Greg sits forward in the chair, following my drift. “So if you do find a wife, but she’s absolutely completely awful…”
“Then Dad would be begging me to divorce her. He’d be completely apologetic for forcing me into marrying so quickly in the first place too. And I can tell him I’ll only divorce her if he
makes me CEO without any of his crazy conditions.”
“That could work,” Greg agrees. “But where the hell are you going to find a woman like that? Just start scouring local bars for a pick-up?”
He keeps talking, but I don’t hear the rest. My eyes have landed on a cast-aside stack of papers, and my brain is already ticking into overtime. I reach out and snatch up the pile of intern assignments once more. “It has to be someone desperate,” I hear myself saying. “Not an ounce of class in her. Someone who doesn’t fit in our world, someone who’ll take to rich like a fish out of water. The most untrustworthy gold-digger type you can find.”
Greg slides the stack of intern files out of my hands then. “In that case,” he says, flipping through it with the practiced eye of a man who’s already read through this file at least a dozen times today. “I have the perfect candidate in mind…”
With that, he withdraws a single slip of paper with my one last chance at freedom written on it.
“Deeandra Smith,” I read aloud.
2
Dee
“Holy shit, Melissa, you are not going to believe where I’m headed right now,” I shout into my car phone speaker.
“Walmart,” my best friend guesses.
Bless her heart. “I said you wouldn’t believe it, not that it’s the most believable place I could be at noon on a Tuesday.” I roll my eyes.
“Just trying to be realistic, Dee.” In the background, I hear the fuzz of the TV, and the distant shouts of children. Melissa watches her neighbor’s brood of four kids on weekdays to earn extra cash because her husband Arnold can barely afford their rent, even working double overtime shifts down at the plant.
“I told you, I don’t need the greeter job anymore. I’m moving up in the world.”
“Yeah, moving up to where, exactly?” Then Melissa shouts something else, which sounds like a string of curse words followed by a yell at one of the kids.
I wince in sympathy and wait for the havoc to die down on her end. “I got an internship!”
“Oh awesome! Congratulations!” Melissa returns to the phone breathing harder than before, but I’ve learned by now not to ask for more details. It’ll likely involve an excess of diapers, puke stains, or worse. “I hope it’s not one of those unpaid ones where they work you to the bone for zero salary…” Her voice goes hesitant again.
Melissa knows how hard I worked to get my degree in a correspondence course, so that I could start applying for real jobs. Tear myself away from the minimum wage retail industry that ate the rest of my family—what little remained, anyway—alive. “It’s paid,” I reassure her, my tone cheerful. “And better than I was making, too.”
“Well praise for that. Then again, just about anything would be better paid than a package store greeter.” Melissa grunts, and I hear a toddler squeal somewhere near the receiver. “I keep telling you, you should get into the nannying gig, it’s decent money.”
“I think it takes a real saint like you to put up with other people’s kids for so long.” I laugh.
“What, don’t you want a whole passel of your own?” I hear more grunts, and then the toddler near the phone begins to yell something about a bottle.
“Sure, eventually,” I shout back, over the sound of wails. “But with the right person, you know? Not just like… Stealing my neighbor’s kids.”
Melissa bursts into laughter. “Hey, don’t knock it till you try it. And you, Ryan, knock it off.” She vanishes for a few moments, then returns once more, torn between laughter and an exhausted-sounding resignation. “So, where is this mystery gig, huh?”
“That’s the best part…” I grin to myself and pause for dramatic effect. “Quint Motors.”
“What?! No way!” Now Melissa sounds like the screechy one. “That’s amazing—you’ve been geeking out over their cars for, what, the past decade? Ever since Will took you to prom in his old vintage… what was it called?”
“Andromeda.”
“That’s right. The one that looks like it fell straight out of the sixties version of a sci-fi movie.”
I roll my eyes, but also grin as I check my directions and make a right turn through a packed intersection. “It’s a classic. As are most of the models they’ve put out ever since. Not to mention word on the street is that their forthcoming model is going to blow the luxury car market wide open.”
“God, can you imagine?” For a moment, I hear Melissa pause on the other end. “Having enough money to waste on cars like that?”
“I can.” I sigh under my breath. I have been imagining it, for just about all my life. But for a girl like me, owning a car like the ones Quint Motors produces is a pipe dream. Still, working for them, and with those cars, could be the next best thing. Right?
“Oh right, I forget that you like that kind of stuff. If you were rich, you’d be insufferable, wouldn’t you? Buying some new fancy car every other week, speeding them so fast down roads you flip them into telephone poles…”
I gasp in faux offense. “When I own my private fleet of Quint Motors cars, I will never crash them into something so quaint as a telephone pole.”
“Only the most expensive car crashes for you?” Melissa laughs. “But seriously though, congrats again. That’s, like, the perfect job for you. Miss Wannabe Mechanic. Do you get to wear jeans and greasy shirts to work too? If they try to make you dress up like an office girl, I think you might explode,” she warns.
I snort. “I own dresses!” I protest.
“One dress.”
“Okay, one dress. It must have worked well in my preliminary interview because they gave me the internship, right?”
“Uh huh. And what are you wearing today? Same dress?”
Crap. I glance down at myself. The plain blue shift-dress seemed about right for my first day of interning. It’s office-y, boring. Everything I normally hate. But I scored this one on megasale for five bucks, and it’s served me well in situations like this. When I have to, on occasion, I clean up nice. “Do you think they’ll notice?” I ask.
“Who interviewed you, the same people you’ll be working with?”
“No, some assistant. Greg something?”
“Hmm. If it’s a guy, he might not notice.” A pause. “Unless he’s gay.”
“Hmm.” I think back to the interview. “Really couldn’t tell.”
“Then you might get caught. But hey, who cares, it’s just one day. Pretend you’re doing laundry if someone asks about the same outfit thing. Or, ooh, do you have a scarf or something in the car? Toss that on, change up the look a little.”
My head swims. Dammit. I didn’t even think about this stuff. I’m used to rolling into work in my only pair of non-completely-holy jeans and my assigned uniform polo top. Not having a whole closet full of appropriate clothing to choose from. “Thanks, Melissa.”
“What are friends for?” She laughs. “In this case, whipping your tomboy butt into shape. Okay, I gotta run—oh God, Simon, no!” The other end of the phone dissolves into screams and distant peels of triumphant toddler laughter.
I disconnect, just in time it seems, as I pull into the Quint Motors parking lot. Now my face really does flush, not from the idea of wearing the wrong dress, though. Because arriving to this parking lot in my junky, beat-up, twenty-year-old car—the one I’ve just barely been able to keep wheezing along through life with a lot of TLC and a really good friend down at my local mechanic who slips me spare parts for wholesale price when nobody’s looking—is way more embarrassing than being caught in a cheap work outfit.
I slide into a free spot between a 2018 Phoenix and a 2019 Aspen. I didn’t even know the new Aspen was out yet. Maybe that’s some big-wig’s car who got it on pre-sale. I eyeball it with interest as I open my car door, grab my purse, and square my shoulders. Right. Time to do this. Time to change my life from boring-minimum-wage-retail-worker to Girl With Real Job.
All I need to do is ace this internship and land a permanent spot with the company. How hard c
ould that be?
This is what I’ve worked for.
Growing up, Ma always told me that if you put your noses to the grindstone, you’d be rewarded in spades. Never stop working, she’d always say, and eventually you’ll make it. The tortoise and the hare was her favorite parable, you might say.
This is for you, Ma, I think, a little pang in my heart at that. I wish she could be here to see it all finally pay off—all these years of hard work. But unfortunately, cancer claimed her far too young. It left me solo, considering my father had died just a few years before her, and my older brother ran off the minute he died. I was a wreck when she first passed, but now, with a few years’ space, the pain has gotten manageable. That, and I have Melissa, and our little tight-knit circle of friends to serve as my new family.
But there’s still an ache. Still a little family-shaped hole in my chest where my old life used to be.
I push that thought to the back of my mind and wipe the frown off my face. Today is a happy day. Not a day to cry over the past—a day to look to the future, to the bright new life I’m going to build. One that would make Ma proud. One that will make her proud, from wherever she is looking down on me now.
My smile returns with a vengeance and I slam my car door and stride into the lobby of Quint Motors with my head held high, chin up. Whatever this new internship entails—which, from the job description on the application site sounded like a little bit of everything, with some hands-on experience with the cars, some office training, even the potential for a day on the test track with new models (I definitely geeked out over that last possibility)—I’m going to ace it.
“Hi,” I tell the receptionist. “I’m here for the intern program?”
The receptionist doesn’t answer at first. She’s too busy staring off at the far corner of the lobby. I follow her gaze, turning to see two men in deep conversation. One, the older one, looks vaguely familiar. The younger one looks angry, and a lot like the older man, and also… well. I can tell why the receptionist is distracted. Because damn, that man is built.