the stereotypical dude in a heavy metal band. Oh sure, he had the requisite tattoos on his arms (barbed wire on the right, some Chinese lettering on the left) and he wore a ripped black T-shirt and black army boots, but Gear was warm and friendly, too, which surprised me.
“So this is the infamous Kelly,” he said when Laney introduced us.
“Infamous? I hope that’s a good thing.” I held out my hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He smelled like shaving cream and cigarettes.
“You’re infamous because Laney Bug is always talking about you.”
“Laney Bug?” I looked over my shoulder at Laney, who groaned a little, probably realizing that she would never be able to live down this nickname. I could almost see us at age ninety, me taunting her, Oh Laney Bug, can you bring me my tea, please?
The rest of Gear’s band weren’t quite as outgoing or sweet, but we spent a happy afternoon with them eating pizza, watching football and screaming at the TV when the Bears messed up. I drank a few beers in a hair-of-the-dog effort, and didn’t think about anything else for hours—not Ben or my town house or my lack of employment.
Monday morning, I rolled over in Laney’s bed and stretched, feeling, once again, intensely headachy from the alcohol. Apparently, I couldn’t hold my liquor like I used to. I heard the hum of Laney’s hair dryer from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of makeup on the tile floor and Laney’s curse.
“You okay in there, Laney Bug?” I yelled, stretching my legs under her comfy duvet.
“Late,” she called back, ignoring my use of her new nickname. “Totally late.”
A second later, she tore out of the bathroom, yanked open her closet and stepped into a pair of shoes.
“What time did you get up?” I asked.
“Six.”
I turned and squinted at her bedside clock. It was eight-thirty. “And what have you been doing?”
“Answered e-mail, did a Tae-Bo tape, returned a few phone calls.”
“Okay, now I feel like a lazy ass.”
“You need to take it easy.” She picked up her purse by the bedside and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay as long as you want, all right? And call me at work if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” I watched her run into the kitchen and grab an apple out of a bowl. “Have a good day!” I called, but she was already out the door.
With Laney gone, the apartment seemed empty and vast. I swallowed some Advil, then took one of the books from her shelf, a memoir about a woman who’d followed the Grateful Dead. I figured that maybe I’d lie in bed all day and read. The book wasn’t that interesting, though, at least not after the first three acid trips, and within an hour I was antsy. I knew I should probably go back to my own apartment, but the thought brought only a queasy feeling.
To thank Laney for everything she’d done for me lately, I ignored the pain in my head and the nausea in my stomach and cleaned up her place. Then I made myself a bowl of granola and decided I’d just spend a lazy day in front of the TV.
The first few hours went okay, especially after my headache eased. I watched the news and business stations, trying to catch up on the market, studying the Bloomberg as I used to for the ticker symbols that signaled the retail stocks. There were a couple of surprises, a few stocks that were way higher than when I’d followed them, and I found myself analyzing the rest of the market and how it might affect these companies. After a while, though, I didn’t care all that much. It was a relief just to flip the channel.
Next, I tried the talk shows and the soaps, which kept my interest for a whole forty minutes. What, exactly, was I going to do with the rest of my day? A better question—what had I done when I was home for five months? I couldn’t fathom it.
A thought came to me. Laney had said that I had more than enough money to live on because of the severance pay from Bartley Brothers and the sale of my town house. But what if I’d somehow spent that money during those five months? Laney had assumed I was holed up in that high-rise, but what if I’d actually been blowing the cash on God-knows-what, maybe a sailboat or a Porsche for Ben or a diamond engagement ring for myself?
I found Laney’s cordless phone, dialing the number for my bank’s automated system. Leaning against the kitchen fridge, I punched in my social security number, relieved that I remembered it, then my banking code, which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.
But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?
I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.
My life was a clean slate. What did I want to do with it?
I found a pad of paper in Laney’s desk and settled on the couch again. “New Possible Careers,” I wrote at the top. I sat there for a full five minutes staring at the paper. Why wasn’t anything coming to me? Anything, I told myself, write anything that comes to mind. I shook my hand to relax it and scribbled the following list:
Journalist
Clothing Store Owner
Music Video Dancer
Ambassador to France
A good list, excellent really. These were the jobs that I’d always thought so glamorous and cool. I could almost see myself as a political journalist, a pen tucked behind one ear, the president at the podium, pointing to me and saying, “Kelly,” because of course I’d know the president. The problem was that in reality I had no writing skills to speak of and it probably took twenty years of hard-core newspaper journalism to get on the White House beat.
All the other possible careers I’d listed had impediments, too. I’d love to have my own clothing store, to be able to change outfits in the middle of the day just because I could, but I knew that owning a store was a massive amount of hard work. And as much as I’d been interested in the retail stocks and my own shopping, I really couldn’t envision myself standing in the same shop day after day.
As for the music video career, well, I couldn’t imagine what would be more fun than wearing a don’t-fuck-with-me face and shaking my thing behind J. Lo or whoever, but I could dance about as well as I could remember the last five months. Ditto for the ambassador to France gig. I couldn’t speak French.
I crossed out the list and tore the paper off, giving myself a fresh sheet. I would concentrate on the things that I could do, the activities that truly gave me pleasure, whether or not they could lead to a career.
The thing that came immediately out of the pen was “Photography.”
