She was developing an acne problem already, just a few months after turning thirteen. One of the many revelations of adoption: whatever had happened to you at the age your daughter was now, good or bad, whatever changes you went through, early or late — it was irrelevant, it was of no value to anyone. Even the fact that Sara and her mother were of different races somehow hadn’t prepared Helen for the shock of her own uselessness in that regard. There were no genetic predictors. You were as surprised by what she became as she was.
On Thursday Helen was filling out some parental-consent forms for school and watching CNN with the sound down, in case anything major happened somewhere in the world, when the phone rang. “Helen, it’s Harvey Aaron,” she heard. “Listen, I am very pleased to tell you that for various reasons those two other guys didn’t work out and so I’d like to offer you the job here, if you’re still available, that is. Probably rude of me just to assume that you’re still available. I’m sorry for that. So are you?”
“Yes,” said Helen, amazed, hearing her own voice while watching the anchorwoman’s lips move silently on the TV. “I am available.”
Harvey asked if she could start as soon as Monday, and she almost said no, but then she realized that there was nothing other than fear of the unknown that would prevent her starting two hours from right now, if it came to that. She hung up and, after a few moments, whooped with laughter. What the hell had she just done? Harvey himself seemed so chaotic, and the office so moribund, that it wouldn’t have surprised her if the whole operation went under before she cashed her first paycheck; she had to remind herself that the place had somehow stayed in business for thirty years. It was the first instance of good timing her life had seen in quite a while. She finished off the endless school forms — liability waivers, most of them — with a much lighter heart. That night at dinner, she told Sara what had happened, and what to expect in terms of the change in their routines.
“They hired you? Really? A PR firm? No offense,” Sara said. “Well, it’s a good thing, I guess. I mean I’ve been wondering if we were just going to go broke or what.”
“We’re not going to go broke,” Helen said quickly. “But it’s true, we do need some money coming in while your father’s not working.” It was so much more dire than that, but Helen was constitutionally averse to talking about money with her child. Besides, she didn’t really want to find out how much Sara already knew. “And now we’ll have it. So that’s great.”
Sara looked thoughtful. “What time will you get home?” she said.
“Six,” Helen said, though in truth she and Harvey hadn’t discussed it. She hadn’t even thought to ask him. “But you’ve got soccer until five most days anyway, and you can go to friends’ houses if you don’t want to be here alone, and you’ve got the cellphone if you need anything and the neighbors—”
“Yeah, I think I can survive here for an hour or two all by myself,” Sara said acidly. “But I mean—”
“What?” Helen said.
“What about just moving to the city?”
Helen blanched. It was something she had planned to wait at least a month before bringing up as a possibility, on the grounds that there was only so much change a child should be asked to accommodate in one shot. But Sara’s whole life was founded on upheaval. It was Helen, really, who had a limit on how much of a chance she was willing to take that life might improve if they just tried their luck somewhere else.
“First things first,” she said. “Let’s bank a few paychecks and then see where we are. But that’s something you’d be willing to consider?”
Sara snorted. “Consider? Try dream of,” she said. “These people are hicks. And now they all think they’re better than us. Plus I’m not saying I want to forget about Dad or anything but it would be kind of a relief to be able to look at something, or someone, that doesn’t remind me he’s not here. Is there dessert?”
On Monday Helen took the earlier, more crowded train, full of tense faces and clubby nods of recognition, and showed up at work so far ahead of schedule she had to wait in the hallway for ten minutes until Mona arrived with a key to let her in. She expected some kind of formal orientation, but instead Mona just showed her how to set up Google news alerts for all nine of the business’s current clients, as well as twelve other names Harvey had identified as potential clients. When that was done, it was just a matter of waiting for these alerts to show up in her inbox; in the meantime she was handed a stack of gossip magazines and asked to scan them thoroughly for any mention of those same twenty-one names. Harvey came in around eleven; he looked surprised to see Helen sitting there at her desk but then nodded quickly in embarrassment, went into his office without a word to her and shut the door.
Mona and the other employee there, whose name was Nevaeh, spoke all day long to each other but never once to Helen, unless it was to answer some question they couldn’t pretend not to know the answer to, like where the ladies’ room was. At four forty-five they reapplied their makeup and left without a word to the boss or to Helen. The whole first week was like that. She didn’t mind the idleness, or the feeling of being ignored — this wasn’t some journey of personal growth or something, she was just looking to keep herself and her child out of the poorhouse — but so little happened around there that she didn’t see how any of their jobs could possibly last. She was relieved when Mona handed her her first paycheck and then relieved all over again when it cleared. When she mentioned to Harvey that she didn’t feel like she had that much to do, he looked embarrassed and said, “Hurry up and wait, as they used to tell us in the Army,” and went back into his office with a bag full of Chinese food and shut the door.
“The guy who used to have your job quit to go back to school,” Mona finally told her. “He didn’t have nothing to do either. But if Harvey doesn’t hire someone to take his place, that’s like admitting that the business is shrinking.”
Then one morning Harvey came in on time for once and called all three women into his office. “I think we may have something here,” he said. “I went out to Brooklyn last night to have dinner with my son, and the two of us ordered out for some Chinese. Any of you ever heard of Peking Grill?”
Mona and Nevaeh nodded sagely. “There’s one up in the Heights,” Nevaeh said.
“Right,” Harvey said, “there’s like eight of them. Anyway, we call and ask for a delivery, and they say no. No? They say no, we can’t, because our delivery guys are on strike. But you’re still open? I say. Sure. So Michael and I walk three blocks to Peking Grill, and we have to cross a god damn picket line to get in, and inside it’s empty except for one guy who’s sitting alone at a table and crying, for Pete’s sake. Sobbing. He’s the owner.”
“Disgusting,” Mona said.
Harvey glanced at her curiously but then went on. “So someone is apparently trying to unionize the deliverymen at all the Peking Grills, which I would think would be difficult because pretty much everyone who works there is illegal, but nevertheless. They are picketing the owner not only for a wage hike but for back wages for all the years they say they were underpaid. I ask him if he’s had any calls from the papers, and he says yes, just that day, from somebody at the Post. He hasn’t returned it yet.”
He sat back in his chair. “So I sense an opening here,” he said. “For us. For us to intervene.”
Mona and Nevaeh just went on nodding, but Helen, who couldn’t help herself, said, “On which side?”
The two women shot her an angry look, and all of a sudden Helen understood that they weren’t really following any of what Harvey said either but had just settled on nodding as the quickest way to get through these enthusiasms of his and back to their desks. Harvey, though, looked delighted and indulgently thoughtful, as if he were only pretending to think through a question for a student’s benefit, even though someone of his intelligence would have known the answer instinctively. “Well,” he said, “the deliverymen don’t really have much of a public image problem, do they? I mean, they risked their lives to get here, they’re being paid about two dollars an hour, they’re sleeping Christ knows where. Everybody already sympathizes with them. In New York, they do, at least. If we were somewhere in flyover country, they’d have a posse out for these guys, but hey, this is Manhattan. Whereas this owner, who came here in exactly the same circumstances but then had the temerity to actually succeed, to make himself a millionaire — his name is Chin, by the way — he’s being portrayed as the villain, he’s the one with the story that needs to get out. He’s the one in need of our expert services. Which is what I convinced him of last night while we ate some very delicious chow fun.”