The Night I Got Lucky by Laura Caldwell Page B

attitude also helped to convince myself that I real y was a VP.
    “What’s up today?” I said through a bite of salad.
    “Some papers for you to sign. Oh, and the HR department wants to know if you got the signed severance agreement from Alexa.”
    I swal owed hard on a rough piece of lettuce. The guilt of firing Alexa was stil eating at me. I’d gotten a taste of power, and she was the first one in my line of fire. “You haven’t seen anything come through the mail?”
    Lizbeth shook her head. “Let’s hope she doesn’t sue the company. Roslyn would be so pissed.”
    “Is that a possibility?”
    “That’s what HR said.”
    I pushed my salad away, feeling queasy. I’d wrongful y fired a col eague—just because I could—I’d given her a pittance of a severance, and now I might have landed the company in litigation. “Maybe I can help her get a job,” I mused aloud. But even as I said it, I knew it would be tough. I’d been keeping an eye on the city’s PR firms for over a year, and the industry was as dry as ash.
    “Whatever you want to do,” Lizbeth said. “Here’s her info if you want to cal her.” She handed me a sheet listing Alexa’s name, address and other identifying information.
    I looked it over, staring at Alexa’s address. She lived on West Division. Probably in one of those new loft condos. Of course, Alexa might have a hard time affording the new loft condo with her ten days of severance pay. The guilt rose higher in my chest.
    “I’l work on it,” I told Lizbeth.
    I immediately cal ed HR and asked if I could get Alexa a longer severance. No go, the HR director told me. It was the company’s policy not to change a severance once set, especial y if the employee had been terminated for cause as Alexa had. She reminded me that we needed the signed severance agreement.
    My guilt felt like it was scraping away my insides.
    I sat silently at my desk until I knew what to do. After work, I’d stop by Alexa’s place, and bring her flowers or something suitably apologetic. I’d tel her I was sorry for the way things had gone down, and I’d tel her that I would help her in any way I could. And then I’d get her to put pen to paper.
    I pul ed my salad toward me and at the same time pushed Alexa from my mind. It would be al right, I told myself. For both of us.

    At six o’clock, I sat in the back of a cab traveling west on Division. In my lap was an enormous fern. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time at the florist, debating hydrangeas versus orchids, tulips versus sunflowers. Nothing seemed right. Final y, I settled on a huge fern in a yel ow ceramic holder. The flowers had seemed too romantic, but the fern, I’d decided, had a hail-fel ow-wel -met effect and said, I’m sorry I fired you and gave you a shitty severance, but you’ll be just fine.
    I couldn’t see in front of me, due to the fern, but out the side window, I watched as the cab passed the entrance to the highway and continued west. Ashland went by in a blur, the hip shops and cafés of Wicker Park starting to show themselves. Of course, Alexa would live somewhere trendy. She was probably from a waspy family in Kenilworth but considered herself
    “slumming” in the now-posh confines of Wicker Park. She began to annoy me again, if only in my head. I saw those cashmere twinsets and her smug grin. I remembered her uncanny ability to get me to do her work.
    Suddenly, the fern seemed obscene. She had deserved to be fired, and she certainly didn’t need my help. She probably wouldn’t even want it.
    I shoved the fern onto the seat next to me. It would look good in my house, next to Chris’s big chair. I wanted to tel the cabbie to turn around.
    I had just leaned forward and angled my head through the fiberglass window to speak to the driver when I noticed that we’d passed Damen. The cab kept moving. The trendy stores of Wicker Park gave way to Hispanic grocery stores and rundown bars.
    “Excuse me,” I said to the