“I already have a typewriter.”
“Not this one! This is a portable Smith-Corona with features that make it faster than your old manual typewriter. It’s got an all-electric carriage return. A space bar that repeats. Automatic paper advancement to the next line. You’ll love it and can work faster than ever before!”
Mr. Getty’s obsession with the latest fad gadgets and gizmos was becoming a serious problem. One that was stealing money out of the employees’ pockets for his fleeting entertainment.
A light rap at the door turned Sam around to find Mel and Betty Number Five swooping in, with Mel wearing a crap-eating grin and Betty carrying a stack of papers.
“Congratulations on your huge accomplishment,” Sam gave her best impression of sarcasm, which Mel couldn’t hear over the raucous applause inside his head.
Mel could already imagine his hateful wife’s overdue praise for him finally not being a total failure of a husband, for finally becoming the successful man her parents had forced her to marry. Not that she was any prize either, as he discovered ten years into their matching failure of a marriage.
When she wasn’t wrecking his self-esteem with snide comments about her boredom in their bed, she was reminding him of every disappointment he left her with: His letdown of a job, their mediocre home, their childless extra bedrooms. If he couldn’t give her children, at least he could now afford to give her a spa day.
“And I hear you got yourself a raise,” Mel said, already plotting when he could demote the cheeky feminist who he assumed would justify his wife’s cruelty in the name of women’s rights to be a bitch.
“If you call fifty cents a raise,” Sam replied.
“There’s paperwork you have to fill out,” Betty informed Sam, handing over a clipboard. The paper was as baffling as Mel’s promotion: Husband’s name. Husband’s bank account. Husband’s signature.
“Who’s getting the raise here?” Sam asked. “Me or my nonexistent husband?”
“Which leads me to my new office rules, Miss Stanton,” Mel interjected. “Rule number one: No snark in this office.”
“You’re telling me I can’t have a personality now, Mel?”
“And rule number two, you must address me as boss.”
After filling out the paperwork she couldn’t even sign, Sam hauled her new typewriter to her old desk, realizing that having Mel as her boss simply was not going to work. For all of the advice she had given over the past year and half, Sam had a problem she didn’t know how to solve.
Chapter 33
When Sam read the letter she had hidden from Raul, she felt surprised. And very few people could surprise Sam, because Sam avoided surprises at all costs. Experience had taught her to be wary of anything unexpected, but sometimes one simply could not anticipate or avoid it.
Like the day her greenhouse was destroyed, or on that same day when Sam had received the mysterious letter. It turned out not to be your average fan mail, though. A written correspondence from Gabriel Smothers, Raul’s long-lost father.
That day she found herself genuinely surprised. And terribly stressed.
While she disliked surprises, she hated secrets. And now she was none other than a super-secret-keeper from the man she loved most. Five weeks of holding this secret had nearly killed her, and now she was piling more on.
After reading Gabriel’s eloquent note—like father, like son—she could never tell Raul about their written exchange until she met with Gabriel face to face. So she wrote him back telling him exactly that. Only, it was easier said than done, and it took much longer than her impatience could endure. He lived a full state away, and each correspondence took over a week to receive, and then add on another week waiting for a reply.
Finally, five weeks from the day she first laid eyes on his grammatically perfect letter and New York return address, she would tell off the man responsible for Raul’s distrust of love. The man who had singlehandedly destroyed Raul’s ability to lower his guard. And here he was, across a wobbly booth from her, in the flesh, both of them sweating in a stifling August heat that the single window air conditioning unit couldn’t keep up with.
Sam had picked a nondescript diner that Raul would never frequent, in a nondescript part of Pittsburgh no one she knew ventured into. It was just outside of the newly erected projects where Blacks were cordoned into and whites fled from. Considering segregation was supposed to have been a thing of the past—since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made desegregation a law seven years ago—still whites found their loopholes to build walls that kept them “safe” from the scourge of a dark complexion.
“So,” Sam began, nervous.
“So,” Gabriel echoed, hopeful.
While her gaze flicked to a Muhammad Ali poster hanging on the wall beside their booth, his eyes remained locked on Sam. The same endless brown with sparks of gold as Raul’s.
Under normal circumstances Sam would have asked Gabriel how his trip from New York City was, or where he was spending the night. She may have even offered her sofa, had she trusted him. But she didn’t.
