Things Withered Read Online Free Page B

colleague left to join another firm.
    My face would get nearly red with it, and there was always the same, easy—which was not to say, undeserved—target: Richard Maynard. The devil in my eyes.
    I still had a friend in the upper ranks, Oscar Barns. Unlike me, he’d benefited from time and merit and occupied the position under Richard. Of course it had been many years since we were in the pit together, but at least he remembered me as a young thing, attractive and ambitious, and hopefully, more than a few nights of boozy flirting from the days before Kevin and I were married.
    I waited until the end of the week and tapped on his door near the end of the day.
    “Well look who’s stopping by,” he said, with what seemed like genuine affection. “Haven’t seen much of you these days, how are you? How’s Kevin?”
    “Well, you know, I’m still in the pit. I suppose our paths rarely cross.”
    He had the decency to colour at that point, but his smile never wavered. “Come on in, Anita. Let’s catch up.”
    By the end of our meeting, I was so grateful that had it been even three years earlier, I might have cried. Which was strange to me, because the result of the meeting was not entirely positive. Not entirely. But I felt heard, I felt stronger for it, as though forcing the issue without wavering was a bit of magic. But throughout my tenure in that chair, what I felt was that tingle of anger. My hands closed into fists just before I closed the door behind me and stayed that way for a very long time.
    I was clear in my words: I wanted to move up. It was time. I resisted using the word “fair,” since that smacked of girlhood fights on the playground and I wanted to stick with merit and seniority as long as possible before I played such a card. To my benefit, he agreed with me. We went over my numbers and when he raised an eyebrow over the last few months, I bristled and told him my side of things.
    Without getting too detailed, I told him how time and again new territories were split up among all the brokers, how in that system I was no more valued than the newest broker. I tried heartily to keep the bitterness from my voice when I told him about Richard’s heavy-handed demand that I train the newest girl, and his insinuation, real or imagined, that she could be my replacement.
    All the while, my hands were rolled into fists, my fancy, silly, fake fingernails digging into my palms in a way that felt oddly, painfully good. When my voice rose or wavered, my blood pressure climbed and I felt as though my face were getting red and puffed with buried resentments and anger, I would take a deep breath and smile and repeat in my head,
Oscar is not the enemy.
    It worked. To a point.
    The unfortunate ending to our visit was Oscar telling me, “If I could do something more, I would Anita. The best I can do, is to put your name forward when the time comes again.”
    “With emphasis,” I pressed.
    “As much as I can,” he said. “Richard is not a . . . malleable man.” I understood this to be true. I was grateful and I said so. There was a long enough pause at the end of the conversation that I knew it was over.
    It dragged me home. The best I could do had been done, and I had been grateful for Oscar’s
as much as I can.
I disgusted myself as much as I was terribly thrilled with the feeling of that anger. Once home that afternoon, I ate the rest of Kevin’s takeout of roast beef from several nights earlier. Ate the whole thing, standing at the fridge.
    Delicious.
    I went to the memorial service for the Bramleys, held a few weeks after the tragedy. The memorial was for their New York friends, since their children lived all over the country.
    Kevin and I arrived almost late; I had been showing an apartment on the upper East side that I felt quite good about. The block was mid-range for the area, and my commission wouldn’t be very high, but I’d hit it off with the couple I’d shown it to, and they were young and in