Free Who You Know by Theresa Alan

writing.”
    â€œHave you ever thought about getting a job somewhere else?”
    â€œI’ve thought about it fleetingly sometimes, but never very seriously,” I said. “I’m just too loyal. My mom’s like that too. That’s why we stay with guys who cheat on us. We just keep thinking things will get better if we work hard enough. Anyway, I’m not really sure what other kind of job I’d want. It’s a little bit pathetic when you think about it—I’m thirty years old and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.”
    â€œI majored in marketing, and this is not what I signed up for,” Jen said.
    â€œWell, you guys have cheered me right up. Ave, could you pass me the wine and maybe some arsenic while you’re at it?”
    Â 
    Â 
    I t was only about nine in the morning when I heard Jen’s machine shutting down. “Not again, Jen,” I said. She stuck her tongue out at me and called down to IT.
    A few minutes later, another guy from IT, Les, knocked on our office door. Jen was obviously disappointed. Les was a little overweight and had oversized eyeglasses and a shaggy, recklessly unfashionable haircut, but Les was, after all, a man, and Jen never let an opportunity to flirt pass her by, so she recovered quickly, smiling brightly.
    â€œHi, Les. Are you coming to Rios with us tonight?”
    Les beamed and looked at Jen adoringly. “I’d love to come.”
    â€œAll you guys in IT are invited. I think Tom said he was going. You might just want to remind him he’s invited. We’ll be there right after work, around 5:30.”
    She explained what had happened and he told her some possible problems. “So what do you think is wrong with my computer?” He told her a few possibilities. She oohed and aahed at his techy language. He practically glowed from the attention.
    I shook my head, envying Jen’s talent to make every man think he was irresistible, and I returned to the chore of going through my e-mail.
    I’d spent half my morning hitting CONTROL D to delete e-mails from Lydia. They were supposed to contain funny e-mails to brighten our day. One out of every twenty of Lydia’s e-mails might elicit a huh —not a full-blown ha and certainly not a full-fledged laugh—but an occasional huh was not worth struggling through the e-mail jokes that dragged on for an eternity and had a punchline that wasn’t worth the time it took to focus my eyes on the screen, let alone wade through a Russian novel-length epistle.
    Lydia never stopped smiling. She clearly spent years and years as a cheerleader. But beneath her dumb exterior lurked a killer closer, someone who could get companies to buy ten times the service they wanted or needed from us and got them to pay ten times more than what they wanted to pay. And after they signed on the dotted line, they would thank her for her help.
    She was the one who had sold the Expert account and promised this outrageous deadline, so even though we’d maintained a superficial friendship for these past few years, when I saw her in the halls, I wanted to lash out in violent, entirely unprofessional ways to express just how much she’d ruined my life.
    At last I finished going through my office e-mail and went to my personal e-mail account to check on Art.

    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    I’m afraid today’s note will have to be a short one. It’s 1:30 in the morning as I’m writing and I’m ready to collapse. My brother had a really bad night tonight. He went to pick up the kids, and I’m not sure what happened, but he was just a wreck afterward. I’ve never been through a divorce, so I can only imagine what it’s ’s like to have your wife leave you, especially when you have two little kids together. They’ve been divorced for six months and separated for much longer, and it’s just not getting any easier