Best Friend for Hire Read online

  When Derek’s phone began to ring, not only did I hear the ringtone on my phone, but also the actual ring sounded in the bar. A quick scan of the bar offered no further clues or recognition to what had just happened. Everyone was just where he or she was supposed to be. Even the cozy couple did not budge. The bartender, whom I can assume was now taking a pity on me, served me another mimosa.

  When you are sitting alone at a bar, you are conspicuous. There is an urgency to explain why exactly you are alone. When two people meet at a bar, the entire scenario changes. You have someone in the world, regardless of any kind of terrible things have happened. The joining at the bar makes things better and seems to absolve everyone of whatever happened before or will happen after. It is quite Zen really. If someone were to meet me, I would get just a bit closer to normalcy, feel less alone, less fired, less humiliated. The phone rang again and this time more loudly. That is Derek’s ring; I know this because he has a distinct ringtone. It’s the theme song from the television show Cheers. The ring was coming from inside the bar, close by. It was the phone that was sitting on the table of a couple huddled together cozily in the corner banquette. The couple still engaged in their oversized coffees, so deep in cuddlesomeness that the phone went unanswered. I slunk down from my bar stool to investigate this awaiting injustice and then it happened. My eyes met the male star of this happy couple rendezvous. And it was Derek. Derek was the man snuggled up with a woman who had her back to me. A woman so engaging that he would avoid my SOS calls, twice. Add jealousy, rage, and embarrassment to my long list of now swirling emotions.

  Like most terrible events, things started to move in slow motion. I looked at Derek, he looked at me, and we both looked at the phone, confused about what exactly to do next. He finally answered the phone. We stood for a moment and spoke into our receivers, confused by the fact that both of us were indeed in the same bar, just a few feet away from each other. And then, after what seemed like several awkward minutes, his companion turned to face me. It was Allison, as in Allison my next-door neighbor and friend. We all just stared at one another for a beat and then another beat, our glares ricocheting off one another like billiard balls. I was certain everyone in the bar would turn around and notice this showdown, but the day workers continued to frantically type away. Moving toward the table, I had the sense that tumbleweeds were moving toward us like a scene in one of those old western movies when the two gunfighters draw their revolvers on a dusty street.

  Disheveled, phone in hand, I took the first step and moved toward their table. There is something about catching someone red-handed when they have committed a crime, an “A-HA! I’ve got you moment,” which should make the discoverer feel justified. But this discovery did not do that for me. Before I could crystallize the humiliation, the outrage, and the shock of this turn of events, Allison stood up and started coming toward me, clearly with the intention to hug me. What was going on today that everyone delivering bad news felt the need to hug me?

  “Jessie! What a surprise, it’s great to see you…or is it great to see you?”

  Derek, equally confused by my two phone calls (more than I had placed to him in the last six months) and my presence, coupled with my unexpected appearance, also began to show concern.

  Not only were the two collaborators not surprised to see me, they seemed to be happy to see me. As if to say, we have done nothing wrong. Everyone knows we’ve been seeing each other, everyone but you. I was beginning to sense a theme to this day. Everyone seemed to know something that I had obviously missed. Still not convinced that these two were, in fact, together, I asked the obvious.

  “What are you two doing?”

  “Having coffee.”

  “Together? You’re having coffee together?”

  It was clear that this was not the first time these two had had coffee together. Allison, sensing my unsteady footing, reached over and placed her hand on top of Derek’s, her Tibetan beaded bracelet making a little clinking noise against the mosaic tiled table.

  “Babe, let’s give Jessie a little time to regroup in this space,” Allison suggested to my—I mean, her—boyfriend.

  Regroup in this new space? Who talks like that? I had regrouped just enough for now, thank you very much. I had been “regrouped” all morning in fact. Again, the unease of newness set in, along with queasiness. Derek nodded to his partner and moved a chair closer to me as if I would fall face first onto their lovely table if I were not guided into the actual chair. He shot a conspiratorial look to his Allison, which indicated that this was not a chance meeting, but that this super couple had been familiar for some time. Derek was somehow expecting this conversation and was at ease. As if it was predetermined when I stood him up (again) five months ago. Derek had been waiting for me to show up for a post-work drink when he received a familiar text, “Rain check, work drama.” That text had excused me from any prior commitment. This was part of a long string of stand ups and last-minute cancelations that had comprised our dating relationship. As I had been texting that fateful night, Derek was beginning a new relationship in real time right on my doorstep.

  “We just started talking,” Derek began.

  “And haven’t stopped,” Allison finished.

  Allison, who had just moved in a year ago, had not been aware that Derek and I ever had a romantic relationship. She further explained that a guy like Derek was very hard to come by, and that once he had said that he was free, she did not hesitate to “scoop him up.” Who could blame her? I recall her saying something about the heart does what it will, but the second mimosa was beginning to have its effect, otherwise I would have corrected her and said “the heart does what it wants, not “will.” That doesn’t even make sense, but her voice seemed to trail off as I stared hypnotically at the small rose tattoo peeking out of her gauze tunic top.

  To add insult to awkwardness, my so-called boyfriend and my so-called friend immediately wanted to know exactly what had happened to me, and from the beginning.

  “Let’s discuss this as a family,” Allison coaxed. The usually complimentary Derek was inspecting me closely, as if he could not quite figure out what had happened, my odd appearance coming into better focus as I got closer.

  “You don’t look so good,” he said. The understatement of the century, I thought to myself.

  The bartender had taken notice, more interested now in my demise than his doppelgänger. I felt even more conspicuous in his presence. He delivered a third mimosa to our table. A good bartender, like a good publicist, is usually one step ahead of bad news. Placing a loose curl behind my ear, I instantly tried to reinvent myself as a carefree girl just taking some time to join her friends for a casual morning cocktail. To make sure he knew that I was not a complete basket case, I muttered, “You can put that on my tab.”

  “We can settle up, later,” he said and gave me a sly little salute.

  Feeling like it was time for me to go for the second time that morning, I grabbed my bulging tote bag. Just then, out of the bag rolled my long sought umbrella, which proceeded to pop open to its full size right in my face. When I opened my mouth in surprise, all that came out was a high-pitched squeal. Oh, yes, this was shaping up to be a real bestseller of a day.

  I left the warm cocoon of the bar and began the sobering walk back to my nearby apartment. Shifting my glance downward toward the slick sidewalk, I proceeded slowly, methodically, still afraid to arouse interest from passersby. My stealth return was nearly complete until my inquisitive dry cleaner and neighbor spotted me.

  “No work today?” she probed.

  “No, no work today,” I said out loud, and then to myself, no work tomorrow either or the next day or the day after that.

  “Okay, I like your pants, enjoy your vacation. Bye-bye.”

  I was relieved to be inside my first-floor apartment without any more spectators to respond to. The apartment was dark, blinds closed, and there was litt
le evidence that anyone lived here. A half-read manuscript was strewn on the couch where I had left it last night. The neglected galley kitchen was tidy, too, no evidence of meal making, wine drinking, or use at all. Not even a coffee cup from this morning to suggest the warmth of a home.

  It was as if someone else, not me, were making this house tour. Pausing in the first room of the railroad apartment, my things looked oddly unfamiliar. The apartment had a straightforward layout, one room leading to another and another in succession. A true Hoboken railroad apartment that had never quite felt like home, its very layout almost designed as a metaphor for my life. During the weekend my parents helped me move in here, my very first apartment where I would live alone, they had also noted its long, tunnel-like design.

  “You’re not renting an apartment, you’re renting a hallway,” my father commented with a combination of dissatisfaction and utter amazement. And he was right; looking around this apartment, it did not seem welcoming, or even familiar, for that matter. It was like a picture that has hung in your bathroom for years and suddenly you look at it, really look at it. And you say something like, how did that get there? Here I was in the hallway starting to itch uncomfortably from my dysfunctional outfit.

  I started shedding the painful reminders of the day, depositing the entire suit into the garbage can, and the shoes, now beyond repair, quickly joined it. The troublesome tote bag was in the middle of the living room floor, now demanding even more attention than it had already seen today. I scowled at it and turned away from its hideous presence, determined to take the world’s hottest shower. Once inside the shower, I turned the water faucet to “Hot” and kept on turning, making it hotter and hotter, until finally the water in its post-war plumbing started to run cold. Another signal that time was up. I slipped into a fuzzy warm-up suit, even though I had no attention of working out. Looking like a retiree returning to Boca after a long summer in the Northeast, I was preparing myself with athletic wear. The most active I planned to be was to sit on my couch and watch daytime television, a luxury in which my workaholic life had seldom given me the opportunity to indulge.

  In some sort of technicolor nightmare, a super close-up of Dr. Ursula was on the screen. Once again, she had inserted herself into my world, without my even recognizing her entrance. It was a repeat of the Dr. Phil show we taped last fall. And no sooner did I lock in on her chartreuse Chanel brocade jacket, which very few women can pull off, the phone rang. My mother, another well-intended inquisitor, was calling.

  How did she do it? I had been home for five minutes, and she called me. Sooner or later I was going to have to talk with her, sooner or later I was going to have to start telling people my sad news. But I somehow thought that sooner would have been a little more than the five hours I’d had to acclimate to my out-of-work status.

  “Jessica, what are you doing home?”

  “I left work early.”

  “What’s the matter?” she probed, her psychic powers at full alert.

  The thing about my mom is that she knows things before they happen. More than maternal instinct with her, this is all about her Sicilian upbringing and all its crazy superstitions. As a child, I had thought that everyone believed these myths. One day, I said to my friend Jan, hey, you’ve got a string on your pants, that means you’re going to get a letter, and she looked at me like I had three legs. She was not the first, nor the last. In my family, every time your ears would ring, you asked people for a number. This number corresponded with a letter in the alphabet, and that letter began the first name of the person who was talking about you. Sounds simple, really.

  Most of these superstitions foretell bad news or things to look out for. Sicilians are a suspicious group, always thinking that someone is out to get to them. Today, they may have a point. So with all this stored psychic knowledge, Ma calling me at home in the middle of the workday should have come as no surprise. But with all the unexpected happenings of the earlier part of the day, it was safe to say that my Sicilian sense was off, at least slightly.

  “I knew there was something wrong and just as I was about to call you, I saw Dr. Ursula on the television and I thought, this must be it.”

  Here’s the other thing about my mom—she lives for television. Conversations with her include full updates on the Real Housewives of Wherever, the Big Brothers, the Food Network stars, and all those other instantly famous people who develop a huge overnight following. All of her useful information comes from television, mainly The View and The Young and the Restless. Most of them she does not even enjoy, but she has to keep up with them, if only to point out their mistakes and make sure that her kids don’t ever follow in their footsteps. And the worst part of all this media fascination is that she is a big fan of

  Dr. Ursula.

  With quick brushstrokes, I relayed the whirlwind events of the morning. In truth, I had no intention of telling my mother or my family about any of this, but without time to prepare a suitable cover story I began to spill like one of the reality stars she watched so intently. Like a good audience member, she listened to my intriguing tale. This was the second time I had recounted the story, and the fact was that I really had no idea how I wanted to feel. This was one journey for which there was no road map. I had never been fired from anything, ever, before.

  With this lack of experience, instead of being angry, I was more embarrassed.

  A persistent thought at the back of my brain was there was something I could have done differently—but what? That pesky feeling that you cannot lay your finger on something, a nagging feeling that keeps bringing you back repeatedly to the same series of events, wondering if you had tweaked the story just slightly, how you could have changed the outcome. All I could think of was a sort-of Glamour magazine “before” shot of me. The “after” shot was a blank, black box. But my mother did not see it that way.

  “Have you heard from Dr. Ursula?”

  I was stunned by this question and the fact that the entire conversation was quickly slipping out of my control.

  “Um, no, um,” I ad libbed, “why would I?”

  “It’s just good manners, dear, after all the work you did for her. I thought she would call; she is such a compassionate person.”

  The compassionate person line really hit home. My mother had tons of compassion, but it was usually misplaced, and misplaced in heaps. Celeste De Salvo, the youngest of three sisters, certainly had a keen eye for observation, a habit she was now liberally sprinkling all over my work events. At times, her advice and commentary were direct, even cutting, but compassion was always her underlying theme.

  “If I can’t tell you the truth, then who can?” was her modus operandi.

  Her abounding compassion was best observed in the big media stories, like Tonya Harding, poor thing, and Teresa Giudice, oh the orange suit. I would then have to remind her that Tonya “poor thing” Harding had arranged to have her teammate clubbed in the knee, and that the Teresa Guidice was sent to jail because she did not pay her taxes. She fell for the media spin and used her Catholic forgiveness to let these situations allow her to take the high road. In make-believe land, she, like Oprah, was living her best life adopting an all-knowing, saint-like quality. In real life, though, the opposite was usually true; when it came to one of her children, she was usually short on compassion and understanding. We needed a firmer hand, apparently, than an ice skater or a superiorly coiffed tax-evader.

  “I just cannot believe she did not call.”

  “It’s just bad etiquette,” she continued to hammer home the point.

  Frankly, I didn’t know how much the good doctor knew about what had happened. Did she have something to do with my firing was another thought I couldn’t keep out of my head. Again, I tried to trace the Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that had led up to my dismissal, but still I came up with no coherent answer.

  “Ma, does it really matter?”

 
“It always matters; doing the right thing is important.”

  This right and wrong theme figured greatly throughout my upbringing. As the daughter of two Sicilian parents, it was not easy. Sicilians are known for their arrogance in much the same way as the country is known for its scenic vistas. Sicilians set themselves apart from other Italians; being on an island that so many other cultures tried to conquer only contributed to their bellicose nature. All those civilizations could not be wrong.

  “Besides, Ma, she is still on the boat.”

  “What does that mean, still on the boat? Like your father, not off the boat?”

  “No, literally. She is on a boat.”

  My mother’s reference was to the slang phrase for Italians who were so old- fashioned that they never got off the boat that had originally delivered them to America from their unsophisticated Italian villages. But in this case, the good doctor was actually on a boat, a big one, the Norwegian Line’s “New Year/New You” cruise that would not be docking in New York Harbor until tomorrow. Even though my mom was more media savvy than most 70-year-old women, there were some things in the modern world that needed a more detailed explanation, and this was one of them.

  “Cruise travel is lovely. I can see why the doctor would want to do that. I went on a cruise, you know, before I had you kids.”

  “Ma, I know…you told me…um, can we get back to the other conversation we were having?”

  “Well, Jessica, it’s really time to move on, let’s stop dwelling, things end when they are supposed to, dear. Not longer, not shorter, all according to God’s plan.”