exclaimed with both hands on her heart, like it might break if she didn’t hold it together.
Audrey sighed. Something squirmed in her gut like acid indigestion, only more, well, squirmy. What kind of a cutesy name is Bethy, anyway?
“And the thing is, I like you, Audrey!” Bethy said, like she was auditioning to perform Audrey’s eulogy at the annual Luck Strike Smokehouse company retreat. “If they boot you, I’m gonna put Ex-Lax in that bitch’s coffee.”
Audrey took a deep breath. “Well, for that it might be worth it.”
Jill Sidenschwandt was Audrey’s supervisor, and one of only nine other women in the eighty-person office. Jill had entered the business back when architecture had still been a boys’ club, so even though she’d given Vesuvius thirty years of hard work, she’d never made partner. She was bitter about that. Or maybe she was just generally bitter, Audrey couldn’t tell.
Since Jill’s fourth kid got diagnosed with leukemia, she’d stopped working the same long hours as the rest of the 59th Street team. Instead, she’d been delegating, and leaving Audrey in charge. But Audrey was bad at delegating, and besides, she didn’t have the job title to back her up. As a result, some parts of the project were in great shape, others, a mess. And Jill hadn’t been paying enough attention to know the messes from the successes.
The meeting was a status report on the 59th Street, Parkside Plaza Project. Six months ago, a Ukrainian man with two hundred pounds of urea nitrate strapped to his back got past security. The metal detectors hadn’t sounded, and, remarkably, the guards hadn’t questioned the note he’d written on the sign-in sheet: “End Servitus Tyranny.” On the elevator, the terrorist had unstrapped the bomb from his waist and held it in his hands. A Good Samaritan had strong-armed him to the roof. During the struggle, the bomb detonated. Twenty midmorning smokers were killed up there, and another eighty-four died on the top floor when the ceiling fell. If not for the Samaritan, mortalities would have been in the thousands. It took the FBI almost two months to identify his remains: Richardo Monge, an illegal immigrant from Costa Rica who operated the street-level bagel cart. He’d been in the middle of a coffee delivery when he’d seen the bomb and saved the building.
Allied Incorporated American Banking (AIAB), which held a one-hundred-year lease on the 59th Street property, had picked Vesuvius to rebuild the gutted floors and erect a rooftop memorial for those who’d died. Jill was team leader because, before her son got sick, she’d asked for more responsibility. If her team design saw completion, the firm’s founders had promised to finally make her a partner.
Silk blouse sopping wet, Audrey raced to her workstation cubicle, where Jill stood with crossed arms.
“You’re late. We’re all waiting,” she said. Her skin looked pale blue, like her blood had been replaced with black and blue ink, and if you touched her, she’d bruise.
“I’m so sorry,” Audrey panted.
Jill was tall and slender, but big-boned. Her uniform was loose-fitting pantsuits and fussy silk blouses that tied into bows at the neck, like an ERA poster from 1972. “I just finished going over floors forty-seven through fifty in the boardroom, but not the roof. That’s up to you.”
“What?” Audrey panted. As project manager, it was Jill’s job to give presentations.
“I decided you should do it,” she said. Her voice cracked, but only if you were listening for it. Audrey knew then what had happened. Jill hadn’t bothered looking at the plans over the weekend. Instead, she’d come in early and expected Audrey to brief her. When Audrey hadn’t shown, she’d panicked and decided that somebody had to take the fall, and it wasn’t going to be the lady with the chemo bills.
“Hurry up!” Jill said, her arms still crossed.
Audrey took three long breaths to collect herself. This was bad. She wasn’t prepared. She squeezed her hands into fists and let go. Tried to think of a bright side, could come up with only one: she no longer smelled like pee. It was something, at least. “Okay,” she said, and started toward the conference room.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Jill answered. “You can’t go in there looking like that.” She pointed her chin at Audrey’s chest.
Audrey followed Jill’s gaze. The blood rushed to her face, hot and uncomfortable. She was reminded of her dream, and the coveralls. Her mother’s red-stained hands, and the girl she used to be, because the wet, spilled coffee had rendered