She forked lemon curd into her mouth and laughed around the tartness.
“Hell, girl. He had an attitude on him, if he didn’t want to be hit on again, he wouldn’t have called.”
“I told him not to.”
“Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. You are my hero.”
“No, it was just...not me. Not...” She shook her head. She had no idea how to talk about Mace and that weekend she replayed in her mind till it was so familiar and cosy it made her ache to acknowledge it wasn’t real.
“So it’s okay to throw this out?” Mel waved the bit of scrap paper.
She could take his number and never use it, keep it as a lucky charm. What was the harm in that? No harm at all but it was silly sentimental thing to do, another version of running from this enforced process of finding out who she was without a job. Like the haircut and the holiday, thinking about Mace was another stalling tactic when she had work to do.
She nodded and Mel grimaced, but rolled the paper and tucked it into the handle of her cup. Mel made her dash back to the office and Jacinta sat on, she had nowhere to hurry to. When the waitress came to clear the table she thought about snatching Mel’s cup and taking the paper. But she let the waitress stack the crockery without making a move. She was fossicking for the keys to the hire car and thinking about checking for a place to rent in this neighbourhood when the waitress called.
“Excuse me, did you need this?” She held out the paper.
She stood and picked up her bag. What she needed was to build a life while she waited for the right job. What she needed was to look forward, not back.
“No, thank you.”
When she phoned Jay and he’d finished rousing on her for dodging him, he said the same things: cut loose, have fun, because soon enough the right job would be there and she’d regret it if she didn’t make use of this gift of time, this unique circumstance of being able to support herself and not work.
“You could learn to cook,” he said.
She’d learned about the ready meal section in the supermarket, learning to cook sounded like a chore.
“You could learn an instrument, write poetry.”
“That makes cooking sound more interesting.”
“You could paint.”
The canvases spent weeks stacked in Bryan’s garage. Now they were stacked in her new rented apartment, taking up more room than was sensible.
“I might paint.” It had always been a thing she could lose herself in, and why had she trucked the stupid canvases around if somewhere in the back of her head she didn’t have a desire to pick up a brush again?
“I’ll commission something to get you started.”
She laughed. She missed Jay. Not living next door to him was another painful consequence of losing the job. “I’ll give you a canvas and you can pretend it’s good enough to hang while having an unfortunate accident with it where it gets crushed beyond all recognition.”
“Then it will be modern art and probably worth a fortune. Get cracking.”
“Speaking of commissions. What happened with Mace and Dillon?”
“Oh yes. I thought you’d already know. The investment committee knocked them back. I meant to step in and override that decision, I have a feeling about those two, but then this nightmare in Shanghai came up. I must phone Dillon when I get back.”
“You thought I’d already know?”
“There was something going on there.”
“Just a little fling.”
“It looked like more than that.”
“It wasn’t. When are you back?”
“Another month, maybe longer. I’ll expect a masterpiece from you by then.”