Free A Place Called Home by Jo Goodman Page A

reveal a white silk shell. Once she was sitting behind her desk, Thea picked up the pink message slips that Mrs. Admundson had placed on her blotter, and swiveled to face the windows while she read them. Most of the employees had voice mail but Thea hated it and preferred callers leave their messages with a real person. Mrs. Admundson almost qualified.
    There was one from Joel this morning, before he reached her on the cell phone. He must have guessed that she had spent the night at the office. Thea crumpled it and tossed it over her shoulder onto the desk. There were two from locally based corporations, one an Internet firm, the other a health maintenance organization. She would return those quickly then set them up with Hank if they were looking for consultation. He would bring her back after he had some idea of how serious they were about changing advertisers. In the meantime she would put the creative teams to work developing something interesting for them to consider.
    There was a message from the secretary of one of the local family service organizations where she sat on the board of directors, reminding her there was a luncheon meeting on Thursday. Yes, she thought, wouldn’t she feel like a complete hypocrite attending that function? She slipped it in her pocket.
    Flipping through the rest of the stack she saw that a colleague at another firm had called. There was a message from a Carolyn Schafer in human resources at Dwight Ennis, Inc. requesting a reference check, which meant that someone at Foster and Wyndham was jumping ship, and either he hadn’t told Hank or Hank had forgotten to tell her. There was a message from Avery Childers and the Chronicle called and ...
    Thea’s fingers stilled. It wasn’t the paper specifically that had called, but Mitchell Baker. Mrs. Admundson, always playing her cards close, had pretended not to know his connection to Thea and had asked where he worked. Thea saw her assistant also made a note in red that there had been three calls. One of Thea’s brows lifted. All of them were before eight o’clock. She looked at the number and saw it was the local exchange. He was in town, then, not at home.
    She stared at the pink slip a long time before she made a tight fist around it. Turning ninety degrees in her chair, Thea sent it sailing toward the wet bar where it fell in the sink. She threw up her hands and made crowd noises. “And the fans go wild!” Finishing the turn so she faced her desk, Thea picked up the phone and called Joel. She listened while he told her about the concert. He passed on his daughter-in-law’s thanks for thinking of her as a replacement and then they broke away, each with their agendas for the day in front of them.
    Thea spent the next hour on the phone with the Net firm and the HMO. Then she initiated a few calls which took another hour. The call to Avery took longer than expected. The attorney didn’t want to hear that she was firing him. During all the calls, the earbud let her move around the office. She dallied in front of the window, looking down on Smithfield Street while she talked and watching the pedestrians jostle for position on the sidewalk and dart willy-nilly between the moving cars. She watered her plants, pulled the dead leaves, and straightened the books on her shelves. For a while she walked on the treadmill, stopping short of glowing or labored breathing. It hardly qualified as exercise, but it was better than nothing and she didn’t want to beat Hank Foster to that first bypass.
    When she finished with business calls she made one more personal one. She got voice mail. “Hey there. Unless you’re new to the planet, you know what to do.” Thea smiled. That was pure Rosie. “Hi. It’s Thea. Just checking in. Thank you for last night. It helped.” Thea almost asked if she wanted to be a bridesmaid but managed to stop herself. “I’ll be in touch.” She ended the call, removed the earbud, and put on her shoes. She left her office