The Sweetest Revenge (7 page)

“
Still,” the bitch said. “You
are no longer meeting expectations. We are offering you a three-month
compensation package.”

“
Screw your package,” I said
standing up with a little difficulty. “And screw you.”

I made my way to Sheila’s door
and walked out of her office. I went straight to my office and began
to pack up my personal belongings. There wasn’t much. I’d never
been one to decorate my office with family photos and works of art
like other people—namely Sheila—did. Sheila stood in my doorway
as I went through my stuff, watching my every move. I put everything
I had into a plastic bag I had in my desk in case of emergencies. I
left the Christmas cactus that had been a gift several years before
from my co-workers. I walked past Sheila, my plastic bag in one hand,
my cane in the other.

“
This isn’t the end of this,”
I said to Sheila. She didn’t even do me the courtesy of looking me
in the face.

When I got home, I threw the
plastic bag on the kitchen floor and sat at the table. Only then did
I let my angry tears fall. I wept bitterly. I wept for my marriage,
for the children I would never have, for the friends I had lost, for
my house I had loved, and for my job—the final thing I could call
my own.

Chapter
Ten

I was so angry at Sheila. The
next day after my firing I called Wesley and told him what happened.

“
I think you’ve definitely
got a case of wrongful termination,” he said. “You’re dealing
with a state institution and it doesn’t sound like they followed
protocol on this.”

“
Can you help me?” I asked
him.

“
Employment law is not my
specialty,” he said. “I specialize in divorce. But I can
recommend someone to you. Let me give her a call and I’ll call you
back, okay?”

“
Okay,” I said. I sat fuming
on the couch for a long time. Finally, I got up and limped into the
kitchen to make some tea. Midnight, my eternal friend, was in the
kitchen to greet me with her meows. I rubbed her neck and got her a
plate of food.

Wesley called back at the end of
the day. “I’ve talked to Janice Hobbs and she wants to talk to
you,” he said. “She went to a different university and has no
conflicts about representing you. She’ll call you tomorrow.”

Janice Hobbs called me the next
morning and I explained everything to her. I had worked for the
development department for fifteen years. I had broken my foot, which
required me to miss some work to go to physical therapy. I had the
sick time, I told her.

“
So this Sheila person just
fired you without any warnings whatsoever?” Janice asked.

“
Well, she had been grumbling
about some days I had been late due to my having difficulty getting
around. I tried to explain to her about that. But I worked over every
day I was late and she knew that.”

“
Sounds like Sheila had it in
for you,” Janice said.

“
I think so,” I said. “But
I don’t know why. I’ve always been a good employee. I don’t
understand it.”

“
Sometimes,” Janice said,
“when an employee suffers a calamity, the supervisor begins to look
on the employee as a weakened person. They go after them. That’s
just my opinion, mind you. But I’ve seen it happen over and over in
the years I’ve been dealing with employment law. It’s sad, but I
think it’s true. Has there been anything else that might have made
Sheila see you as a weak person?”

“
I have gone through a divorce
recently,” I said. “I was married to a prominent lawyer. Jim
Sullivan.”

Janice drew her breath in. “Yes,
I know him. I went up against him in a contract case last year and
lost.”

That didn’t make me feel any
better.

“
I’m thinking,” Janice
said, “that your divorce and your subsequent accident caused you to
be weak in Sheila’s eyes. That’s what I think happens a lot in
these employment cases where the employee is long term. I can’t use
that theory in a court of law, of course.”

“
Of course not,” I said,
wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

“
But you’ve definitely got a
case, there’s no doubt about that,” Janice said. “And I’ll
drive the point home that they fired you after you had an accident
and after your years of service to the university.”

That sounded good to me. “Okay,”
I said.

“
I’ve got trial for the next
two weeks,” Janice continued. “Can you come to my office week
after next and we’ll hammer everything out?”

“
Yes,” I told her. Janice
seemed a little loopy, but Wesley had recommended her, and that meant
a lot.

The thing about it was, I didn’t
have to work. I had the assets worth nearly half a million, I had the
house free and clear and when I sold it I would have four hundred
thousand dollars, minus the realtor’s fee, and I received a regular
alimony check of four thousand dollars a month from Jim. But the
other thing about it was that I had worked hard for the university. I
considered myself a working person. It gave me a sense of value. So I
couldn’t let the university get away with such shabby treatment.

Knowing that I had done all I
could for the moment, I allowed myself to enjoy my time as a
nonworking person. As I sat in the den or limped through the house, I
wondered sometimes how the office was functioning without me. I
wondered how the brochures were being handled, the databases for
mailing the brochures, the press releases. All of those things I
supervised in my job as director of communications. But I didn’t
have that job anymore, I reminded myself over and over.

At the end of the week, Melissa
called to say she had some interested buyers for my house. They
wanted a second look. That was a big pain, since I was relaxing in my
house unemployed. But I had to make accommodations. I had, after all,
put the house on the market.

Melissa made arrangements to
bring the buyers by the next day. I decided I’d go to the movies
during that time. I hadn’t been to a movie theater in years, not
since that movie with Zoey Deschanel and Marky Mark. I couldn’t
remember the name of the strange movie about the wind blowing and
people going crazy.

I looked at the theater offerings
on the Internet and decided to see The Lone Ranger, even if it had
gotten terrible reviews. I loved Johnny Depp, so reviews be damned.
It was Disney! How bad could it be?

I spent the rest of the day
watching television. I tried to determine if the male guests on Maury
Povitch were or were not the father of the baby. I played Jeopardy,
doing pretty well. I scanned for movies and dropped in on a few in
progress, watching the last half or even fifteen minutes of some of
them. All in all, it was a full day.

Midnight started to meow, letting
me know it was time for her supper. I opened a can of her expensive
gourmet cat food and set her plate on the floor. I looked in the
fridge for something to eat. There wasn’t much—three eggs and a
half dried brick of cheddar cheese.

Midnight was eating better than I
was.

When Jim and I were married, the
refrigerator was well-stocked with condiments lining the door
shelves, eggs, several varieties of cheese—Jim loves
cheese—luncheon meat, yogurt, cream for our coffee, milk for Jim’s
cereal, fresh vegetables, imported beer, wine, and any number of
leftovers from the fantastic meals I made.

In the latter years of our
marriage, my cooking was just about all I had to offer to Jim that he
wanted. He rarely wanted sex, and that was actually fine with me. I
didn’t want his hands touching my rolls of fat; I didn’t want to
be naked in front of him. I guess I thought I could make up for it
all with a pan of lasagna.

Out of all the things I cooked on
a regular basis, I was known for my lasagna. If we had people over
for dinner, which we used to do regularly until the last five years,
I always made lasagna and served it with a fresh leaf lettuce salad
and garlic bread. If we were attending an event where we were
required to bring a dish, it was always the lasagna.

As I stood staring into the
fridge, I realized I hadn’t made lasagna in a year. I was going to
have to get the ingredients for that the next time I went to the
grocery store, which would have to be soon given the contents of the
fridge. I decided to make scrambled eggs with grated cheddar. I drank
a glass of chardonnay while I scraped the eggs in the non-stick
skillet.

I settled in front of the TV with
my meal and was lucky to find Sleeping with the Enemy right after it
had started. I loved the beginning of that movie where Julia Roberts
outsmarts her abusive husband and fakes her own death. My heart
soared with victory as she made her way across the country wearing a
black wig.

I saved some eggs for Midnight
and put the plate on the floor for her to lick. She obliged. When she
had removed every semblance of food, she rubbed around my ankles
before jumping on the couch to join me.

Julia Roberts was painting the
kitchen cabinets in her new cottage by that time. I had seen the
movie many times, and my mind began to wander. I looked at the
heart-pine country mantle and remembered Jim in the garage, stripping
it of its chipped paint before he lovingly rubbed it with a honey
colored wax mixture and buffed it with a soft cloth. That was back
when Jim liked to do things with his hands. It hurt to look at the
mantle. I supposed I would be leaving it with the house when I moved.

I resented that I had to move,
but Jim had left me no choice. It would have been difficult enough to
stay in the home we had created together, but finding Jim in the
spare room with Kimberly had completely ruined the house for me.

I resented that Midnight would
have to make a move and become an indoor cat. She was ten years old
and used to going in and out. She had her favorite spots—a place on
the patio that got afternoon sun, underneath a privet bush near the
back fence, in the deep monkey grass so that I couldn’t even see
her.

Julia Roberts was visiting her
mother in the nursing home when I finally succumbed to sleep. In my
dream, I was walking—no floating—through the house. I floated
upstairs and looked into the spare bedroom. It was painted a sky blue
color and it had a new bed with a wrought iron headboard. I floated
to the master bedroom, which was painted a golden color. The bed,
which was on a different wall, had a plush golden comforter spread on
it. Downstairs, the couch in the den was a slate blue color and the
television was hung on the wall. Everything was different in the
house that I knew so well.

When I woke up at 3:47, I had
made my decision. I made a pot of coffee before turning on the TV. I
watched the entire previous season of “Dexter” I had missed due
to the chaos in my life. It was the only show Jim and I had watched
with any regularity.

At nine, I called the realtor.

“
I’m taking the house off the
market,” I told her. Complete silence on her end.

“
Look,” I said. “I’m
sorry about this. But I realized last night that I can’t handle a
move right now. When I decide to put it back on the market, I’ll
call you first, I promise.”

“
I’m a little stunned,”
Melissa finally said. “I thought you couldn’t wait to get out of
there.”

“
You’re right,” I said.
“But since I broke my foot and lost my job. . . .”

“
You lost your job?” Melissa
said.

“
Yes. They fired me. I’m just
not in a good position to move right now. And then there’s my cat.”

“
Your cat?” Melissa sounded
truly confused.

“
Yes, my cat. If I move right
now, her life will change completely and I don’t want to do that to
her.”

“
Okay,” Melissa said
uncertainly. “I’ll let the Danigers know it’s off the market.”

“
Thank you for everything,” I
said. “I’m really sorry.”

Once I had taken care of that
unpleasant business, I sat at my computer and researched companies
that handled estate sales. That was the time that I really needed a
friend, someone to guide me, give me suggestions, but apparently I
had no real friends. Apparently, our friends were really Jim’s
friends because not a single one called me when he abandoned me. I
had gone through the early, difficult days of my divorce on my own.

The cheerful woman at Estate
Sales, Inc. said she could send someone over that afternoon to look
over the items in my house and set up a time to have the sale. I
would need to clean the house a little before that happened, but
first I took a shower and washed my hair. It had gotten longer in the
six months since Jim had been gone. I liked the feel of it as it
flowed down my back.

When Rudolf from Estate Sales,
Inc. arrived I was ready for him. I knew exactly what I would sell
and exactly what I would not sell. We walked through each room and I
pointed out a painting of a country farmhouse my parents had given me
and said it would not be sold. The bedside table in my bedroom was
from my grandmother and would not be sold. Various vintage pieces
from my grandmother would not be sold.

When all was said and done,
everything that Jim and I had bought together would be sold. That
amounted to most of what was in the house. I would be left with very
little furniture or knick-knacks and other decorative pieces.