Chapter Two
I was running late when I got to work Monday morning because apparently it is far more difficult to pack fifty tiny chocolate chip and banana nut muffins into a basket than I thought that it would be and the bakery was simply not prepared to work in my timeframe. Juggling the basket under one arm and my briefcase under the other, I struggled to squeeze them against my body hard enough that they wouldn’t slip as I tried to sign the card I held. The elevator doors opened and I curled forward to try to guide the pen cap in my mouth toward the pen in my hand without dropping anything. I couldn’t quite make it work so I tossed the pen aside and spit out the cap before anyone noticed me.
Scurrying as fast as I could, I made my way down the hallway toward Mr. Royal’s office. Before I could get to the door, though, I saw Cindy, Mr. Royal’s secretary, waving me down. She had a phone pinned between her ear and her shoulder and she finished the call before dropping the receiver back to the cradle.
“Morning, Cindy,” I said. “I just wanted to bring this in to Mr. Royal.”
“He can’t be disturbed right now, Snow,” Cindy said.
I looked at her quizzically. Never in the years that I had worked with him had Mr. Royal been inaccessible. Usually his office door was standing open and more often than not he was standing in the doorway looking up and down the hallway for someone to talk to. Now I glanced over at the office and noticed that the door was firmly closed, the blinds over the large window beside it pulled down tightly.
“He can’t be disturbed?” I asked, thinking I might have heard her wrong. “Is something wrong? Is he alright?”
“He’s fine,” she said. “He just asked that he not be disturbed this morning. There’s going to be a meeting at 10 and he said that he is not to be disturbed until then.”
“But I wanted to bring him this,” I said.
I knew that I had reduced myself to sounding like a whiny teenager, but, like Robin, I had already committed and was going to see it through. I held up the muffin basket, hoping that the puffy red and blue bow I had chosen specifically to match the picture that I had seen on the announcement would sway her.
“You can put it in the first conference room,” Cindy said.
The phone on her desk rang and she picked it up, gesturing toward the conference room like she was shooing me away. I had been dismissed. I turned around and took a few steps toward the conference room. Before I even stepped inside, I got a glimpse of the table inside and sighed, hanging my head for the last few steps. Pushing a few of the other of the baskets on the table aside, I settled mine into the fray, trying to get it positioned so that Mr. Royal would see it first when he came into the room.
“Stupid Robin,” I muttered to myself.
I glanced down at my phone to check the time. Just long enough before the surprise meeting to grab a cup of coffee and scarf down a break room doughnut since I didn’t have a chance in my morning of muffin selection to eat breakfast. Fortunately, one thing that Mr. Royal did extremely well was stock the break room. Every morning the tidy little space filled with the rich, sweet fragrance of every flavor of doughnut offered by the gourmet shop just up the road almost by magic. At least, it would seem almost by magic if I hadn’t spent my first six months at the company doing the morning doughnut runs before I found out that that wasn’t actually a part of my job description and it was just Mr. Glass, the company advisor’s, way of not having to do it himself.
I adjusted my skirt as I walked into the break room, then stopped short, no longer caring that my zipper had wriggled its way from the back around to my hip. My eyes locked on the table in the center of the room and the blatant lack of light pink bakery boxes that were usually still staked high at this time of morning. I drew in a breath and noticed that there was no lingering fried dough smell that would indicate the rest of the office had just eaten all of the doughnuts before I could make it. Instead, there was a painfully clean disinfectant smell and in the center of the table a large bowl of fruit and plate of individually packaged granola bars.
What kind of shit was this?
Rosa stepped into the break room behind me and I saw her do the same scan of the room that I had. She looked at me with the expression of unique horror that came from being deprived of her early morning fat and sugar rush. I nodded at her in commiseration and we both stepped up to the table, staring down at the plate and bowl as if it was going to be one big joke and they were going to flip over and turn into our doughnuts and coffee.
We didn’t have much time to question the new craziness of the world. The crackling, old-fashioned PA system that Mr. Royal refused to upgrade told us that it was time for us to report to the main conference room for the big mysterious meeting. I had a bad feeling in my stomach as I settled into one of the blue-cushioned swivel chairs at the table and looked around at my colleagues. Everyone was exchanging questioning looks and there were a few mutterings about the wedding announcement, but it seemed that there was no indication that anyone knew why we had been brought there. We sat there for a few tense minutes, and exactly at 10, the door to the conference room swung open. I looked toward it and saw Mr. Royal step in.
“Good morning, everyone!” he exclaimed in his usual bold, jubilant style.
There was an extra sparkle in his eyes and I couldn’t help but think about what Robin had said. As much as I didn’t want to.
“Good morning,” we all burbled back to him.
“I’m so glad to see all of you here this morning because I have a thrilling announcement that I am sure that you will all be as excited about as I am.” He took a breath and I felt my stomach flip. Here it comes. “As some of you might know, life took me on an unexpected and enthralling adventure over the last few weeks and this weekend it reached its pinnacle when I married the love of my life.” The door opened again and Lucille stepped inside. “Please meet my wife. Mrs. Lucille Royal.”
My blood ran cold and I felt the same physical reaction toward her that I always did when we were in school. This was the woman who had done everything in her power to try to pull me down. From the moment that she met me, she was determined to stomp on me on her way to the top, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary. Fortunately for me at the time, that just pushed me to work harder and I was always enough ahead that she never had the opportunity. Now as I sat there at the conference table watching Lucille as she looked out over us with a stony expression on her face, I was starting to feel like her stiletto was on its way to my head.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was just as icy as it had always been. “I look forward to getting to know all of you.”
Getting to know all of us? That sounds ominous.
“And she will have plenty of opportunity,” Mr. Royal said. “The primary reason I’ve called all of you together this morning, other than to share my wonderful news with you, is to announce that moving forward there will be a shift in the leadership of Royal and Company. I have been considering retirement for some time now and my lovely bride has convinced me that now is my chance. I will spend the next few days getting some loose ends tied up around here and then I will be leaving on a world tour. I will be handing over power of the company to your new president…Lucille.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. Lucille’s eyes seemed to darken slightly as they swept across the room toward me and a vile curve came to her lips.
“I know that we will work extremely well together and bring Royal and Company to new levels of success,” she said. “That will take effort and dedication from all of you. I know that there are certain ways and operations to which everyone is accustomed, and some of them will need to change. That means that we are all starting fresh. I don’t know you or what you are capable of, so you will need to prove to me that you are of worth to this team and the contribution that you can make. This is a beginning for all of us. Everyone is on level ground now.” She looked directly at me and I knew that that comment was for me. Lucille went back to looking at the rest of the group. “I will be shaking up things around here to make sure that we are all able to reach the potential that I know we have. You may have already noticed some of the changes that I have made in an effort to make our shared work environment healthier. A healthy work environment encourages a healthy team and I know that all of you will not just get accustomed to the changes, but will embrace them and the benefits that they will bring.”
Bitch, where are my doughnuts?