Hand-Me-Down

I growled into the phone and flipped through the Recent Developments. Nothing else caught my eye. Maybe it wasn’t a deal I needed. Maybe it was a new job. Rip walked in as I was glowering at the wall. He looked at my face, looked at the Recent Developments file open on my desk, and slipped into his office, closing his door for protection against the gathering clouds.

I guess I really am like Emily sometimes. But sometimes I’m like Charlotte, too. And I wasn’t going to let myself ruin everything. So I opened the door softly and gave him a smile. It was the job I was VDed with, not the man.

He eyed me suspiciously. “What?”

“I was just thinking how much I like your arms.”

“You want your desk moved again? It’s not getting the afternoon sun?”

“My desk is perfect. So is my boss.”

His suspicion grew into wariness. “How did your call go?”

“I’m this close to closing a big downtown deal.”

“Hung up on you again, huh?”

“Yeah. But I’ve got a plan.”

“Let me guess. It involves taking two-hour lunches?”

I waved an airy hand. “Oh, that—my boss is a pushover.”

“That’s not what I heard. I heard he wants to take it out of your hide.”

“He has to catch me first.”

Wren and I had a standing date Wednesday nights. We’d walk Ny at Hendry’s beach, then head up to the Mesa for a burrito before class. I considered stopping at the antiques store before meeting her, but I wasn’t going to be late to pick up some crusty old chamberpot.

“I’m thinking of quitting.” I put the tray of food on our table outside the burrito place: veggie tacos for me, chicken burrito for Wren, and cheese quesadilla for Ny. “Salsa?”

Wren gave me a look as she unwrapped her burrito. “Why?”

“For spice,” I said, tossing Ny’s quesadilla to the ground. He engulfed it.

She gave me another look. “I mean, why quit?”

“Yeah, I know. For spice.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I dunno…I just think it’s time.”

“What would you do instead?”

“You know I never have trouble getting a job.”

“Just keeping one.”

“I’d still be working at Element, if you hadn’t fired me.”

“If I hadn’t fired you,” she said, biting into her burrito. “There wouldn’t be an Element anymore.”

I made a face at her. “I wasn’t that bad.”

“You were worse. You haven’t broken up with Rip, have you?”

“No.”

“Not yet,” she said.

“You sound like my dad.”

“I like your father.”

“Yeah, a little too much. You want to get it on with my dad, don’t you?”

“I’m serious. Rip is great. You don’t deserve him.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Give him a chance, Anne. I know you’re approaching the sell-by date, but—”

“I’m not,” I insisted. “That’s why I want a new job. To preserve the relationship.”

“I thought you got along great at work.”

“Well, aside from the buzzer.” I toyed with my taco, before pushing it away. “God, Wren, I’m just so…bored. With me, with my job. Everything.”

“Here.” She dumped salsa verde on my taco. “A little more spice.”

For some reason, this made me feel better. Maybe because she seemed to be agreeing with me, even if it was only about the taco. We finished our meals and Wren sat back in her chair, replete from her burrito. “Now all I need is a naked woman and fifty pounds of warm mud, and I’ll be good.”

Twenty minutes later, she got more than she asked for. We were in the main room, the drapes pulled tight over the windows, with spotlights on a beautiful naked man, and Wren was up to her elbows in clay. She rolled her sculpture stand closer to mine and dug a big hunk from a bag of terra-cotta.

We’d been attending the Adult Ed clay sculpture class for the past three years. Originally, we’d started because Wren thought it would be a good place to meet sensitive men, and I thought I’d like mucking around with mud. She’d never found a sensitive man—or an insensitive one, for that matter—but we kept coming.

Our patience had finally been rewarded. In three years, we’d only had a handful of male models, and none of them had looked like Mr. Nude America here. There were a dozen students in the class, held at the Schott Center on the upper west side. The sessions usually started with around twenty-five students, but it was fairly late in the season, and we’d dwindled down to the regulars.

I glanced briefly at the model, clinically observing his broad shoulders and washboard stomach, and when I looked away I noticed that Wren had already roughed out his torso. In clay, that is.

“That was fast,” I said.

She glanced at the clock. “You’ve been staring at the poor guy for twenty minutes.”

“I was examining the subject.”

“And drooling.”