Of course, I thought, as I finally squished my way inside. It always rained when you were running late for your very first power lunch with your boss and forgot to check the weather.
To make matters oh so much better, there was a lithe and perfect Nordic hostess behind the podium inside. She acknowledged my sopping presence with a slight lift of her eyebrow. But then she smiled nicely.
“Welcome to Patroon. Name?” she asked.
I stood there as tall and regally as I could, doing my damnedest to pretend that being as wet as a drowned rat was the new black.
“Nina,” I said, flicking my ruined hair out of my eyes with a hopefully gracious and professionally competent smile. “My name is Nina Bloom.”
I’d lucked out. My boss hadn’t arrived yet, so I was able to do some rehab work on my makeup and hair in the ladies’ room before I returned to the discreet banquette where I’d been seated.
As I waited, I kicked back for the first time and drank in the vista. Carefully seated inside the modern power-lunch mecca, big-hitter media elites in bespoke tailoring were cutting deals beside Botoxed A-list fashionistas. Among the bottles of San Pellegrino, I spotted Ivanka Trump and Anderson Cooper chatting it up.
Well, it was more like I studiously ignored Ivanka and Anderson, like we were currently not speaking. I had picked up on one or two things living in Manhattan for the last couple of decades.
After a moment, I smiled and raised my own glass of sparkling water toward the room of power players and took a sip. Given my arrival in New York in 1994 with nothing but the clothes on my back and Emma in my belly, I had good reason to toast myself.
Most of all just for surviving.
I thought about all the craziness of those first few years. The skeevy dive bar around the corner from Madison Square Garden where I worked until I started to show. The place in Chinatown where I got my first fake ID. The shoebox of an apartment in Spanish Harlem that I brought Emma home to after giving birth at Lenox Hill Hospital.
My “big-shot career,” as Emma called it, came later. After some extremely creative résumé writing and a New York Career Institute class and a whole lot of luck, I’d scored my first non-waitressing job as a paralegal at Scott, Maxwell and Bond, one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the city.
I thought working at a law firm would be just a way to make a little more money, but from the get-go I found myself enthusiastically drawn to the work. There was something so exciting about being even a small part of the cases and issues and war room strategizing. After the chaos that had been my life up until that point, I found comfort in the law, its authority, its rationality, its calm and inherent nobleness.
The luckiest thing of all was that after I proved my usefulness in a class action suit, my boss, Tom Sidirov, a legendary litigator and even better person, practically demanded that I go to City College and then Fordham Law School on the firm’s dime.
It had taken almost ten years of work and night school, and thousands of logged hours on the New York City subway, but I eventually pulled it off. I became a lawyer. I’d even passed the New York bar exam on my first try.
Over the last three and a half years, my career had steadily started to pick up speed. I wasn’t in line to make partner anytime soon, but I had my own cases now, my own clients, even my own personal assistant.
All my hard work at the office and as a mom was starting to reap some pretty plush dividends, I thought, as I sat in the tastefully done restaurant. There weren’t supposed to be second acts in American lives, but I was giving it a pretty good go. I was finally starting to come across things I’d never dreamed I ever would again.
Stability. Fun. Dare I even say its name?
Hope.
It seemed that after two decades and a thousand miles, maybe I’d finally run far enough. For a moment there among the high-rent chatter and clacking crockery, I think I actually felt safe.
That’s what made what happened next so wrong, so utterly unfair.
Because as I sat there toasting myself, it wasn’t just my boss who was on his way.
As I sat cozy and dry and warm and stupidly proud of myself, my rude awakening and reckoning was already hurtling toward me, bigger and badder than ever before.
Chapter 52
“IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?” my boss, Tom Sidirov, said five minutes later.
Bald and short, even in his signature Brioni navy chalk stripe, my slight, sixty-plus mentor looked more like a retired bus driver than one of the country’s most successful litigators. Which couldn’t have tickled the cunning summa cum laude Columbia Law School grad and tenacious former Golden Gloves boxer more.
“When you say lunch, you don’t mess around, do you, boss?” I said.
“Well, when it comes to bribing my protégée,” Tom said, twisting an imaginary villain’s mustache, “I pull out all the stops.”
“Protégée?” I said. “Wow, here it comes. I’m almost afraid to ask. What’s this urgent new project you wanted to discuss?”
“A multifirm pro bono initiative is starting up,” Tom said as he spun his BlackBerry on the tabletop. “I don’t know too much about it except that it’s called Mission Exonerate, and I’m the partner who was supposed to find the volunteer for it, yesterday. Which I’m praying to Saint Anthony might be you. It starts Monday.”
“What about ProGen?” I said.
For the last month, I’d been on a team putting together the contracts and prospectus for a biotech merger. To fall asleep at night recently, instead of counting sheep, I’d go over the alphabet soup of reagents, genomics, proteomics, and cell therapies.
“We’ll find someone else to take over your role,” Tom said, lifting his gadget and making the sign of the cross at me with it. “I know it’s last minute. Hence, the free lunch and my undying gratitude. What do you say?”
As if it were a question. Tom had been like a father to me. Try like a fairy godfather.
“I say yes,” I said with a smile.
“Marone! How many times I gotta tell you?” he said, reverting to his native Bensonhurst accent as he took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. “When you’re being bribed, neva eva agree straight offa de bat.”
I opened the flap and slid out the two tickets.
And had trouble breathing.
They were double-digit field box seats for tonight’s Yankees game. Tonight’s Yankees–Red Sox game. The first one of the season. The only bigger Yankee fan than me was Emma.
“Oh, Tom,” I said woozily. “Oh, wow. I’m…”
“Hungry?” my fairy god counselor said, winking as he lifted his menu. “Then try the steak frites. Best in the city. Fuggedaboudit.”
Chapter 53
YOU HAD YOUR GOOD DAYS, Peter Fournier thought from his loge-level seat in the unbelievably opulent and immense new Yankee Stadium.
And then you had your perfect days.
“Here we go, Boston! Here we go!” he yelled as loud as he could as Beckett retook the mound.
From the famous façade, to the flat-screen TVs at every turn, to the low bowl-like design that made it seem like you were watching the game from the batting circle, even a die-hard Sawx fan like him couldn’t deny the billion-dollar ballpark was baseball’s version of paradise on earth. Even after they’d dug up Ortiz’s jersey.
But to be here in the eighth inning, the Sox up by three and Beckett still on the mound in a perfect game, was nothing short of miraculous.