she wanted, even a schmuck like Zach Jones. And Adam had a right not to talk to her about it. So he’d limited his contact to a few random, somewhat impersonal e-mails—and her responses weren’t more than acknowledgments. Maybe she was avoiding him, too?
He shoveled in another mouthful of pad thai, slightly colder than the last bite. Elmer turned his puppy face up to the dark clouds in the distance and a stray raindrop blew into his eye. He blinked and shook and yelped again, wagging his happy tail.
The thing was, Molly had no idea Adam’s silence was anything but golden. She had no idea how inexplicably annoyed he was with her, with her uncharacteristically poor judgment. But if he failed to call her on her birthday, that was an egregious error. One that she would remember and hold over his head. That part, he could handle. But she’d be hurt, too, and that part he couldn’t handle. Hurting a woman like Molly Jackson by not calling her on her birthday would make him the schmuck.
Another bite of dinner was the deciding factor. “I think this is destined for the microwave, buddy,” he said, standing. Elmer leaped as high as he could, barely scraping Adam’s kneecap.
“Down, boy. I meant for tomorrow,” Adam said. “For lunch.” He stepped into his living room and Elmer trotted in behind him. Adam slid the door shut. “I have to make a call,” he continued, heading into the kitchen and reaching under the sink for the aluminum foil. “I have to wish Molly a happy birthday. I don’t know what else we’re going to talk about, but I know one thing is for sure.” He tore off a piece of foil, fitted it over the dinner plate and slid it into the refrigerator. “It’ll probably be a more interesting and complex conversation than these deep ones I have with you. No offense.”
Elmer wagged his tail, eyeballing the bottom shelf of the open refrigerator. Adam closed the door.
“You and I have fun, though, huh?” He rubbed his dog’s head. “Molly. Now that’s a girl who’s not about fun. She’s about work. Maybe she thinks work is fun.”
Elmer groaned and lay down on the linoleum.
“I agree. She’s nuts. People like that—” An image of his father floated to the front of his memory. Dad, who always did everything one-handed because the other hand was always clutching either a phone or a legal pad or his briefcase. “People like that—they die way too early,” Adam finished weakly. “They’re not for us.”
Elmer stared at him, uncomprehending.
“Molly is—well, Molly just needs to get out more,” Adam said.
Remembering that the last time he saw Molly she was going out and then he held it against her, he felt bad enough to finally grab the phone off the charger and dial her number. Before he got to the last digit, he hung up and tried to decide how he was going to musically deliver the happy birthday message. Traditional version? Beatles version? Finally deciding on the smelling-like-a-monkey version—even though he suspected he might have done that one last year—he redialed Molly’s number.
“Hello?”
Something was wrong. Molly’s voice was muffled, like she was speaking into the wrong end of a megaphone, or she was underwater, or she was…crying?
Molly? Crying?
“Molly?”
He was answered with a big, wet sniffle.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for the birthday blues,” he ventured.
No answer yet, but was that a sob? Sounded like a strangled something in the back of her throat.
Worried, Adam tried again with humor. “Come on, Moll, maybe you’re over the hill but you’re not totally decrepit yet. You looked pretty good the last time I saw you.” In that short black dress and illegally high heels, she’d looked better than pretty good, in fact. And he hadn’t been the only one who’d thought so.
“Thirty-two is not over the hill, Shibbs,” she finally said, petulance obvious even under the sniffling.
“Sure it is. It’s all downhill from here.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes right now.”
That wasn’t what worried Adam, because Molly wasn’t exactly someone aligned to Adam’s constant levity. It was the tears that were concerning. “Come on. Didn’t your birthday wishes come true?”
“Actually, let me think,” she said, sniffling so hard she coughed twice. “You know, I guess they did come true after all. This morning I woke up and thought, ‘Oh, it’s my birthday. I think the best gift anyone can give me today is a nice big stack of walking papers!’ And I had to wait the whole day, but just as I was finishing up work, at the very last second, I got my wish!”
Adam’s mouth hung open, and he thought it was very possible he was just as surprised as Molly must have been. “You got fired?”
“Only by my biggest client. No big deal.” She sighed, and a little sob came out with it.
“I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“I never got fired before.”
Neither had Adam, but he considered it best to keep that to himself. Molly was well aware of his relaxed work style, and it wasn’t going to make her feel any better that she’d now been canned one more time than he had.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It wasn’t me. It was budget cuts. They had to let a lot of people go. An outside consultant wasn’t someone they were willing to save at the expense of one of their full-timers.”
“Of course not.”
“I begged them to keep me. I told them I’d revise our plans, make it more affordable, anything. It was humiliating, the way I acted. It was even worse than the firing part.”
“Then why did you?”
“I’m losing a big chunk of income.”
“Listen, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Well, I can’t exactly write ‘Not my fault’ on my mortgage check.”
“No, but your business has been going well enough to land you that gig in the first place. M.J. Consulting has a great rep. You’ll get another job soon enough. And you’ve got other clients. So you’ll eat mac-and-cheese and Ramen noodles for a couple of weeks, and by then you’ll have recovered. Tighten your belt a little.”
“Trust me, that’s not even physically possible.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed again, and this time it wasn’t accompanied by sobs and sniffles. Just noisy mouth breathing, caused by her now certainly stuffed nose.
“You know, I’ve been asking you for years to breathe heavy for me on the phone, babe, but you refused,” he joked.
“We can’t eat Ramen for weeks,” Molly said flatly.
“Sure you can. I can teach you 750 ways to cook that stuff—” Wait a minute. We? “We?”
