My hair is driving me nuts. My bangs are too long and falling into my eyes, but I don’t have time to go to the hairdresser. I should probably just whack it off myself, but that has ended disastrously before, usually when I’m stressed. When I was a teenager studying for my SATs, my dad hid every pair of scissors in the house so I couldn’t scalp myself.
“Yes, I’m holding for the doctor . . . No, he can’t call me back, because I’m going to be in a meeting. Please, can I just speak to him now? It’ll take five minutes . . . Okay, one minute. I can talk fast.”
I glance through the glass wall into my law firm’s conference room. Half of the meeting’s attendees are already there, though they’re hardly aware of each other since most of them are focused on their phones. I hear voices up the hall, and I see the partners walking in a pack toward me—just as a woman picks up at the other end of my call.
“Hello, this is Sandra, the nurse. The doctor’s in with a patient. Can I help you?”
“I’ve already talked to you, Sandra,” I say, lowering my voice to almost a whisper. “I asked you to have him call me, and you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you.”
The partners are lingering at the door, not three feet from me. I have to get in there now. “You already have a message from me to give him. Please give it to him. If he calls me I’ll try to answer. Please. It’s important I talk to him as soon as possible.”
I click off the phone, plaster a smile on my face, and greet my bosses as I slip into the room. I take my place among the other first-year associates, who suddenly look engaged as the heavyweights enter the room. My friend Joanie has saved me a chair next to her, too close to the Christmas tree decorated by the priciest interior decorator in town. The heat of the incandescent lights is going to make me sweat.
“Did she get there?” Joanie whispers behind her hand as I sit down.
“Who knows? If the cab company didn’t send someone, I’m suing them.”
“I covered for you at lunch. They don’t know you were late.”
“Thanks. I had to get her dressed. She was still in her pajamas.”
“You have got to get help for her.”
“I know, but I can’t afford it.”
The meeting comes to order, and I try to focus on the senior partner who’s presiding—the Southerby in Southerby, Maddox, and Hanes. But my mind keeps wandering to my grandmother who was staring into space last night in front of her hours-old Meals on Wheels lunch, which she hadn’t touched.
Her decline in the last few days has been so rapid. Maybe it’s just some virus that has made her seem worse than she is, or maybe she isn’t sleeping well. I was going to take her to the doctor today myself, but then the partners called this meeting for the exact same time as the appointment. I couldn’t risk missing it.
Mr. Southerby is twirling an unlit cigarette in his fingers as he talks. His heart attack last year scared him into quitting, but he still carries one wherever he goes. “And as you know,” he continued, “billing has been down in the last quarter. We blame a couple of lawsuits that didn’t come out in our favor, and a few lost clients due to Benedict Simon’s leaving the firm.”
Everyone chuckles at the “Benedict” part of the name, because Simon’s real name is Larry. His leaving with some major clients has made the partners bitter.
“Long story short, we tell you this with great regret, but we are going to be downsizing our staff, and that means we’ll be letting a few of our first-year associates go.”
I gasp. He has my full attention now. I look at the others around me. Everyone is gaping at him, waiting for the ax to fall. “We’ll be calling some of you into meetings this afternoon and letting you know whether you’ll be kept on or let go. Those of you who stay on will have to step it up. You’ll obviously be doing the work of two or three people, so if you can’t handle that, perhaps you should go ahead and step down.”
Is he looking at me as he says that, or is that just my imagination? I roll my chair back a few inches, hoping the flashing tree will hide me.
What am I going to do if they fire me?
When the meeting is over, the partners leave first, probably so they won’t be ambushed in the hall. Some of the associates get up and follow them out, no doubt hoping to convince them that they’re indispensable to the team. I sit frozen, staring at the air in front of me.
“It’s going to be me,” I tell Joanie, who’s also paralyzed beside me. “He was looking at me when he said that thing about stepping down if you didn’t think you could hack it.”
“But if you were getting fired, there wouldn’t be anything to step down from. Besides, I thought he was looking at me.”
“Why would he look at you? You haven’t been coming in late because you can’t get your grandmother bathed and dressed on time, no matter how early you get there, because something always goes wrong.”
“But maybe they know I’ve been covering for you. Maybe they’re madder at me than they are at you. You’re more valuable, after all. You did good work on the Krieleg case, and they were awarded a hundred million dollars. We lost the last case I went to court on. Plus you’re on the Darco case. They’re not going to fire you the day before you go to court.”
I sigh. “It’s the stupidest case in the history of lawsuits, which is guaranteed to ruin my reputation whether I win or lose.”
“If you win, it will make our biggest client happy.”
“Get real. Everyone knows this is a losing battle. His kid provides the alcohol for a dorm party, then smashes his car into a Burger King after he gets wasted, so the kid sues the school for allowing him to get that drunk. And when I finish this one, I get to represent this stellar young man as he sues Burger King.”
“Like I said, job security. Stupid cases have been won before.”
“But any of us could work on this case and get the same result.” I blow out a frustrated breath and take a quick inventory of my accomplishments here because I may need to remind the partners of them. It doesn’t seem like enough, and some of the other first-years have been so much more successful. “And anyway, I was a second on the Krieleg case. I don’t get the credit.”
“You worked day and night, and most of what they used in court was stuff you found. They’re not going to let you go.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t even say how many. I’m gonna be sick.” Joanie slides her chair back and stands up.
She does look pale. I watch her leave the room, then I look toward the podium again, trying to remember exactly what Mr. Southerby was saying when he glanced toward me. Was it really the “can’t commit to long hours” part?
I can’t just sit here. I have a million things to do before court tomorrow, and I have to keep working as if I’m valuable to someone. I make myself get out of my chair and leave the room. For a minute I stand in the hallway as though I don’t know how to find my office. What is wrong with me? I have to be on top of my game.
As I walk, I look down at my phone to see if I’ve been summoned yet to the downsizing talk, but my mind quickly slips back to the call to the doctor’s office. I check to see if they called while I had my phone on silent.
No, not yet. Why can’t they call me back? Surely they know by now that my grandmother isn’t in her right mind and needs medication.
I don’t have time to obsess about her. Grammy will be fine. Surely the doctor will figure it out.
But how? You can’t drop a car off at a mechanic’s and not tell him what’s wrong with it, and hope he’ll figure out that it makes a squealing noise whenever you put it in reverse. What if he never tries putting it in reverse?
What if Grammy seems lucid for the five minutes the doctor talks to her and he considers her fine? Then we’ll have to go back again.
My desk phone buzzes, and I push the button. “Yes?”
“The partners are asking for you,” Nora, my assistant, says.
“Already?”
“Yes.”
“Like now?”
“That’s what they said. Mr. Southerby’s office.”
What does it mean that I’m one of the first? I straighten my skirt and try to tame my hair, but it’s useless.
I’m just outside Southerby’s office door when my phone chirps. I glance down and see that it’s the doctor’s office. I start to answer, but the secretary sees me and, avoiding eye contact, picks up the phone and tells her boss that I’m here.
I can’t take the call now. I’ll have to call the doctor back and go through the whole thing again. I drop the phone into my pocket, plaster on my most-reliable-and-committed-employee-who-loves-long-hours smile, and step into the lions’ den.