He placed his hands on the edge of the desk and pushed himself into a standing position. “You’ll start tomorrow morning. Sound good?”
“No, sir.” I picked up the hammer he’d left on the desk. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to start now. Hanging up posters doesn’t seem like the highest and best use of your time.”
* * *
I stayed at the office until almost eight o’clock that night, hanging up Gavin’s pictures, organizing his files, trying to prove my worth. After a quick trip to the condo to pay the neighbor who feeds and walks Maisie every afternoon, then walking her myself, I finally made it to Landsdowne.
“Sorry I’m so late. You wouldn’t believe my day,” I said after kissing Jamie on the forehead. “Remember my old boss at the bank? The one who used a stopwatch to time employee lunch breaks? Well, my new boss makes him look like Santa Claus.”
Jamie grimaced and yelped out a noise that was somewhere between a bark and a laugh. I knew it didn’t mean anything—he made similar sorts of vocalizations all the time, usually while I was still speaking. But when his noises came at a break in my commentary, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if he might actually understand what I was saying—not my words so much, but possibly my tone?
“Don’t worry,” I said, making an effort to sound more cheerful, “he’s no match for me. You’re looking at a woman who once picked ten bins of apples in a single day.”
Jamie let out another yelp.
“Okay, fine. You’re right. I was so sore I could hardly move the next day, but the point is, I’m no stranger to hard work. If Gavin Nutting thinks he’s going to scare me off with long hours, he’d better think again. I know he thinks I’m just ‘a nice girl,’ but I’m tougher than I look, right?”
Jamie twisted in his bed, making an undulating motion with his head and shoulders. I bent down, scooped my arms beneath his torso, and rolled him onto his side.
“There you go. Better?” I asked, looking into his eyes.
As usual, he looked right through me, but his expression seemed more relaxed. I sat down and pulled the plastic bag with my quilt patches from my purse.
“Do you remember the year I picked those ten bins? Your dad could hardly find any pickers that year and the fruit was going to rot on the trees, so your mom got on the phone and called every relative within three hundred miles. Everybody worked as hard as they could from dawn to dusk, but nobody harder than you. You picked fifteen bins. Three years before, we thought you wouldn’t live to celebrate your twenty-first birthday, but there you were, climbing up and down that ladder with forty pounds of fruit in your picking bag, leaving the rest of us in the dust. It was hot and miserable, but we got it done, didn’t we?”
I slipped a length of gray thread through the eye of my needle and smiled, thinking about the satisfaction I’d felt when Jerry, Jamie’s dad, drove up on the tractor to tell us that the last bin had been filled and the whole orchard picked. I’d never felt so tired, or so proud.
“Maybe working for Gavin will be like that,” I said, looking up at Jamie.
His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open. He was snoring softly. I was tired, too, but decided to stay and finish my quilt block, one of the Delectable Mountain blocks I was making to represent the many, many challenges Jamie and I had faced since we’d met—the mountains we had climbed and conquered together.
The one I was working on that night was made from a pair of dark blue size twenty pants I owned when Jamie and I first became friends.
He’d been very nice to talk to me that day at the medical center, but I figured that was the end of it. I never expected him to show up at my front door.
“The doctor says I’ve got to give the knee a rest,” he said, “so that’s the end of my cross-country season. But I want to stay in shape for spring and he said it was okay to walk, so I was wondering if you felt like coming along? It’s kind of boring walking by yourself.”
He made it seem like I was doing him a favor, keeping him company and helping him stay in shape, but I’d barely been able to walk a mile on that first day, and huffed and puffed so hard that I couldn’t really carry on a conversation.
But the next day after school, there he was again, and every day after. We started with one mile, then two, then three. Pretty soon I was able to talk and walk at the same time. We got to know each other really well, sharing intimacies and inanities with equal enthusiasm, the way teenagers do, as if it was all so important. To me it was. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a friend, someone who looked at me instead of past me, and liked me in spite of what he saw.
Pretty soon, we were talking all the time, not just on our daily walks but at school and on the phone. One day, about a month after we started walking, I called him at home.
“Jamie, guess what? My blue workout pants were feeling kind of loose so I got on the scale. I lost nine pounds.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Jamie said.
“Are you crazy? It’s nine pounds!” I squealed. “I haven’t even been dieting!”
“But the doctor said you weren’t fat enough to be able to get that surgery, right? So this means you’ve got even more weight to gain before you can lose it all.”
“You jerk. I can’t stand you,” I laughed, meaning the opposite.
Unless I brought it up, we never
