause.
At least she’d get to talk to him alone. Even before he started ignoring her, they hadn’t had a private conversation in weeks. Every time he’d rung the office, Magda hovered like she was waiting to hear her test results. She didn’t even have the courtesy to pretend she wasn’t earwigging.
He raised his eyebrows when she set the wine on the table, but didn’t remark.
‘I felt like wine,’ she said. Something nice and dry and nothing like an ale. ‘Would you like a glass?’
‘Of course.’
They sipped their wine in stubborn silence, a tactic honed from hammering out divorce details.
‘Nice day at work, dear?’ Richard finally said.
‘Not really, no. We need to talk about Magda.’
He sighed. ‘Can’t you two sort things out between you?’
‘Why?’ she asked sharply. ‘What has she said about me?’
Richard levelled a look at her. ‘Probably the same things you’re dying to say about her.’
Touché.
‘She’s running roughshod over the business, Richard. I know you don’t care about that now that you’ve cashed in, but you need to control your fiancée.’
‘What? Catherine, I am shocked. I never pegged you as a chauvinist. Control my fiancée? Is this the nineteen-fifties?’
Catherine reddened at the accusation. ‘What I mean is that she’ll listen to her elders.’
He smirked.
‘Can’t you just tell her to slow down a little? She needs to learn some tact.’
When he sat back in his chair she realised they’d both been leaning forward. She sat back too.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She needs to have the freedom to exercise her right to have a say in the business. You, however, need to learn to let go, my dear. Catherine, nothing has changed, really. You owned half the business when I was the other shareholder. You still own half the business. Your problem is that you think you own the whole thing. My fault, probably, because I let you run it.’
‘You let me run it?!’ she nearly spat. ‘Really? Because the way I remember the last year is that you were nowhere to be found. You left me to run the business, Richard. You didn’t let me run it.’
Instead of acknowledging the truth, he said, ‘Magda’s just spreading her wings. I thought you’d support a fellow businesswoman.’
‘It’s not about support, Richard. It’s about doing what’s right for the business.’
‘Well I’m not part of the business any more, so let’s talk about something else.’
If she kept harping on he’d just ignore her again. He’d always been like that. Much as she wanted to believe she’d had more influence over him once upon a time, she probably never had. Richard was always a law unto himself.
Besides, this wasn’t about Magda’s spread wings at all.
Richard had a bad case of whiplash and Catherine was getting the pain in the neck.
Did that mean that Magda had more hold over him than Catherine had had when they were married? The thought bobbed uncomfortably on top of her Sauvignon Blanc. Looking back, a lot about their marriage made her uncomfortable. Top of the list was her part in ending it.
When she’d first moved with him to the US she hadn’t minded not working. With the wedding to plan she hadn’t had time anyway. It was only after the confetti had settled that she’d got restless. With him working stupidly long hours she’d had a lot of time to fill on her own and there were only so many ways she could rearrange the medicine cabinet. One morning as she’d stared out the sliding door off the kitchen until her tea was cold, she realised she could sit there staring all day.
When Richard got home she pounced on him. ‘I’m going insane. I’ve got to work.’
‘Kate, sweetheart, it’s not up to me. It’s US Immigration that say you can’t. Have you been in touch with those clubs my secretary emailed about?’
‘I don’t want to just sit around drinking tea with a bunch of other expats. My brain is turning to mush. Do you know what I did yesterday?’
Her glare warned him to wipe the smirk off his face. ‘I arranged all the tins in the cupboards. Only I got stuck. Do you organise them by size or colour or type of food? I went round and round and round. Richard, I fell apart sitting on the kitchen floor because I couldn’t organise the tins.’
She leaned into his chest when he put his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know I’ve been working crazy hours and you’re here on your own. Believe me, I feel guilty about that, but you know you can’t work. We can’t take the chance you’ll get caught, even if you could find something without a work permit. Is there anything I can do?’
‘Yes, there is.’ She pulled away from him. ‘Help me find somewhere to volunteer.’
But that wasn’t as easy as it sounded. She figured she’d need qualifications and experience to find proper work, but to volunteer? Her meagre offering of bar jobs and an eighteen-month marketing stint after graduation didn’t get her past the first interview.
She had to give up on the sexy charities – the Greenpeaces and United Ways – and start looking for the ones nobody else wanted to work for.
Finally she found a food bank on the bad side of town that was desperate enough to let her work for free. It wasn’t where she’d imagined ending up but at least it saved her from any more breakdowns on the kitchen floor.
She felt like the new girl on her first day of school when she got to the huge warehouse. What if they didn’t like her or she screwed up or they said it had all been a mix-up with HR and there was no job for her?
She walked all the way around the building, but couldn’t find an obvious office entrance. Nil points for that, she thought.
She crept through one of the giant loading-bay doors instead.
‘Excuse me, can I help you?’ A stocky young man was piling up boxes. His white button-down shirt hung out of faded jeans and she could see curls of jet-black hair under his vivid yellow hard hat.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, realising as she looked around that she was the only one in the cavernous warehouse without headgear. ‘I’m here to volunteer. I was told to come for nine but I didn’t see where the entrance was. I’m sorry.’
‘You can be fired for coming in that door, you know.’
‘No, really?’
His caramel skin made his teeth look snow-white when he smiled. ‘Nah, I’m just messin’ with you. Come on, I’ll show you around. I’m Jose.’
They walked through the warehouse together while he explained the set-up. Tons of food got delivered each month and everything had to be checked for expiration dates, sorted and shelved. That was where she’d play her part with the other volunteers. Then the soup kitchens, food pantries and feeding programmes collected what they needed.
When he showed her the neatly lettered signs above each shelf in the sorting area, she had to laugh.
‘Something funny?’ Jose said in his sing-song Latino accent that made the word come out as foney.
‘No, no, not really funny.’ She thought of her cabinets. ‘It’s just that I’ve had some unofficial experience with this lately.’
From now on she’d be alphabetising tins on a massive scale.
‘Well, I’ve got to get back upstairs,’ he said. ‘So I’ll leave you with Susie here. She’s the volunteer coordinator, but really she runs the place.’
Susie, a sixty-something woman in a shiny lime-green tracksuit, joined them when she heard her name. Susie giggled and blushed to her permed grey roots.
‘Oh,’ said Catherine. ‘Are you not with the volunteers?’
Jose laughed. ‘Sometimes I wish I was, but no, I’m the director. See you later.’
So he was their boss.
Her back ached by the time she left for home, but she was grateful for the camaraderie with the other volunteers after her solitary confinement. And Jose didn’t act like a boss at all. He spent so much time in the warehouse packing boxes that he kept getting told off by the board of directors. But the volunteers loved him and not just because he had more than a touch of Antonio Banderas about him. He was passionate and enthusiastic about more than the charity and they laughed like loons together.
Richard loved that she was working. ‘You’ve got your mojo back,’ he liked to tell her. He was just happy that she was getting out of the house so he didn’t have to feel guilty about his manic work schedule. Or the fact that she seemed to be sliding down his priority list at a rate of knots.
It wasn’t long before she started looking forward to work for more than the chance to get out of the house.
Who wouldn’t want to spend all day with a hot man who talked about modern art and obscure films and Mexican food she’d never heard of? It was a whole new world and it excited her.
If Richard hadn’t been so obsessed with work, who knows what would have happened? Maybe she wouldn’t have had to listen each night to the same conversation about people she didn’t know and processes she didn’t understand. Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed the contrast between her days at the food bank and her nights with her husband. And maybe she wouldn’t have started to prefer one over the other.
She ate lunch every day with Jose and the volunteers in the communal break area. Then one morning, a few months after she’d started, he beckoned her away from the sorting area to the little kitchen.
‘Guess what I’ve got,’ he said, pointing to a carrier bag in the fridge. ‘My mother’s burritos. You have to taste them. Come up to the office at lunch. I’ve got my own microwave. The others will kill me if they have to smell Mama’s hot burritos down here.’
She spent the morning counting the minutes instead of her crates of tins.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked later, spooning sour cream and guacamole into the warm burrito. Then he sprinkled shredded lettuce and tomato over it and expertly rolled it up.
Her mouth watered. She was more than ready.
She took a bite. ‘Mmm. Oh my God. You got to eat these any time you wanted growing up?’
‘Any time we wanted. Mom only cooked Mexican food. It killed her when we’d sneak out for McDonald’s.’
‘I guess we all want what we can’t have.’
His deep brown eyes held hers. ‘Es una verdad. That’s true.’
From that day on they ate their lunch in Jose’s office. If the volunteers thought anything of it they didn’t say so.
Technically they were doing nothing wrong.