A Work In Progress

Chapter Fourteen: A First Day, Again

Once I was back in my apartment, I started trying to find phone numbers. I had to get this group back together to undo what they had done to me. I spent hours trying to track and find, with little success. As darkness fell, I finally had the three numbers of Sharon, Kay and Kathy’s mother. When I told them my name both of them slammed the phone down on me, I suppose that they assumed it to be some sort of sick joke. I kept calling Kay but there was just no answer. Around 11 at night, I gave up on getting her answer and went off to bed. I had to be at work in the morning.

I knew from Saturday and Sunday I was going to have to get up extra early to be at work at the very least on time. I had to allow time to dry and style my hair in the simple up-do I practiced for the party before deciding to go with my hair down. I chose a lovely maroon suit and skirt and found a bra that compressed my breasts, almost painfully, to keep from having too much interference with the lines of the jacket. It was a little hard to button the blouse I wore over a camisole as the buttons were on the opposite side from a man’s dress shirt, like my own that I was now using for pajamas. The hardest part of it all had been getting on the right undergarments. I was wearing pantyhose and a pair of four inch heels that matched the suit. Overall, I looked professional. I was pleased with it all.

I headed down stairs to the car that Ralph should have waiting for me. It was there of course and Ralph opened the door for me. “Have a lovely day, Miss Adair.” He smiled. I don’t know why but I laid a hand on his right cheek and kissed his left one.

“Thank you Ralph.” The door man blushed deeply as I walked away, feeling a little smug at having brightened his day so. As I sat in the car through the City traffic, it occurred to me that Ralph was not as old as I had assumed him to be. The more I thought about it, the more amazed I was at how little I actually saw him. It might as well have been an ornament to me before. It was good that I was being nice to him now.

When I got to work I found that several of the big accounts I had been working on, I was now a secondary on, backing up a man. I found I was doing the work that needed to be done to make a deal stick while the men commiserated, as I had done before about how they had closed the deal. What good was it to close a deal if the deal would not hold legal water? I had always insisted on working alone before, I knew many of my male counterparts preferred a secondary to double check, but I had always wanted the work I had done to be my own. Now I was left cleaning up after the sloppy half-assed work these men had done. By six at night I was still working through the mess Phil had made of the deal I had been wrapping up as tight as a drum. I was having to call and reassure lawyers as well as Bill that the deal was right during the day, and now I was making the paperwork match what it should have been. Mari sighed at my office door. “Phillip?” She asked. I nodded with a pencil in my mouth as I tapped buttons on a calculator. “How he messed this up with the groundwork you laid for it, I will never know.” I shoved a bit of paper at her, a copy of Phillip’s expense report. “Christ, why don’t they fire him?”

“Because then one of us would have to be considered for his job.” I said as the numbers added up correctly for the third time.

“I’d settle for his salary.” Mari chuckled.

“Well,” I started putting papers in folders and setting them out in order, “I have it all ready so I am going home. I have some calls to make.”

“You have a taxi coming?” She asked.

“I will.” I winked to her. “See you tomorrow?”

“Sisterhood.” She held a closed fist before her chest and headed home. I got my jacket back on and buttoned and then my purse. I called Ralph who gushed to send a taxi to me. Before I left, I laid the folders neatly on Phillip’s desk with a post it about the final numbers being on all the paper work for him to close the deal. I pulled out my cell as I rode down to the street level on the elevator and left voice mail on his cell phone and his office phone telling him that I had prepared the correct final files for the deal and left them on his desk. There was no way he could blow this deal with the work I had done.