Month of Sundays Read Online Free

thinking out loud. She weighed her reasons for going on the show against her reasons for staying put. “I don’t have a girlfriend, my family’s in California, and work will be there when I get back. What have I got to lose?” She rolled her pen between her palms like a dice player hoping to roll a lucky seven. “If I lose early, my critics will rake me over the coals and I’ll never hear the end of it. But if I win, it will feel so good to say, ‘I told you so.’”
    She signed the contract.

    *

    “Good evening, Fernando.”
    The concierge on duty looked up from a copy of a Spanish-language newspaper and returned Rachel’s greeting. “How was your evening?”
    “Let’s go with interesting.”
    “In a good way?”
    “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
    Rachel crossed the lobby and headed to the mailroom. Orderly rows of locked steel boxes lined the walls. Her box was full but didn’t contain anything she wanted. Just the latest round of bills and a couple trees’ worth of catalogs. Nothing said the holidays like a boxful of retail therapy. She tossed the catalogs into a nearby recycle bin and returned to the concierge desk.
    With the end of the year rapidly approaching, tax season was about to kick in to gear. Rachel was going to be up to her ears from now until the following April. Some clients came to her with their supporting documentation neatly organized in color-coded notebooks. They were the easy ones and, in her mind, the most boring. She preferred the filers who showed up with shoeboxes overflowing with dog-eared receipts. Sifting through the mess to see what she could keep and what she needed to ignore made her job more difficult but more fun as well. She enjoyed the challenge.
    Besides, accounting wasn’t as cut-and-dried as it was perceived to be. From those boxes of disorganized receipts, she could re-create a year in people’s lives, one scrap of paper at a time. What could be better than that? Oh, yeah. Having a life of her own.
    Fernando and his wife, Montserrat, were two of her early birds. Each year, they made a beeline to her office as soon as they received their W-2s from their respective employers. They left her their paperwork, she phoned them if she had any follow-up questions, and she produced their completed return as quickly as she could.
    “Montserrat brought me some of your information this morning. If all goes well, I should have your return ready the same day you provide me with your W-2s.”
    Fernando’s eyes lit up at her news. According to Montserrat, the couple planned to use their refund to book a trip to Madrid to visit relatives and were eager to get the money in their hands so they could start searching the Internet for cheap flights.
    “That’s fantastic, Miss Bauer.” Fernando’s thick eyebrows, which often seemed to move independently of each other, furrowed into a uniform line of concern. “But at the risk of offending you, please allow me to say I think you work too much. When was the last time you did something you wanted to do? When was the last time you had a…how do you say?” He motioned for her to provide the phrase he couldn’t come up with.
    “A Me Day?” she said.
    “Yes. When was the last time you had one of those?”
    She tapped her utility bills against the edge of the desk. “Too long.”
    “Then why don’t you take the weekend off? You could see a movie. Perhaps go to the park. Maybe invite a nice lady out to dinner?”
    His grin was infectious. His enthusiasm was, too, but she was too tired to catch either.
    “We’ll see.” She bade him good night and headed for the elevator. Before the doors closed, she heard him call Montserrat and relay the news that their travel plans could begin in earnest. As the elevator car rose to her floor, she felt her spirits sink even further than they had when she left Maidenhead.
    She felt completely and utterly alone. Before tonight, she thought being alone was enough for her. Now she