Love Saves the Day

Clay nodded. “Put the call through, Diane.” Laura remembered the day she’d gotten the emergency call from her mother’s office, only six months earlier. She rose from the couches where she’d been sitting with Clay and Perry, and crossed the room to the ringing phone on Clay’s desk. Her hand trembled as she answered it.

“Josh,” she said. “Josh, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Prudence.” The anger of two hours ago was gone from his voice, replaced by a controlled panic. “I went out for a walk, and when I came home she was just lying there unconscious. It looks like she threw up all over the place.”

Laura, who didn’t know what she’d expected to hear, but hadn’t expected this, needed a moment to redirect her thoughts. “Is she breathing?”

“I think so,” Josh replied. “Which animal hospital should I take her to?”

“St. Mark’s Vet down on Ninth and First,” Laura responded immediately, trying to control the panic now rising in her own chest. “That’s where my mother always took her.”

“That’s all the way downtown. Shouldn’t I bring her someplace closer?”

“What if she has a medical condition they know about and we don’t?” Like my mother did, she thought. “Tell the cabbie you’ll double the fare if he can get you there in fifteen minutes. Triple if he makes it in ten.”

“Laura, I—”

“Just go,” Laura interrupted. “Go now. I’m on my way down.” She hung up and turned to look at Clay and Perry, still seated across the room and watching her closely.

“Is everything okay?” Perry asked.

“My—” Laura stopped, hearing in her own head the words she was about to say, knowing how they would sound to Clay and even to Perry. Squaring her shoulders, she said it anyway. “My cat is sick.”

At first, Clay looked more startled than anything else. “What?” he asked.

“My cat is sick,” Laura repeated. “She’s unconscious and she’s on her way to the animal hospital. I have to go meet her there.”

Having made this statement, Laura felt foolish for a moment. Not because of what she’d said, or for wanting to rush immediately to the animal hospital. She simply didn’t know how to get out of the room. If she’d had a child, and if she’d said, My daughter is sick, she’s unconscious, she could have left instantly. Nobody would have expected her to do anything else. But this was something different. Instinctively she waited either for permission, as a good underling should, or for the confrontation that would make permission irrelevant and carry her out the door.

“You’re kidding, right?” Clay glanced at Perry. Turning to Laura again, he said, “What did you say?”

Laura had fought already with her husband that morning. She’d even fought with Prudence who (her heart clutched with guilt and fear) was now on her way to the hospital. Might as well make a clean sweep of it, she thought grimly. Aloud to Clay she said, “I think you heard me just fine.”

“No, I don’t think I did,” Clay replied. “Because what it sounded like you said is that you, an associate, are walking out on a multimillion-dollar contract review with two senior partners because your cat is sick.”

“See?” Laura was gathering her notes and papers. “I knew you heard me.”

For one second, Clay gaped at her. It was inconceivable that anybody, any associate, would have the nerve to speak to Clayton Newell this way in his own office. Then his eyes hardened. “Of course I heard you.” His voice was wintry. There wasn’t an associate in the firm who didn’t tremble when Clay sounded like this. “It just never occurred to me that you were serious.”

Laura thought of all her late nights in the office, all the times she’d worked twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours, leaving Josh to stew at home, because Clay had dropped some last-minute project on her desk, demanding an immediate turnaround even as he knew—as Laura herself had known—that he wouldn’t be in the next morning until hours after the deadline he’d given her.

“Clay,” Laura said, turning to face him, “you know how committed I am to this firm. I didn’t even take time off when my mother died.” She heard her own words echo in her head. I didn’t take time off when my mother died. My mother died, and I came right back to work. As if nothing had happened. “I’ve never put anything else first. You know I haven’t. Not once in all the years I’ve been here. But this is something I have to do, and I have to go now.”

“Don’t throw your commitment in my face like it was a special favor you conferred on us.” Clay was angry now. “You were committed and you worked hard because that’s the price of admission in a firm like this, and you know that.”

“Clay—” Perry attempted, but Laura interrupted him.

“No, Perry, he’s right. I was back in this office one hour after my mother’s funeral. I didn’t want anybody to think that I wasn’t man enough to handle it.”