Free Good Grief by Lolly Winston Page A

in my bathrobe and started driving.
    Now, it’s already nine-fifteen. Who do I think I am, taking so many days off? This is Silicon Valley, for God’s sake. Is the NASDAQ going to shut down because my husband died? There’s business-to-business e-commerce valuation to shore up and leverage!
    I crank up the heat and take another slug of coffee from my travel mug. My bowels rumble.
    My head itches because I haven’t washed my hair in how many days? Who knows. The thing is, account executives from our New York public relations agency flew out last night and they’re meeting with Lara and me today to hammer out a strategy for East Coast story placements—
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.
Lara always says “hammer out.” She called last night to make sure I’d be there. I promised I’d be in by nine-thirty.
    Mastodon Suburbans and Land Cruisers chug past me. Maybe I feel fragile because my car is too small. Maybe I should be driving a van, a school bus, a tank. On
World’s Scariest Police Chases,
a guy stole a tank and plowed through a neighborhood, crushing cars and boats and bicycles. I can relate to having this kind of bad day. I wince when I realize what’s clunking from side to side in the trunk: my pies.
    I’m supposed to give a presentation after lunch to Lara and the PR women on patch strategies. But I don’t have a single idea yet.
We’re
the client. Why doesn’t the agency come up with a strategy? Their job is to implement the strategy under my direction, says Lara.
    I listen to the traffic report, hoping for a multiple-car crash to halt my commute, but there isn’t any.
    In the elevator, the CFO smiles at my slippers in an absentminded sort of way. Maybe he would like a slice of apple crumb. We both concentrate on the red square numbers overhead, which wink knowingly as we shoot toward the fifth floor. Two, three, four,
here we are
!
    I fetch
The Wall Street Journal
from the little table in the hall.
    “Oh!” the admin two cubes over says when she sees me.
“Oh.”
    As I steam toward my cubicle, suddenly the floor seems all uphill.
I think I can, I think I can!
More and more employees are finding it hard to juggle work with family, an article in the
Journal
says. I envy
that
dilemma.
    My in-box is piled high. Doesn’t anyone at this company know we’re becoming a paperless society? I pick up the whole thing and dump it into the garbage. I move my ficus tree to where the in-box was. It looks pretty there, its wrinkly leaves outlined in white. I decide the other plants around my desk would look nice on the floor. I arrange them in a row that closes up the opening of my cube. The potted palm, ivy, Christmas cactus, and African violet create a much needed fourth wall.
    My presentation is in less than two hours. I turn on my machine, open PowerPoint, and get started on the slides, but I can’t decide whether to make the text centered, flush left, or flush right, let alone what to say. I pull my lunch out of my desk: a bag of old hot dog buns and a few restaurant packets of honey. I drizzle the honey on the buns and start eating. Not so bad, really.
    There’s a rustling in the plants and a knock on the edge of my cube. I love how people try to knock on your cube, as though you’ve got privacy.
    Someone says, “Sophie?”
    I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll
blow
your house down!
    Lara slides through the plants. She is small and lithe and can wedge herself into narrow spaces, like a bat.
    “Um,” she says. “What happened?”
    “Erm.” The buns and honey stick to the roof of my mouth. “My hug-band thied.”
    Lara crouches on her haunches beside my chair. She bites into her plump lower lip and draws in a long breath through her teeth. Finally, she clears her throat and speaks. But I don’t have
any
idea what she’s saying. I try to listen, but suddenly my brain can’t string words together.
    “Media streep froop,” she whispers.
    “Wha?” I swallow a dry lump of hot dog