her decision. She wished she didn’t know that detail. It made it worse somehow.
CHAPTER 2
To be a manager at J.Crew, you had to be organized. That was what Martha always told people. She had, after all, risen to the position of manager faster than any other person at this particular branch. (Well, she was pretty sure of that. Someone had told her that once, and it seemed true.)
“You have to be willing to fold clothes all day if that’s what needs to be done,” she always said. “People don’t want to scrounge around through a messy pile of pants to find the right size.”
Martha was being a little modest when she told people this. You did have to be organized, that was true. But you also had to have the right work ethic, and Martha knew she had it. Some of these people treated this job like it was nothing, like the store was lucky to have them. Well, Martha was a registered nurse who had graduated at the top of her class, and she still worked harder than everyone else. She wasn’t too good to take the extra time to help a pear-shaped girl find the right kind of pants. If her job was to steer that pear of a girl away from skinny cords and point her in the direction of some wide-leg chinos, then that was what she was going to do.
The store was just a ten-minute drive from her parents’ house, which was why Martha decided to apply there in the first place. She’d never worked in retail before, but she figured it couldn’t be that hard, and so she dropped off applications at Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, and Anthropologie. She was turned down almost everywhere.
“But I went to college,” Martha would say, when the managers asked her about previous retail jobs.
Then they would shake their heads no and apologize. “I’m sorry,” they’d say. “We really need someone that has prior experience.”
It was a godsend, really, that the manager at J.Crew was someone that Martha had gone to high school with. They weren’t exactly friends, but Margaret Crawford had sat next to Martha for years in school, and they’d had a sort of friendly alliance, since alphabetically they were always stuck together.
Margaret, it turned out, was pregnant. She told Martha that she was going to be cutting back on her hours and between that and all the college kids leaving to go back to school, they really needed help.
“You’re pregnant?” Martha asked. She tried not to sound shocked, but she was. Margaret looked just a little tubby all around, but not pregnant. Martha noticed a tiny diamond ring on her left hand.
“Yep,” Margaret said. She smiled and rubbed her bloated tummy. “Thirteen weeks. Can’t you tell?”
“Oh, yeah,” Martha said. “Now that you mention it, I can.”
“So why do you want to work here anyway?” Margaret said as she read Martha’s résumé. “I thought you were nursing. Career change?”
“No, not really. I was just in a job that wasn’t a good fit and I thought I’d take a break from it for a while. From nursing, I mean. You know.” Martha prayed that Margaret wouldn’t ask her what she’d been doing in the past year since she stopped nursing.
Margaret wasn’t a very pretty girl. She was average height and a little hefty, with unremarkable brown hair and a splotchy complexion. She was the sort of person who was just average at everything. She’d been in all mid-level classes in high school, had played volleyball for one year on the B team, and had some friends, but not many.
But she was nice, Martha thought. A little dim, but not completely unaware. Martha wondered for a second why they never became better friends. They could have banded together in high school, enjoyed each other’s company. It could have been a little less lonely.
Martha was mulling this over, thinking that maybe now was the time when she and Margaret would connect and they would become great friends, the kind of friend that Martha had never really had before. Maybe Martha would be this baby’s godmother, and they would laugh about it in years to come, about how they sat next to each other for so many years in school, but never really became friends until that one day when Martha just randomly walked into J.Crew.
“So where are you living these days?” Margaret asked.
“At home, for now.”
“You’re living with your parents?” Margaret asked. “Oh, no. That’s awful.”
And just like that, Martha