you know.” Lincoln turned and went back around the corner, back to his part time gig in the warehouse. I envied him. Today was one of the days I didn’t want to be in charge, didn’t want to try to carry the world on my shoulders.
I slumped over my arms, trying to regain my footing. I needed to think. What would Dad do? He was always coming up with on-the-spot solutions for crises when he was running things.
But my brain didn’t seem to want to work.
I kept picturing El, walking away with Chad. Or seeing her face as she told me she was falling for me, but still walked away seconds later. I felt empty and drained, exhausted and hollow. I didn’t want to be in charge of anything—deciding what I might have for lunch felt like too much to bear, let alone what to do about this latest crisis.
“Don’t get the quilt wet if you’re crying in there,” Pauline said from the doorway.
I looked up. “I wasn’t crying.”
“Well the cotton might shrink and it’ll screw up my proportions if you do.”
“Pauline, I’m not going to cry.”
“I’d cry if I was you. Heard what your brother said about the shipment from down south.” She shook her head, a pen dislodging from behind her ear and hitting the ground without her seeming to notice.
“Yeah.” I let out a sigh. I knew it would get me nowhere, but I didn’t have real options at the moment, so I asked. “Pauline, what do you think my dad would do?”
“Well, I didn’t see him in here crying too much, that’s for sure.” This was delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, so it was hard to take offense.
“I’m really not crying.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes,” she said in a quieter voice, stepping inside the door, “he’d crack open a bottle of wine if he was having a really bad day.”
“Seriously? At work?”
She nodded, her eyes wide behind the huge round frames of her glasses.
I considered that. It couldn’t hurt. “Stay here.” I went to the warehouse where we kept a shelf for the occasional tasting and selected one of the nice red blends there, carrying it back to the office with two glasses.
Pauline had sat on the low couch at the far side of the office, and was counting small squares of fabric and arranging them around her feet.
“It’s a Rhône blend,” I said, lifting the bottle and the glasses toward her.
“Got any 7-up?” She asked.
“Uh . . .”
“I like to mix it in.”
So Pauline was not necessarily a connoisseur of wine. That was okay. I didn’t have a lot of options for company at the moment.
I poured for each of us and took a seat next to her on the couch, still feeling desperate and hopeless.
“So you want me to do for you what I did for him?” she asked.
Thoughts raced through my mind and none of them were good. What had Pauline done for my dad? I knew it was nothing inappropriate, because I’d witnessed first-hand the relationship my parents shared and there was no room for anyone else there. “Um, okay?”
“The year was 1971,” she started, glancing at me to see if I was going to stop her.
I nodded, wondering where on earth this might go.
“And I was in college.”
I tried to picture that, but failed. Pauline would always be a gray-haired woman in my mind.
“I had this boyfriend back then, Alfonse, his name was.” She shot me a smile that told me she was quite fond of Alfonse. “He was a real supply-closet candidate, if you know what I mean.”
I cringed. Why had I thought Pauline didn’t know what was going on between me and El?
“Anyway, the guy was out of my league. He was smart, handsome, everything I could ever want in a guy.”
I was nodding along, sipping my very good wine a bit too fast.
“And you can see where this is going, I’m sure.”
I could not. “Uh, no. Where?”
She stared at me as if she might smack some sense into me at any moment.
“He broke your heart? Left you? Told you he never wanted to see you again?” I might have accidentally channeled some of El’s anger from the night before.
“Calm down, Boston,” Pauline advised, sipping her wine and then making a face. “It’s just a story.”
“Right.” I sipped more wine. “So what happened? Wait, this is a true story right?”
“As far as you know.”
Fantastic. Why was I wasting time sitting on the couch drinking wine with my half-senile secretary