Swept Away

“HoHos, Cheetos, Dr. Pepper and beer? You call that food?”

“Sounds good to me,” Candy said with a shrug. More than once she and Matt had vied for the last sack of Cheetos or package of HoHos in the SyncUp snack machines. They shared junk food preferences if nothing else.

“Did you remember sunscreen?” Ellie asked, hands on hips. When Matt shrugged, she sighed. “I’ll pick up some. Along with some healthy food.”

“I can feed myself, Ellie.” He paused. “There’s no point arguing, is there?”

“Not really, no.”

“Do what you must then.” He sighed, but he was smiling. Obviously, Matt had plenty of experience with his sister’s nurturing ways. Candy liked the rapport between them.

Setting her ancient laptop beside Matt’s razor-thin model already open to e-mail, Candy noticed the neat spread of folders beside it, proving that Matt was a master at working vacations. He was already at it and they’d all barely arrived.

“But what about entertaining yourself?” Ellie said. “You’re not going to sit here all week at the computer. You work too hard. Both of you. Especially you, Candy.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. But Candy loved Ellie for overacting on her behalf.

Ellie snatched a flyer from behind a magnet on the refrigerator and carried it to where Candy and Matt stood at the table. “Look at all these Sin on the Beach festival events.” She handed Matt the flyer and lowered her voice. “No moping now. There are other fish in the sea.” She was obviously referring to the breakup with Ice Princess Jane.

“I’ll be fine, Ellie,” Matt said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Then I guess my work here is done.” Ellie gave a pointed look at Candy, then hip-swayed to the door. Because Matt had moved to the kitchen, Candy was able to shoot her a quick thumbs-up as she left.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he called from the open refrigerator. “A beer?”

“Water is fine, since I’m working and all.” Was that overkill? Maybe. She sighed.

She couldn’t help thinking how great it would be to just kick back in this cozy bungalow with a beer and Matt and those blue-sky eyes of his. But that was the old Candy. The new one had a vital task to achieve.

She shifted her laptop and it knocked one of Matt’s files to the floor, fanning paper across the white tiles.

The first doc she retrieved was a PQ2 report with Matt’s name on a label at the top. Also attached to it was a pink Post-It note in the bold script of their CEO, Scott Bayer. See me re: changes!

Matt arrived with her glass of water and his beer.

She handed him the report form. “You took the PQ2?”

“Scott required all the managers to take it.”

“What changes is he talking about? In the test?”

Matt gave a humorless laugh. “No. In the managers. He wants us to address the weaknesses the test revealed.”

“What weaknesses could you possibly have?” she teased.

“Exactly.” He grinned his great half smile. “According to the PQ2, I’m low on sociability.” He sat next to her. “Do I strike you as antisocial, Candy?” He looked at her so directly her heart tightened in her chest. “Be honest.”

“You don’t chit-chat. You’re pretty direct. I’d say you’re more nonsocial than actually antisocial.”

“Nonsocial. Yeah. I like that. I guess I don’t get the function of small talk. Make your point and move on. Why waste time?”

“But informal talk eases tension, makes people feel comfortable—safe to take risks. A little back-and-forth about the weekend, the Suns game or the nephew’s bar mitzvah greases the wheel of ideas, gets people psyched to tackle tough issues.”

He paused, pondering her words, she could tell. She’d never dug up a rationale for what seemed so obvious to her.

“I suppose that makes sense,” Matt mused. “The proximate issue is that Scott expects me to score some clients at the convention. It’s next month, so I’ve got to get better at backslapping and schmoozing right away.”

“Sounds like fun.”

He smiled. “To you, sure.” He gave her that look that made her wiring crackle. “But I’m not you.”

No, wait. The crackling was coming from her borrowed laptop, which was grinding to life with agonizing slowness and enough noise that Candy expected some of Ellie’s espresso to drip out.

“For what it’s worth, the PQ2 got me wrong, too,” Candy said.

“How so?”

“It made me seem like I don’t take work seriously.”

“You? No! How could that be?” His eyes twinkled at her. “Maybe because of the time you brought in all those cans of Silly String and made a mess in the lab?”

“Everyone was getting cranky. We needed a break. And it cleaned up easy.”

“Or how about when you spiked the Halloween punch?”

“Come on. It was a party. I warned Valerie first.”

“She was pregnant, right?” He nodded. “Your costume was…interesting.”

She’d dressed as a zombie hooker, which would have been fine, except she’d only convinced a few people to dress up, so she sort of stood out.

“Happy workers are productive workers, Matt. There are studies that show the benefits of morale building and—”

“As I recall, three people went home too drunk to work, someone tossed their pumpkin cookies into a trash can and everyone else but Val slept away the afternoon over their keyboards.”

He was smiling, but light glanced off his lenses and she couldn’t tell if he was amused or making fun of her. The Halloween party had been early in Matt’s time at SyncUp. If she’d known that six months later he’d be her boss, she might have been more careful about how she behaved around him.

“As I recall, you laughed a lot. Plus, you won the one-on-one wastepaper basketball tournament the next month.”

“Your idea, too, correct?”

“We’d put in two sixty-hour weeks on the Payroll Plus revision. We needed a break.” She’d come up with the idea of a modified basketball game using office chairs with trash cans on file cabinets for baskets and wadded printouts as the balls.

“That was fun,” he mused.

“And afterward, we were refreshed for more work. Work hard, play hard, that’s my philosophy.” She hoped he’d buy that. It sounded like a bluff. That’s how her family would see it, considering her history. She’d been erratic in college, uncertain in the work world and switched jobs a lot. Her parents, on the other hand, had built a business from scratch and her brothers had bee-lined from law school to successful law practices without an eye-blink of doubt. The four of them thought her a flake and the idea seared her with hot shame.

“I see.” Matt seemed to be fighting a grin.