TWO

Kezia

Paranoid about traffic as usual, she found herself at the airport gate at 7 a.m. with an hour to kill. She took little adventures away from the waiting area: bathroom run, magazine purchase, futile inquiries about a business-class upgrade she couldn’t afford. Victor was on a later flight but she wondered if she might run into Olivia Arellano or Sam Stein. She wasn’t close enough with either of them anymore to know. When she texted Olivia, a stranger replied with a “wrong # sorry.” Kezia wasn’t much tighter with the bride. She and Caroline hovered in distant-friend brackets, conscious of their past (they were freshman-year roommates) but strangers in the present. And whose fault was that? Kezia’s, probably. She had shed college like a snake.

Once in Miami, she followed her driver as he pushed an empty cart toward the parking garage, using a folded paper sign like an oven mitt. The sign was impressively misspelled. Moytrin instead of Morton. He pushed the hooded crosswalk button. It was hard to believe these buttons were affiliated with actual change.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to get that?” Her driver gestured at her bag.

The bag dug into her shoulder but she knew she would expend more energy removing it than holding on to it for another minute. She also clutched a garment bag with multiple dress options hooked to the plastic hanger inside.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Her company’s car service was so abused by her boss, every Rachel Simone employee fudged this little luxury. The same obliviousness that caused Rachel to look quizzically at completed tasks, as if she herself had not assigned them, caused her to gloss over charges from cities she hadn’t been to.

“What brings you to Miami?” The driver tossed her luggage into the trunk.

“Just fun.”

She hated being asked about her plans by strangers. The worst were hairstylists who yammered as they yanked at her curls, asking her about her “big plans” for the evening. Who had taught them to do this? Usually she was getting her hair done for a first date and the question embarrassed her. Sometimes she tried to teach them a lesson by replying with: “Funeral.”

“What’s Kezia?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your name, Key-zee-ah?”

“It’s Kezia, with a soft ‘e’ like a fez, not a key.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“Oh,” she sighed. “It’s from the Bible. After God takes everything away from Job, he gets his family back and one of the new daughters is called Kezia.”

The driver nodded solemnly. She knew what he was thinking. But she didn’t hail from religious stock. Her parents just liked the name. The closest she had come to hearing the Bible mentioned in their house was when another object was like a Bible. A phone book or a diner menu.

“You eat pork?” he asked, once they were ensconced in air-conditioning.

“Umm, yeah.”

She may have been the least Jewish-looking person streaming out of the terminal. As a human demographic, she looked like she had just come from a Celtic sprite convention. But there was something about her appearance—wan, maybe, a curly blond Wednesday Addams—people were always offering her gluten-free vegetarian options when she didn’t ask for them.

“I know a place that has the best Cuban sandwiches in Miami. The best. And reasonable prices, too. If you like good food, you can go.”

No, I hate good food.

Her driver presented a ticket to a woman at the garage gate. They shared a joke and she waved them through.

“You wanna write this down?”

“I would,” said Kezia, “but my phone’s broken.”

She pushed the pimple on her chin, the one with its own area code, causing a painful throbbing. She could see it in the reflection of the window. It changed her profile, that’s how big it was.

“You like live music?”

Also something I hate.

“I’m here for a wedding.”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “You have to stay longer than that.”

It amazed her how the people most likely to understand the concept of business travel—bellhops, drivers, waiters—seemed the most in the dark about the degree of control she had over her time in their city.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Her driver stiffened and Kezia feigned shock at the device’s miraculous recovery.

“Hi, Rachel.”

A voice came through the speaker hole. It was pert and flowing as if it had been going for hours and Kezia was only now tuning in.

“Where are you again? You’re in Orlando, yeah?”

“It’s my wedding weekend, remember?”

“Where are the Barney’s purchase orders? I come in here on the weekends and I can’t find anything.”

“You come in on the weekends?”

“You’re getting married?” The driver spoke into the rearview mirror. “I know the best—”

“No.” Kezia gestured at her phone, the international symbol for What is this attached to my ear?

“No, you don’t know where the spring ’14 POs are?”

Rachel’s English bulldog, Saul, barked in the background. Kezia hated the dog with that quiet seething shame-hate normally set aside for hysterical newborns.

“If they’re not in the folder, they’re in the metal drawers under Marcus’s desk.”

“Marcus the bookkeeper?”

“The very same.”

“You have a boyfriend?” asked the driver, brazenly.

“I’m sorry, what?” Kezia snapped.

“Oh, am I bothering you?” asked Rachel.

“I have a very chatty escort at the moment.”

“Tell him to fuck off. You have to ride these people like a horse if you want to get anywhere.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh my God, I think someone put the Barney’s ones in the Colette folder. How hard is the alphabet? And who files Bon Marché under M like it’s a person? Oh wait, I’m looking at this upside-down. This all makes sense now. Never mind.”

“You should go out in Miami,” the driver tried again, “find a boyfriend, right?”

A miniature Chinese lantern swung fitfully from the rearview mirror.

“Have you told him to fuck off yet?”

“Not in the five seconds since you asked me,” Kezia hissed.

“Sounds like you should,” said Rachel.

“Sounds like you should,” said the driver.

“Saul, no paint chips, no!” Rachel screamed and hung up the phone.

Kezia sighed and cracked open a half-pint bottle of water. She lowered the car window. The warm air collapsed on her lap.

“Miami-Dade,” the driver reported back to his dispatcher. “Code Four. Over.”

Code Four? A bitch who hates live music?

“Fifteen more minutes to your hotel.”

“Thank you,” she said, more sincerely than she had said anything else.

It was a little late to make it up to him, tonally. He was just trying to be friendly, to do his job, and she could feel herself being cold. But she couldn’t make it stop. Rachel was rubbing off on her. Too much time working for this ludicrous woman and her eponymous company had tightened the springs of Kezia’s impatience triggers. She found herself increasingly unable to downshift to the basic niceties of human contact for the same reason she didn’t want to let go of her heavy bag. She was just going to have to pick it up again.

This wedding marked the first time she had boarded a plane for personal reasons in years. As the people who worked for Rachel Simone Jewelry hit their respective Rachel thresholds and quit, Kezia found herself the most senior employee. She did it all. She was the one who went to the earring-back wholesalers in New Jersey, the gem shows in Tucson, the JCK trade show in Las Vegas where the air smelled of disinfectant and the steady light made it impossible to tell what time it was.

It wasn’t always this way. After college, she had taken a few classes at the Gemological Institute of America and scored a job working in the quality management department of a major fine jeweler. But at a company like that, where half one’s salary goes to an unspoken prestige tax, upward mobility was political and impossible. After three years, she left to be a bigger fish in Rachel’s independent pond. And in the muck of that pond she had stayed. It wasn’t only that Kezia missed the perks of her old company (they, too, participated in JCK, though they were part of the couture show at the Wynn, where their booth was filled with orchids), she missed working with jewelry that had actual gemstones in it.

Rachel was a resourceful designer. Allegedly inspired by the seventies and eighties, her cuffs were made from smashed milk glass and reclaimed cement pipes, her cocktail rings were lace-covered resin and petrified rat teeth. Questionably a midget, Rachel wore pants that brushed the floor and vests and the occasional skinny tie. It was a commitment to this general Annie Hall aesthetic that helped make her jewelry lines a success. Because, actually, a lot of people wanted to live in Annie Hall. They simply lacked the mental fortitude to maintain the fantasy when not within ten yards of the movie. Unfortunately, Rachel was also Rachel.

The day before Kezia left for Florida, Rachel came into the elevator after her. She had removed a dogwood branch from an urn in the lobby and began smacking Kezia on the head with it.

“See? This doesn’t hurt, right?”

Kezia blinked when the petals came near her eye. “No, it doesn’t.”

The week before that, they were waiting at the crosswalk outside a church on Seventh Avenue, where a homeless man lay slumped on the steps, holding a cardboard sign.

“I feel like Sharpie should sponsor the homeless.”

“Ha,” Kezia said.

“Really. If I ever need a Sharpie to jot something down, I’m just going to ask a homeless person. Or do you think it’s one long-lasting marker they use and they just take turns passing it around?”

The week before that Rachel had asked Kezia not to wear perfume to the office, beginning her request with the formality of “I know this sounds insane but . . .”

Kezia braced herself, considering the number of unheralded insane things that passed Rachel’s lips each day. I know this sounds insane but I’ve just killed a man in the stairwell and stuffed him with cotton candy and could use your assistance threading it through his ocular cavity.

The “no perfume” rule was upsetting because Kezia didn’t wear perfume. She sniffed her armpits—just soap and deodorant and a hint of body odor.

“Is there a scent you’d prefer?” Kezia asked, lamentably.

“Christ.” Rachel scrunched her nose. “Smell like nothing. Smell invisible.”