Free The Job by Claire Adams Page B

out.”
    “Thanks,
boss,” he says. “If you want, I really do have the day off tomorrow, so I’d be
happy to drive up there—you know, assuming that I can get a little
reimbursement for gas money.”
    I
hang up the phone.
    Fuck.
    How
the hell am I going to spin this so I don’t end up looking like the idiot I
apparently am.
    Sure,
it makes sense now that I should have called Alec before giving that ultimatum,
but in my defense, Alec’s one of the laziest motherfuckers I know. How was I
supposed to know he’d actually go out and get himself a new job?
    I
walk back into the store, smiling at Linda as I pass her on my way to the newly
sunken floor which, after a whole lot of back and forth and more wasted
concrete than I’m prepared to admit, now sits level at sixteen-and-a-half
inches below the rest of the flooring.
    Really,
unless Jessica comes out here with a list of changes sometime in the next day
or so, we’re pretty much done here.
    The
old storage room was taken out weeks ago, the floor—well, we’ve already covered
that—and my team is now in the process of setting the window.
    There
are a few more things left to do, mostly small and cosmetic, but maybe this
won’t be the end of the world after all.
    I
really need to learn how not to be optimistic about anything.
    Jessica’s
door opens and Mr. Burbank comes walking out with a smile on his face. Jessica’s
smiling, too, but hers is strained.
    She
waits for Burbank to pass hosiery before turning toward me and motioning for me
to meet her in her office.
    This
should be fun.
    I
step into the office and close the door.
    “You’re
probably going to want witnesses,” she says. “In fact, knowing that someone
could see what I would really, really like to do to you right now is probably
the only thing that’s going to keep me from doing it.”
    “I
know I took a hard line before, and I just—”
    “I’m
not done talking,” she interrupts. “It’s bad enough that you forced that
ridiculous decision onto me, but doing it where one of my most important
business contacts could potentially hear you was beyond irresponsible and I
can’t tell you how livid I am at you for it.”
    “You’re
absolutely right,” I tell her. “It was wrong of me to do that. So, to make it
up to you, I’ve decided not to bring Alec back onto my team until we’ve
finished up this contract.”
    “Great!”
she says manically. “That’s just great! I was so pissed off at you that I
wasn’t paying close enough attention to what Mr. Burbank was proposing, and I
just agreed to a cost structure that’s going to completely gut my profit margin
on everything he’s going to supply for me.”
    I
wince.
    “How
much does he supply for you?” I ask.
    “All
told,” she says, “about a third of everything I carry.”
    I’m
about to tell her that a third isn’t that bad, but then I pull my head out of
my ass.
    “Shit.”
    “Yeah,”
she says, “shit is right. Do you want to know what’s worse? Do you want to know
what’s even worse than that?”
    I
cringe. “It gets worse than that?”
    “Yeah,”
she says. “You know how I wanted you to remodel the plus section so I could
expand it?”
    “Yeah,”
I answer, confused. “That’s kind of why we’re here.”
    “Oh,
I know,” she laughs. “What’s worse than everything else is that I just agreed
to make Mr. Burbank my sole supplier
of plus-sized clothing. So now, all of the extra business I was going to do
giving women something chic and sexy to wear for a price they won’t have to
sell their firstborn to afford is fucked! I have two choices: Either I can keep
the prices where I want them and lose thousands of dollars a month on clothes
that I’m actually selling, or I can raise the prices on everything in the
store— ‘cause I’m sure as hell not going to make one
demographic of women pay more than another—completely obliterating my whole
mission statement, business plan and just about the only reason that