by Trisky
Even when the world left her behind, she still managed to be years ahead of most of humanity without even trying, and if I told her that now she'd laugh in my face. If something's not broken, why bother fixing it, but if it is broken why bother paying someone else to fix it when you can do it yourself is just the kind of motto she lives by. She'd be the first one to dig in and just get it done, no muss, no fuss. If that meant crawling on her knees hammering on the motor of the old fridge or scrubbing me until I was nearly raw, then so be it. When in doubt, put a little elbow grease into it.
If I had followed her advice I would probably be married with four brats, I'm sorry, loving children running underfoot right now. Nothing would please her more than a few more grandchildren to traumatize with a bar of Ivory soap. Luckily for me, I got my independent streak from her.
Unfortunately for Brian, I got my independent streak from her.
Mom's not shy and neither am I. I'm also no one's fool. So when he handed me that disk and told me to print off the files and not ask any questions or he'd bump me down to reception, did he honestly think he was going to get away that easily? Silly boy.
72 very dull pictures later, I finally hit the jackpot. I printed that sucker three times. One copy he could throw in the trash, another that would amazingly find its way to his drawer and stay there despite the first one being tossed, and still a third for his Christmas present. I think I'll frame it and put it on his desk and have wallet sized prints made, just to strike a chord. Let him know that I'm not above using a little emotional blackmail to remind him just how many secrets of his I hold and how invaluable I am because of that. Surely I should be rewarded for my loyalty. I'm thinking, money, time off, perhaps a little something from Tiffany's.
I've waited all afternoon for my opportunity and finally his meetings have ended and he's good and tense. I can make it easy for him, or I can bust his balls...
"So, I was thinking, maybe we should get you one of those serenity fountains. You could listen to the babbling brook all day and relieve your stress." I glide into his office, practically walking on air like the angel that I am.
"Fill it with vodka and you've got a deal." That's a good sign. Hell, he was almost pleasant.
"How'd the presentation go this morning?" I put the pictures on the corner of his desk and wait for a reaction.
"Brilliant as always." He's preoccupied with the copy for his newest account, chewing on one of his fingernails. That's a sure sign of his concentration.
"What are all these pictures you had me print? Did you even relax while you were away or did you sit there and come up with a new campaign for boosting tourism in Mexico? It's like looking at a brochure. You're only in one of the pictures!" So I'm the naughty angel, so what? They're always the most interesting.
"Did I say reception? I meant janitorial staff!" Finally, he acquiesces and looks briefly towards them.
"Does Vance know this is what you have your poor, put upon assistant do all day? Use office supplies to print your personal photos?" I slide them closer to his vantage point, and drum my fingers on the desk.
"Why? Is it coming out of your paycheck?" He gives my tapping fingers a once over.
"In a way it is. If you added together the price of that printer, the toner cartridge and the three packages of photo paper it took to print them and added the 7% sales tax, I could have gotten a 14.37 cent an hour raise." The longer I talk, the less choice he has but to listen long enough to get me out of his hair.
"Did you do the math all by yourself?" he smirks and puts his copy down long enough to remove my fingers from his desk and grab the photos.
"As a matter of fact I did." I sit my ass down in one of his new leather back chairs. Another 26 cent an hour, down the drain. "The only worthwhile picture in there is the one of Justin." Maybe I could ask for another ten bucks an hour, that would be one way to use my evil for the purposes of good. I toss my very clean, very conditioned blonde head to the side and smile pretty, just like the lady my mother always taught me to be.
"There is no picture of Justin. Have you been drinking from my non-existent serenity fountain?" He thumbs through the glossy remains of his week in Puerto Vallarta until he spies my ticket to another week's vacation, Justin's photograph.
I snarl at the top of his head bent over the picture. "That is Justin, isn't it?" I've seen him briefly in person a couple of times, and his picture in the paper after that awful incident. The picture looks like him, only it doesn't. He looks intense, like he's looking right through the camera lens and staring at you. I can't tell where it was taken, it looks like some kind of doorway, but all I see is blurry metal on the sides. It looks like a prison cell.
He considers the photo while gnawing on what's left of his stubbly fingertip, as if the ad man that constantly lives in his brain is dissecting what the image is trying to sell. It's obviously the first time he's seen it. In fact, I wonder if he even knew it existed at all. "Where did this come from?" he asks himself, more than me.
"I don't know, it was on that disk. I assume it's yours?" He tears his eyes from the picture and oh so casually slides it away from his immediate concentration. But not so far that he couldn't see it out of the corner of his eye. If he were so inclined, of course.
"Yeah, that must have been Emmett's fumbling handiwork." He flinches briefly at revealing that bit of information. Getting details out of him is as difficult as I imagine it would be to pry the Ivory out of my mother's cold, dead hands. "Don't you have something you need to be doing?"
"I could go run and buy a frame and you could put it on the desk," I chirp helpfully. A little part of me gets a thrill at the prospect that he might actually do it. The larger part of me keeps my eye on the prize, early retirement courtesy of knowing when to push my boundaries. Like I always say about Brian, there's the easy way, and then there's busting his balls. When in doubt, put a little elbow grease into it.
"Did you know that hag from reception is back from maternity leave? I saw her myself this morning. She's the one who married that guy from human resources you were fucking for a while a few years ago, isn't she? I'm sure you two will get along splendidly down there." He cackles unmercifully because he plays this game almost as well as I do.
I am undeterred and very, very used to him by now. I'll give him a nagging hag if that's what he wants.
"Don't you want to know why I'm so interested in the cost of printing your very, very boring pictures? Oh, and by the way if that's the best you can do with a camera, it's a wonder you've gotten this far in this field." God only knows what my mother put in her casseroles but I'm convinced at this stage in my life that it involved some kind of synthetic hormones, because I have no other explanation for the balls I managed to grow without a penis attached to them.
"I only took a couple of them, and no not really. I am, however, very interested in finishing reading this report so that I can leave before midnight tonight. So... goodbye." Class dismissed. He swivels his chair so that I'm staring at his back and paws the photographs, grabbing a random handful to toss on his credenza. Not so random that the one of Justin isn't still on top, however. Maybe I won't have to put a spare in his drawer after all, because it's gotten further than I ever expected. But I guess that's Justin isn't it? Judging from the marked increase in his phone calls, at least.
"I got a look at a memo Vance is about to send around."
That gets his attention.
He turns around and leans back in his chair, not even bothering with the politeness of asking what might have been in the memo, or how I came to see it. He just sits, in all of his expectant glory, waiting for me to spill without any kind of coercion, because he knows I will.
"It seems he's carrying on your favorite Ryder tradition. The company morale picnic. Aren't you excited?" That wipes his smug grin right off his face. "I take it he didn't inform you, his partner? Hate to be the one to break it to you then. Oh, I forgot the best part!" I playfully slap my head and pull out my old cheerleading voice. "You get to be the co-host!"
"He has to be kidding me!? Why are we wasting all this money in this economy?" He sifts through the papers on his desk for a pad and a pen. I lean over and pull one out from my side of the desk and hand it to him. Call it instinct or call it a way to keep his hands occupied so that they don't throw any heavy objects at my head.
"Need I remind you of all the money you spent on that little fete you had me plan at Babylon a few months ago without his permission?" Loyal to a fault, that's me.
"That was business." He's immediately defensive.
"Yeah, none of Vance's as I recall. Besides, what's the big deal? It's our annual morale booster. You were just hoping someone forgot to tell him about it," I snicker.
"You're the one who reminded him, aren't you? Always on my ass about doing the right thing for the staff and rewarding them for hard work. Have you learned nothing from me?" It's a good-natured if somewhat annoyed response. More about Vance than about me, I'm sure.
"I didn't tell him. Evelyn and I had a discussion about the staff and she practically licked her own chops when I mentioned it. I'm sure it got back to him because she runs and tells him everything." He raises an eyebrow at me, yeah so what, I'm a hypocrite, but as long as I'm loyal to him, he shouldn't care. I know I don't need to explain myself, but I feel the need to defend my honor anyway. "I bet he wants everyone who survived the bloodletting to feel secure and feel like we're getting back into our normal routines even as he's thinking of ways to stab us all in the back in the middle of the night." If it isn't broken, why bother fixing it and if it is why pay someone else to fix it when you can do it yourself? "He is in advertising after all! Who knows how to sell crap better than him? Present company excluded of course."
"Well then why doesn't he just go buy everyone a fucking teddy bear and tell them a bedtime story?" he singsongs while he scribbles furiously. "The only reason people even show up at that thing is for the free booze."
"No that's the only thing *you* show up for. The rest of us like to kid ourselves into believing management gives a shit one day out of the year... What are you writing?" It's damn distracting whatever it is.
"I'm adding up the costs of this little patsy party."
"Why? I know for a fact it's not going to come out of your salary, that's for sure. It'll be the excuse we get next year when our raises don't budge an inch." Other than mine, for which I have Justin to thank for looking so handsome in high gloss. So handsome that your very appreciative boyfriend will want to stare at you endlessly and I will be the only one who knows what he looks at when he opens the drawer in the middle of a meeting where he's about to blow his top. Knowing those kinds of secrets are just as invaluable to me as I am to him.
"You think he might have mentioned this in, oh I don't know," he grimaces "the four meetings we had between yesterday and today?"
"Well it's over and done with. You can bitch each other out later for making decisions without consulting one another. My question is how many places am I supposed to reserve for you? I'm sure they're going to want the rough estimates of attendance by the end of the week. And you never tell me until the last minute," I remind him.
"Why should I have to tell you? It's the same every fucking year." Yes I know that, we all know that, nothing ever changes. Until it does, that is.
"I know you bring Michael so that you don't make a total ass out of yourself with the free booze, but I was thinking..." he stops moving his pen, but doesn't look up, "that maybe you'd want me to reserve a third spot, or maybe even a fourth?"
"Why would I want to do that?" His voice positively drips with acid.
Fortunately for me I did inherit that independent streak from my mother, the same streak that tells me that fierce loyalty to a product or a person is all well and good but that sometimes change can be just as good and just as necessary.
"It is a *family* event. Maybe you'd like to bring your son?"
"Are you volunteering to chase after a toddler in the middle of potty training all day, while his father gets good and plastered?" he cracks.
I'm sure I'd love the little ... darling.
"Okay forget Gus," he nods as if to say 'I thought you'd see it my way'. Silly, silly boy, indeed. "You could bring Justin. A boyfriend is the next closest thing to family. I'm sure Vance will bring some knockout, just to show everyone up. Do him one better." 'Stop, drop and roll' suddenly springs to mind when I catch the flicker in his eye. Maybe I'll wash my mouth out with Ivory when I get home.
"If no son of mine is attending, then there's no way in hell a boyfriend of mine is."
He looks up and I say nothing, because there is simply nothing to say. Now that it's out in the open, there's no taking it back.
"Why not? Since when do you give a shit who knows you're gay? It's not like it's a state secret around here." I think of the picture sitting behind him and it quite honestly amazes me that I'm having this conversation with Brian, of all people. I never thought I'd live to see the day.
"I don't care if the entire company decides to hold its picnic in the Liberty baths and watches me get blown by half of gay Pittsburgh. I'm not bringing him." He closes the door on the subject, but sometimes when life hands you a closed door, you kick it wide open.
"So it's not because you're gay. It's because you have a boyfriend. What do you think everyone assumed Michael was, all those years?"
That seems to surprise him. It's not like they were all over each other or anything, but they were obviously comfortable together. It's just that year after year, when an out gay man shows up with the same guy over and over, you start to wonder. If I showed up with the same guy year after year, and he wasn't my brother, everyone would assume there was something more there. Of course no one else answers his phones or deals with him on a day to day basis the way I do, so they just assume whatever they want to, but it's not an unfair assumption. I made the mistake of assuming it when I first started working with him. It's a natural mistake. The way I see it, now is his time to correct it.
"Just tell them to expect two." I wish I could say I knew that meant he was bringing Justin, but he'd be contrary enough not to, just to spite me.
"Don't let Vance intimidate you. If he can bring his latest bimbo as arm candy, I don't see why you can't bring someone you actually care about." I rise out of the chair and walk a safe distance to the door. "Three. In case you change your mind."
"If you bring that disgusting casserole dish with you, you're fired!" he yells to my retreating form.
Mom would be proud. She'd probably dunk my head in freezing cold water and scrub the Ivory in until it became a natural bleaching agent, but she'd be proud. I know I am, and if I know Brian at all, I know he will be too. In fact, I'm counting on it.