Sweet Bye-Bye (3 page)

So it wasn’t so much that I thought I was unattractive. No, no, I used what people saw when they looked at me, when I needed to. It was just that, well, I had a good mind. And I worked hard to show people that I was smart. But lots of times folks weren’t interested in that.

My mole, my eyes, my looks, they came from my real mother. I didn’t know her, though, because she died when I was five years old. She had sickle-cell, and she lost so much weight that I thought she was melting. A strange thing about that, however, is that when she died, I started to cry, and Dad told me not to. He’d hug me and say, “Don’t cry, princess, everything will be okay.” So I’d wipe my eyes and try to smile. Every time the tears started to fill my eyes, Dad would get really anxious, and he’d try to tell me jokes or take me to a movie, and he’d tell me to “just try not to think about it.” I didn’t like to see my dad act so strange, so I learned to stop crying. It had been twenty-three years, and I’d never cried another day over my mother.

I suppose I got my theories on soul-mate-ism from my parents. I remember once, my dad told me that he married my real mother because from the moment they first conversed, she tugged at his soul. I wasn’t sure what tugging at your soul felt like, but I’d guess that Eric and I did that, sometimes. Tia herself said that we looked like black models from a Gap commercial. And that’s important. You should look happy and vibrant. People treat you better when they think you have money, or are beautiful. They want to be your friend. Besides that, if you keep up the front, then people never really know how bad you feel.

Dad always said I was a princess, and I believed him . . . In a way I still did. A princess was attractive, and single, and she had beautiful clothes. Yeah, I tried to fill the bill, but I didn’t like it when people called me snooty or stuck-up. I just wanted to put my best foot forward so people saw me in a positive light. Just because you want to look presentable, that didn’t make you “a piece of work.” Just because you didn’t go around showing everybody your pain, that didn’t mean that you don’t have any. People should know that. But hey, if they couldn’t understand that, too bad. I wasn’t going to go around with my hair undone, waving a white flag and looking like I had trials in my life, cuz it wasn’t nobody’s business. With me, everyone got the same story: The life of Chantell Meyers is fantastic!

“So, are you guys going to the big game this year?” That was Ron.

“For sho,” said Eric. “I went down to the Berkeley ticket office last Friday. You guys?”

“Definitely. Ron’s client brought him over some great Stanford seats,” said Tia.

I knew that my real mother went to Stanford. That perhaps should have been something that I was proud of, but it was deep in my past. After you’ve ignored something for so long, the desire to speak about it just subsides. I kept eating in silence.

I’d always been private that way. I had my share of bills, and despite the way things may have appeared, they were hard to juggle by myself. I was getting older and my biological clock was ticking. But I figured, once Eric and I got married, things would fall into place.

I took another sip from my glass and looked over at my beau. The water was refreshing. Eric had let his goatee grow a little thicker than normal. He was talking to Ron about the junker car that he was restoring.

“. . . And I’m going to get two racing stripes painted on the doors before I take it down to the track.” The ice hit the bottom of my empty cup as I set it back on the table.

“Oh, yeah. That’s going to be nice!” said Ron.

“Yeah, it should be. I named her Margarita.” He looked over at me. “Chantell’s jealous. She doesn’t like me spending all of my spare time going to wrecking yards looking for parts for Margarita. But trust me, when she’s all finished and looking beautiful”—he pointed at me—“she’ll want a key.” He chuckled.

I laughed too, because I probably would want a key. Not because I was into race cars or anything, but because he was ready to share with me. I really liked him, though he sometimes was a little inconsiderate, like when he turned off his phone and my dad was sick. He was out at the Pick and Pull under the hood of a car with his phone off at the time. I was so mad at him, but, hey, it was just happenstance, and I was trying to be about peace. I smiled at him while he talked. Eric Summit was a keeper, and I was in it for the long haul.

The back of my throat was a little dry and the waitress hadn’t been back around yet, so I picked up Eric’s glass and put it to my mouth. But before the water could roll down and reach my lips, Eric said, “Hey! What are you doing? That’s not your cup.”

3

Workin’ 9 to 5

I
t had been three weeks since my father’s collapse, and he was still improving. Yesterday he had even tried to go for a walk, but both Charlotte and I weren’t having any of that. We sent him right back to bed.

So I was back to work still trying to make good on the promises that I’d made to God at the hospital. I adjusted the earpiece to my phone and walked toward my building.

I stood out on the sidewalk for a moment and took my cell phone out of my purse. The bright San Francisco sun towered above. I needed to remind Eric about our plans for tomorrow night before I started what I knew was going to be a hectic day at the office. I looked around the haze-free sky and saw that the San Franciscans were loving it. Everyone had sunglasses on. A couple of ladies had tied their suit jackets around their waists and were power-walking. I dialed the number and Eric’s phone rang. Around me, the tone of businessmen’s mellow laughs appeared to have picked up an octave. People went on about their lives just a bit more animated.

“Hey, babe, it’s me. I just wanted to leave you a quick note to remind you about tomorrow night. The boat leaves at eight, so let’s meet at . . . say, seven o’clock? Okay, that’s it. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.” I hung up and rushed inside to catch an elevator already filled up with people.

It didn’t feel like my life had changed all that much. I mean, with me now being close to God and all. As soon as I got to my cubicle, my desk phone rang. “Hello. Yes, Mr. Felton . . . Sure, no problem!” I said in a bright and chipper voice.

It was my new client, Kauffman’s Sporting Goods. John Felton, the small chain’s marketing manager, was getting jittery about the success of their half-yearly sale that was fast approaching that weekend.

He was nervous about the headline that he had chosen for the ad. “Do you think it sounds okay?” He was nervous about the number of readers who would see the ads. “How many people did you say read the paper?”

There was quite a bit of stress in my life, and to be honest, I’m not sure how conscious I was of it. I was busy reassuring him that we could help him get his company’s message around the Bay Area when I overheard two of my coworkers talking.

Mina, a woman whom I had unfortunately worked with for four years, was whispering to Gary, the new account manager in the office. Even at a whisper, her high-pitched voice came right over to my side of the thin cubicle.

“Shhh! Don’t even worry about it. It’s new business,” she said.

I tried to ignore her. She was the kind of coworker that the rest of us could do without. Gary definitely didn’t need
her
training him.

I jotted down a few follow-up notes and wrapped up the call. “Sure. Your ad will run in the Monday Business edition for three of the six months . . . Nope, I have everything I need.” I closed the file and put my new Kate Spade bag in the bottom drawer of my desk. “Sure. And, Mr. Felton, please call me if you have any more concerns or questions. That is what I am here for. You too, bye-bye.”

I hung up the phone and tried to ignore the woman on the other side of the cubicle. To be fair, it’s not that we hated each other, it was just that we kept butting heads. I couldn’t count the number of times in the past that the newspaper had held contests and Mina and I had fought tooth and nail to win the trip to Palm Springs or the $500 gift certificate to Nordstrom. She was as money-motivated as I was, so yeah, it got personal.

And, yeah, I know that I said that I was trying to live right, but I was not exactly ready to say “God bless you” when she’d just rolled her eyes or scrunched up her lips at me.

I ignored the two and called to check on Daddy. “So how’s he doing this morning?”

“He’s sleepin’ now, but he’s doing okay.”

“Oh, that’s good.” I silently thanked the Lord, my new best friend again.

Charlotte went on to say, “I made a big pot of chicken noodle soup last night. He ate some of that this mornin’.”

After we hung up, I sent an e-mail to the sales assistant, asking her if she could help me in getting some changes quickly made to another client’s ad before tomorrow’s press run.

It was a few minutes later that I heard Mina come back over to Gary’s cube, and this time I had reason to be concerned. It was muffled, but I was sure she said to him either “. . . support Skyway Modems” or “. . . separate from Skyway Modems.” Either way, Skyway was my account, and nobody at the newspaper should have been dealing with them except for upper management or myself. I’d found them last year and had grown the account from a tiny, one-time, business-card-sized advertisement into an account worth over a million dollars. I made as little noise as possible and strained my ears to hear . . .

“It’s a spin-off, so it’s new business,” Mina boldly encouraged.

My account, Skyway Modems was launching a new service in the fall, and I guessed that was what Mina was encouraging him to go after. Gary was new to the
San Francisco Daily News
and just a tadpole in the pond of account managers, but Mina was determined to turn him into a snake. I got up and walked around the thin carpeted divider and over toward his desk to see just what was going on.

Sure enough, they were looking in an
Adweek
magazine at Skyway’s blue-and-white logo at the bottom of a black page. Mina was standing over Gary while he made notes in a crisp, new manila folder.

I started to walk up to them, wanting to say, “Excuse you! You’re busted! That’s my account, you account thieves!” But a sistah had to be more professional than that. My mind raced with options as I neared Gary’s desk. I could have approached them and acted surprised and said, “Is that something for
my
account, Skyway Modems, that you’re working on for me? Thank you!”

I chose a different tactic. “Hi, guys, I see that you are checking out Skyway’s new product line. It doesn’t launch until September. Are you writing that up for me?” I said with a smile.

“No. Well, uh, this is new business, and actually it’s going to be separate from what you’re doing with them,” said Gary, who then looked at Mina like he expected her to give him a thumbs-up.

Mina pushed her glasses up closer to her face with her index finger. With her fiery red hair twisted up into her trademark bun, she just gave him a subtle approving nod. I looked at the new employee, then back to Mina. Was she so desperate to be the lone big dog in the yard that she would resort to setups and account stealing? Why was she encouraging this kind of shenanigan (shenanigan—a word I picked up from my grandmother)?

“Nothing about Skyway is new,” I said confidently. “They have been with me all year, Gary. In fact, I’m very aware of the new division that they are planning to launch.” This was getting ridiculous. “Thank you, Gary, but I’ve got Skyway Modems covered. Really I do.” I was smiling but I was getting a little irritated. I folded my arms and said with certainty, “So, are you writing up that paperwork for practice, or are you starting that file for me?”

Gary shook his head no. “I’m sorry, Chantell, it’s new business. It hasn’t run in our paper before, so I found it.”

Mina smiled and shrugged her shoulders. Then her cell phone rang. “Hey, I’ll let you guys work this out. Excuse me,” she said and walked away.

“You can’t do that. It’s clearly a part of my account.”

“I can respect your opinion, but I’ve already put in the request to management.”

Apparently, Gary wasn’t a tadpole in the pond after all. Nope, homeboy was a piranha. A piranha who wanted to play hardball, so I grabbed the bat and stepped up to the plate.

I did what any top-producing sales rep in good standing would do. I stormed into Canun Ramsey’s office and acted a plum fool! With my arms outstretched, I told Canun that I was shocked at what was going on on the sales floor! With my hands at my hips, I said I’d been with the paper far too long to have to deal with that kind of tomfoolery! I held my shoulders back and spoke with authority. “This is outrageous! We are supposed to be a team. Where is the teamwork in self-thievery?” When I walked out of Canun’s office, my Skyway Modem account was fully intact. I breezed back to my desk cool and calm. Oh yeah! Shoot, I may have even switched a little when I walked. And that Mina Everett, I didn’t see her face for the rest of the day. One point for the home team, zero for the visitors. I put on a fresh coat of lipstick and thought, Go team!

If I only had known. The game was just getting started.

4

Sail On

I
pulled into the pier’s parking lot. The networking event was being put on by a company called mymail.com, aboard a dining cruise. The e-mail said that the event would last from 8 p.m. until 11 p.m. It was still pretty early, so there I sat in the parking lot, one of the first people to arrive.

Except for location changes, the monthly networking events were pretty much the same, month in and month out. Folks would start out ultraconservative: “Oh, hi there! It’s Sarah, right? Ben, dear, look, it’s Sarah. You remember Sarah, don’t you? We met her at the Society of Online Marketing’s event last month? Sarah, you were working for bigheadhuntingmonsters.com, right?”

Then at the end of the evening, after the speeches and the announcements, and after Grand Marnier and tequila shots, it was: “Whooohoo! Ceelll-a-brate Good Tiiimes, Come On!”

I knew the routine and was pretty used to it. I looked in my rearview mirror and put on my lipstick.

The night quickly moved in and I still didn’t see Eric. I decided to wait for him in the lobby on the ship. I walked up the ramp that led to the ship and felt my new pink-and-red dress’s jagged edges dangle at my knees each time I took a step.