Dr. Ruth Coldwell turning her clever little brain onto the science of astrology had been a gift from the friendship gods. I still giggled about it randomly. "Yep, good luck. Hey, by the way, why do you look like a tangerine spokesperson?"
Ruth lifted a half-lidded look of irritation my way. "Cal."
That was all she needed to say. Her doctor boyfriend had definitely been a golden retriever in another life, and he was patentlyobsessedwith Ruth. "He bought that for you, didn't he?"
"He saw it online." Ruth looked pained. "He said it matched my soul."
"It's hideous," I assured her.
"Thank you." She tucked the file under her arm with the rest of her papers. "I'll contact Greg and see if I can find him a decent match." Her gray-blue eyes sharpened on me with keen interest. Once Ruth was focused on something, she didn't miss a thing. And she was clearly focused on me now, despite my attempt to distract her. "What's going on with you?"
"The usual," I replied airily, moving back to my desk. If I told Ruth about my problems with my apartment, she would tell Cal. And then there would be no escaping their disgustingly sweet sex den because he would insist that I move in with them. No one said no to Cal. It wasn't physically possible.
"Gem, you're a worse liar than I am."
Ruth was a pretty bad liar, so that was saying something. I perched my ass on the edge of the desk, flicking a piece of lint off my burgundy and cream plaid skirt. "I don't know. I guess I'm just lacking some… direction. It's no biggie."
That was appropriately confusing for poor Ruth because she got a pucker between her brows and her lips pressed into a thinking pout. "Oh."
"Direction?" Janice asked from just behind Ruth.
I stifled a groan. Of course, my boss would have passed by right as I'd confessed that I was having an existential crisis. Janicelovedexistential crises. She loved to whip out her eerily accurate voodoo witchery and fix them. Ruth shuffled to the side to let Janice into my office, and our boss swept inside with her brightly patterned, multi-colored skirt swishing around her legs and the bangles on her arms clinking. Janice pressed her weathered hands together as she approached me. "Gemma, you've been on my mind. I'm glad I caught you."
I hoped I was on her mind for my stellar performance and not for something worse. Maybe she would give me a raise and I could afford a studio apartment. "It's nothing really," I assured her. "I'm just—" my eyes flicked to Ruth briefly. "I'm figuring some stuff out."
"Ruth, would you mind giving Gemma and me a moment of privacy?" Janice asked without hesitation. I liked that about Janice, actually. She was soft-spoken and kind to everyone, but she also had a directness about her that was more comforting than off-putting.
Ruth nearly scurried away in her haste to obey. "Oh yeah, sure." She paused, hooking me with a suspicious glare. "Dinner later."
"You're on," I agreed readily. Hopefully, I would find a place this afternoon and could actually bitch about it the way I'd been dying to all week.
Ruth left, and Janice folded her hands in front of her as she regarded me. "Now, what's this about direction? You've been a one-winged butterfly all week."
Weirdly macabre, but accurate. I let my head fall back and released a breath of exasperation. "I got evicted."
Janice's gray-streaked, dark brows rose. "Oh my."
"And dumped."
Her expression took on a concerned tilt. "I see."
"And I just feel like nothing is going right for me, lately. You know?"
Janice nodded thoughtfully. "Those energy dips in life can be terribly draining."
I shrugged, looking down at my knees as I leaned back on the desk. "There's nothing anyone can do about it. But if I tell Ruth, she'll try to fix it. And I really can't stand it when people try to fix my life."
Out of misplaced guilt about her divorce, my mother had tried my whole life to “fix” all my problems. Even if I had never seen myentire personalityas a problem. It hadn't gone well for either of us, especially when she had her head in the sand about our real problems. When my dad had left to live with his mistress when I was in elementary school, it had felt like the end of my world. But my mom had done this bizarre thing where she'd pretended absolutely nothing was wrong. Dad wasn't cheating, he was just living apart from us. Mom wasn't crying, she had allergies. They never did get a divorce, and to this day, she asserted that everything wastotally okay. I'd never seen two people more out of control in my life.
Maybe that was why Mom had done everything she could to controlmylife, just so she felt some semblance of control in hers. She had nitpicked me to death—"that boy isn't good enough to date,” “those clothes don't look quite right on you,” “are you sure that's what you want to major in?”
She still lived in Colorado, and I preferred the distance.
"Understandable," Janice agreed gently. "Would you like me to read your palms? It's a silly little thing, but sometimes it helps."
I smiled to myself before glancing up. "Palms, huh?"
Janice held out her soft, time-weathered hands, palms up. "It can't hurt."
