“We need to get office space—nothing big, maybe a waiting area, two or three small offices and access to a bathroom and an elevator. It can be cheap and, frankly, it doesn’t need to be in the hot part of town because this is a boutique firm.”
Mike nodded. “I like that. How about personnel?”
“I’m only going to need me and one other person like an office assistant, somebody to do basic paperwork and filing and answer phones and respond to emails—customer-service-type stuff; anything that’s overflow from what I can handle.”
“You have someone in mind?” Dylan reached out to Laura. The baby had pulled away, deep in sleep, drunk off mother’s milk. Her lips were relaxed and a perfect little red bow dropped open with a tiny little blister right at the little V of her upper lip.
“What happened?” Josie said, turning away from all the business talk.
“Oh, that’s just a nursing blister,” Laura said quietly as she carefully, with Olympic-athlete-level precision, transferred Jillian over to Dylan with one hand and snapped her nursing bra shut with the other. Dylan slid his entire arm carefully under the blanketed form, froze momentarily as the baby snurgled and shifted, and then pulled her across. Laura let out a giant sigh of relief, leaned back and picked up her cold half-cup of coffee, drinking it as if it were the finest espresso at a Parisian coffee house.
Watching Laura take such luxury in the most commonplace of actions, finding it a pleasure to have seconds of not being responsible, physically attached to her child, made Josie marvel at the intricacies of this relationship that she hadn’t understood.
Was her mom like that with her when she was a baby? What about her dad? Had Marlene and Jeff sat in the Ohio version of a diner like this with month-old Josie, Marlene breastfeeding—wait, scratch that. Her own thoughts invaded her own thoughts. Had she breastfed Josie? No scene, no imagined reality of her own infancy, would be complete without a picture of her mom with an inch-long ash hanging off a cigarette dangling over Josie’s head, her little baby form in her mother’s arms.
What she saw across the table from her and what she imagined her own infancy to have been were quite different. The similarity, though, was that there was a time in her life when she was so wanted and so precious and so vulnerable that her parents must have done the drudgery, have lived the endless marathon of seconds ticking by so slowly, of meeting every single need that she had that they could meet—her needs so simple yet so all-consuming.
And the idea that they loved her so much to do all of that made her appreciate all the more how changed her friends were.
“Who do you have in mind for an office assistant?”
“She could just take out an ad.” Dylan turned and looked at Mike, answering the question before Josie could even open her mouth.
“Actually, I have someone in mind,” Josie said.
Three sets of eyes looked at her quizzically.
“Already?”
Josie nodded. “My niece—well, she’s not really my niece, she’s my cousin, but we call her my niece.”
Dylan started humming the song “Dueling Banjos”. Josie reached across the booth and tapped him with the back of her hand on the arm, careful not to wake Jillian. He just grinned at her and laughed.
“It’s not like that. She’s my cousin by birth, our mothers are sisters, but I’m seven and a half years older and I’ve raised her—or, at least, been a major part of raising her since she was four—so we call each other aunt and niece. Anyhow, who cares about genealogy?” She looked pointedly at the baby. “Especially the three of you.”
“She’s got us there,” Mike admitted.
“So, my niece, Darla—”
“Darla? You have a niece named Darla?” Dylan said. “What’s her middle name? Sue?”
“No, it’s Josephine.”
“Darla Jo? Does she have an accent?”
Josie leaned back and crossed her arms, looking at Dylan pointedly. “What kind of accent do you think people from Ohio have?”
He pulled out the rankest, hickest redneck accent that it seemed he was capable of pulling out and proceeded to butcher it. “I don’t know, y’all. How y’all doin’? Good, let’s git on dow—”
“Oh my God, that is not how people from Ohio talk.”
“How do they talk?” he asked.
“They talk like you and me, but without the flat Boston thing you do.”
“I don’t do a flat Boston thing,” he protested. “It’s not like I pahk the cah in Havahd Yahd.”
“You can’t park a car in Harvard Yard.”
“You know what I mean.”
Laura nudged Dylan hard, almost waking the baby up, and then she cringed in horror, forgetting herself. “Shit! Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered. “Just—just stop, you’re going to wake up the baby,” she hissed.
“All right. Fine. So, Darla Sue Billybob Jo Jennings—”
“How did you know her last name?”
“Her last name is Jennings?”
“Yes.”
“I just…it’s the hickest last na—”
“It is not a hick – ”
“Cut that out.” Mike stuck his hand out, finger pointed at Josie, and then at Dylan, and then at the baby. “If you two wake her up right now, I will lock you in a storage facility in one of those eight-by-ten rooms with no way out, a two-day supply of food, and you have to find a way to get along.”
Laura put her hand up. “Can I go do that alone? Because I would totally take that deal right now.”
Josie just looked at her like she was crazy.
Laura looked back. “What? Two days alone, with food that’s made for me already? Are you f**king kidding me? That’s like…that’s like the equivalent of a week-long cruise to the mother of a newborn.”
“Can we just get back to the business?” Mike asked.
“So, I’ve got Darla,” Josie said. “She can be my office assistant.”
“Does she have office skills?”
“No.”
“Does she have any skills?” Dylan asked.
“She’s worked at a gas station for the past six years.”
“She’s worked at a gas station.”
“Which means she’s dealt with customers, cash registers, and inventory.”
“This isn’t exactly that kind of business,” Laura added. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire her, she sounds fine, but—”