Chapter Six
Cristina
I felt myself hurrying through each of the offices that night, trying to get finished early so that I could get home. The building had closed in the middle of the day to give the employees an early start on the holiday, but even the extra time left me scrambling as I tried to make up for missing work the night before. Though it didn't seem to me that an office of civilized adults would be able to make too much of a mess in 48 hours, humanity never ceased to amaze me, and tonight was no different. I was still grumbling to myself about the takeout containers that had been piled up beside one of the trashcans rather than the person just taking the bag out of the can and replacing it with one of the ones that I kept neatly and conveniently folded at the bottom just for such a situation when I headed down the hallway and saw the light in the Sommers office glowing.
Do they ever stop?
The door was standing further open than usual and I stepped up to it, glancing in before I entered. Josh was sitting in a chair facing the window, looking out into the darkness beyond it. I knew that somewhere beneath him was the courtyard positioned in the center of the building to offer employees a little piece of green in the midst of their corporate cage, but I highly doubted that he was able to see anything even though he was yet again sitting with only the meager lamplight in the space with him. I stepped further into the office and flipped the light switch, filling the office with the bright, unforgiving fluorescent light that I was sure wasn't the biggest mood booster.
Maybe it wasn't better than just sitting in the dark.
As soon as the light turned on, the chair turned around and I realized that Josh was holding his phone to his ear. I held up my hands and mouthed an apology, starting to back out of the room, but he shook his head, holding up a finger as if to tell me to wait. He turned back to the window again and I looked around myself, unsure of what I was supposed to do. Should I start cleaning? Should I just stand here and wait for whatever it was he wanted me to wait for?
I knew that I should be hurrying to get this done as fast as I could so that I could get home and finish getting ready for the onslaught of relatives that would be coming over the next day. It had taken all that I had in me to convince them not to come today, which bought me some extra time to make sure that the house was ready for them, but also meant that they were just going to be even louder and more enthusiastic when they actually did get there. I was going to need as much time as I could get to brace myself for that whole situation. As I stood there, though, my urgency didn't seem as important. I wanted to be there with Josh. It had been a couple of days since I had found him alone in the office and I had been missing the comfortable, if wildly inappropriate, rapport that we had formed.
I wasn't ready to go so far as to say that we were friends. That was just going a bit further beyond the line than I was willing to venture. But I would go ahead and say that we were getting familiar with each other and seeing him made coming to work at night a much more pleasant prospect. Of course, just putting up a life-size cardboard cutout of him would make going to work more pleasant, but talking to him was a bonus.
"What if I had plans? Did you even think of that?"
Josh was keeping his voice low, but I could still hear the angry rumble in the words and wondered who he could be talking to like that.
"No, it's not ridiculous, Willa."
Well, there you go.
"Does it really matter to you what I might be doing? You're the one who just left without even giving me more than an hour's notice."
At this point I decided that this was most certainly not a conversation that I was supposed to be listening to. I started poking around the office, doing some preliminary cleaning so that I would be doing something when he turned around rather than just staring at him.
"Fine. Happy Thanksgiving."
I could only assume that Josh hung up after that, but the absurd super phone that he had didn't have a "slam down the receiver" function.
Score one for the flip phone.
By the time Josh turned back around in his chair, I was extremely invested in wiping off the long table in the middle of the room. He gave a deep sigh and I looked up at him, hoping that my expression held enough innocent disconnection that he wouldn't think that I had been audience to his phone conversation.
"Last minute client?" I asked, carrying on with playing dumb like a champ.
"No, it was gloom. Gloom and despair. Gloom, despair, and aggravation. It was a conference call."
I walked back over to the door and turned the light off again.
"Thank you," he said.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "Not feeling in the Thanksgiving spirit?"
"I don't really have anything to have the spirit for," he said.
I looked at him questioningly.
"Is this a Halloween situation? You do know that tomorrow is Thanksgiving, right?"
He nodded.
"I do. But I'm apparently not celebrating Thanksgiving this year."
I was shocked and for a moment I didn't know what to say.
"What do you mean you're not celebrating Thanksgiving this year?"
"Well, for the last several years I've always celebrated Thanksgiving with the Sommers family. This year Willa has informed me that she and Wilton aren't going to be around."
"Why not?"
"They flew out yesterday to go check on some of the bigger stores of their chain to make sure that they are implementing the Black Friday sales plans properly."
"When did you find that out?"
From what I overheard I was going to go with he found out yesterday, but I was still trying to maintain the image that I still wasn't a corporate spy.
"She told me yesterday when she was packing."
"Oh. Wow. That's not a lot of notice."
"No, it's not." He sighed, then tilted his head slightly. "Where were you last night?"
"Last night?" I asked.
"Yeah. I went back to my office to finish up some work and then I came here, but you never came in."
"Did you have more work to do?" I asked.
"No," he admitted. "I just came in."
"Oh." I felt my lips twitch, but I tried to hold back the smile that was trying to form there. "I had to take the night off. Matteo was sick, and my mother was away, so I didn't want to leave him alone."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Is he alright now?"
"He's fine. He gets migraines, especially when he is stressed or excited about anything, and one hit him pretty hard last night. But he woke up feeling much better this morning."
"That's good."
I emptied the trashcan and looked back at him.
"You really aren't going to celebrate Thanksgiving?" I asked.
"I guess not," he said. "I just assumed that I would be having dinner at Wilton's house, so I don't really have a backup plan."
I thought about that for a moment.
"Somehow I just don't see Willa as the domestic type."
He looked at me strangely.
"She's not," he said. "Why would that matter?"
"I just assumed...I mean...does Wilton cook?"
He gave a mirthless laugh and shook his head, standing up from his chair and walking toward me.
"No," he said. "None of them cook. I don't think that any of them have ever cooked. Come to think of it, I don't know if any of them have even seen a kitchen. They give their staff the day off to be with their families, so they have the dinner catered."
"Catered?" I asked. "Like a restaurant brings Thanksgiving dinner to you?"
"Yes," he said. "Last year it was a turkey roulade with cranberry stuffing, potatoes dauphinoise, cranberry gelee, and sweet potato creme brulee."
I stared at him, blinking.
"Are you serious?"
"What?"
"I don't know what most of the words you just said mean. How is that Thanksgiving?"
He shrugged.
"It is what it is."
"It's not Thanksgiving," I said. "Thanksgiving foods are all easily pronounceable in English. And that's coming from someone who celebrates with a family half made up with people who speak a different language."
Josh laughed, and I saw some of the tension ease from his face.
"It definitely wasn't like that when I was younger, but it's been a long time since I've had anything even close to a traditional Thanksgiving. And it looks like it's going to be another year. But Willa did say that we can grab turkey sandwiches when she gets back."
That is the beginning of the most depressing Hallmark Christmas movie ever.
"Well, that's...lovely."
Almost the same thing.
"Are you going to see your family for the holiday? You have the day off, right?"
"I do," I confirmed. "The Sommers might not exactly have the holiday spirit for themselves, but at least they are letting me have the holiday weekend off with the rest of the employees here."
"That's good."
"I'm excited about it. My family is coming over to my house. We've all be working on different parts of the meal for a few days and tomorrow we'll bring them all together and finish up the main dishes."
"What's your favorite part?"
He seemed genuinely interested and I felt a glimmer of sadness.
"I love all of it," I told him, "but I make a peanut butter pie that I could probably eat by myself if I didn't have to fight Matteo and his cousins for it."
Josh's phone rang, and I felt myself tense. I didn't really want to bear witness to another of the awkward conversations between him and Willa.
"Sure," he said into the phone. "Top floor, all the way at the end of the hall. Thanks."
I looked at him quizzically when he hung up and he smiled.
"I forgot to cancel my standing Chinese food order."
"You have a standing Chinese food order?"
"Every Wednesday unless I call to cancel."
Suddenly all of the trashcans full of takeout containers made more sense. The delivery showed up at the door and Josh paid him. He took a bulging bag and carried it over to the table.
"That is a lot of food for one person," I pointed out.
He shrugged.
"I'm never sure what I'll want to eat, so I order all of my favorites. I end up eating a lot of cold Chinese food on Thursdays and Fridays."
I laughed. I would never have imagined him eating leftovers, and the image of him sitting around in his pajamas watching TV while eating straight from the containers made him even more appealing. He sat down and took the packaged utensils out of the bag, sliding them across the table toward me. I sat down across from him and accepted the utensils.
"My sisters would be so mad if they knew that I was sitting here eating this," I said as I took a bite of fried rice.
It wasn't as awful as I remembered the first bites of his takeout that I had eaten, and I willingly delved into another of the containers he had spread across the table.
"Why?" he asked, taking a bite of an egg roll.
"They fast for the whole day before Thanksgiving because they say that if they don't, they'll gain too much weight to fit into their clothes afterwards."
"Do they know that that makes no sense?"
I took a mouthful of beef and broccoli and nodded.
"I'd like to think that somewhere in their minds they do, but it won't change them. They've been doing it for as long as we've been adults."
I started telling him about my family and before I knew it, the food was gone and we had been laughing and talking for more than two hours. The sound of my phone ringing in my pocket startled me out of a retelling of one of my childhood Christmases and I pulled it out of my pocket. I saw Josh laugh when I flipped it open and I swatted at him. He grinned and started cleaning up the remnants of the takeout.
"Cristina! Where are you?"
My mother sounded like she was trying to find me as we escaped a war zone and the buildings burned around us, which probably meant that she realized she had run out of sage. She was not the most calming influence during the holiday season.
"I'm at work," I said.
Not a lie. I didn't say I was working. Just that I was at work.
"I thought you were going to be home early so that you can help me with all of this!"
"I'm coming, Mama. Just calm down. Drink some egg nog."
I hung up and stood.
"I have been beckoned home," I said.
"Oh. Is everything alright?" Josh asked.
"It's fine, she's just beginning her pre-Thanksgiving panic. I have to go help her finish getting the house ready and bake a couple of pies."
"This late?"
"I live a wild and crazy life." I laughed and rushed through the last few tasks to clean the office. "Thank you for the midnight snack."
"Of course. Thank you for keeping me company."
I smiled at him and started for the door.
"Have a good night," I said. "I'll see you in a few days?"
Josh nodded.
"I'll be here."