Household Gods

He waited, chortling, for her to fall over laughing. No, she thought. Not even for a senior partner. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said with rigid deliberation, “that was the most sickening, sexist thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” She could have stopped there – should have, if she’d started at all. But something in her had snapped. “Nobody,” she said, shaking with the force of her disgust, “nobody should tell a joke like that, under any circumstances, to anybody. If that’s what it means to ‘cooperate,’ to be ‘one of the boys’ – if I have to crawl down in the gutter with all the rest of you, guzzling pricey liquor and laughing at sick jokes – then frankly, Mr. Gallagher, I don’t want to play.”

There was an enormous silence. Nicole knew with sick certainty that he’d erupt, that he’d blast her out of her – his – chair.

He didn’t. His eyes went cold and hard, like green glass. He was, she realized with dismay, much less drunk than she’d thought. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said with perfect and completely unexpected precision, “one of the complaints leveled against you by your peers and by the senior partners was that you did not get along with people as well as you should. I took the contrary position. I see now that I was mistaken.”

“What exactly do you mean, I don’t get along?” Nicole asked. Maybe he would give her enough rope to hang him.

She should have known he wouldn’t. He was a lawyer, wasn’t he? “I mean what I said,” he snapped. “No more, no less.” But even while he played the lawyer’s lawyer, his eyes slid down to her hemline again. Maybe – and that was worst of all – he didn’t even know he was doing it. He straightened in his chair. “Good afternoon, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“Good afternoon,” Nicole said, with the starch of generations of Midwestern schoolmarms in her voice and in her spine.

She left with her head high. Oh, he wanted her to cooperate, no doubt about it – in bed and naked, or more likely wearing something vinyl and crotchless from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

So now she’d offended not only the founding partner but the one senior partner who’d even pretended to be on her side. At least, she thought, she still had her self-respect. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she did have. She couldn’t eat it, put it in the gas tank, or pay the mortgage with it. She’d shot her chance for a partnership right between the eyes.

On the other hand, if she’d read Sheldon Rosenthal right, she’d never been in line for a partnership. She’d been a blazing fool from start to finish.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said when Nicole handed her a check that afternoon. “You are the last one. I got to cash this, then run for the airport.” Nicole’s nod was grim. She’d have to get a cash advance from her MasterCard to keep the check from bouncing. She was buying groceries, gasoline – everything – on plastic till she got paid again. The MasterCard was close to maxing out. So was the Visa. Her whole life was on the verge of having its charging privileges revoked.

Kimberley and Justin hugged Josefina so tightly when she bent to say good-bye to them that she laughed a little tearily and said something half reproving, half teasing, in the Spanish that they understood and Nicole never had. At that, Kimberley, who professed loudly and often that “only babies cry,” wept as if her heart would break. Nicole’s own heart was none too sturdy, either. Damn it, it pulled her apart to see her baby hurt.

“Oh.” Josefina straightened, wiping her eyes and sniffing. “I got to tell you, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, we got a virus going around the kids. I had to call two mothers this afternoon.”

Great, Nicole thought. Why not? The way this day had been going, all she needed was a nice round of the galloping crud. “Thanks,” she managed to say to Josefina, though the last thing she felt was gratitude. She fixed Kimberley with a mock-severe look, one that usually made her erupt into giggles. There were no giggles today, just tears. “Don’t you dare get sick, do you hear me?” Nicole said – as if by simply saying it she could make the virus sit up and behave.

Kimberley had stopped sobbing, at least. “I won’t, Mommy,” she said, sounding stuffy and forlorn. “I feel fine.”

“Me, too,” Justin declared, not wanting to be left out.

Then why were you wailing like that? Nicole thought uncharitably as she buckled her daughter into her car seat and got Justin into his. It wouldn’t be much longer before Kimberley outgrew the one she was in. Another milestone. These days, Nicole measured time by how her children changed. First step, first time dry through the night, first dirty word… Her mouth twisted. Her own life was on the downhill side. First abandonment, first divorce, first partnership lost – first firing next, probably, if things didn’t get better fast.