Page 8 of Not My Friend
As my mother always said, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’d be an idiot to act on the attraction that still simmered between us.
“Uh Kim?”
I glanced up as my coworker Mary stumbled into the conference room. I’d never understood the phrase ‘green around the gills’until I saw her face. She’d gone from looking completely normal to looking like she wanted to die in the space of half an hour.
“What’s the matter?”
She gripped the door frame. “I think… I think I have food poisoning. Or the flu. I don’t know, but I feel terrible and…”
Before she could finish she raced out of the conference room. When she hadn’t returned after ten minutes I headed to the bathroom to look for her. I found her at the same sink where I’d seen Gina earlier, rinsing out her mouth with tap water. She was covered in sweat, her usually perfect hair plastered to her head.
“Was it the shrimp?”
We’d eaten lunch at a little seafood restaurant in the neighborhood. I was feeling fine, but then again, I’d had the fish and chips.
“I don’t know, but I think I might be dying,” she whispered. “I just called an Uber. I’m sorry, I’ve got to go home.”
“Of course Mary, don’t worry about it. I can handle things for the rest of the afternoon,” I assured her. “Will you be okay? Do you want me to call anyone?”
“My roommate is working from home today,” she said. “So she can keep an eye on me. If you could just let David know I’m sick, I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course. I’ll take care of everything here, don’t worry. Go home and feel better.”
I walked Mary to the lobby and waited with her until her rideshare came, then went back to the conference room to message our boss. He wouldn’t be happy about this. We were already short-staffed with one colleague on maternity leave and one out for appendicitis surgery. Plus we had two open positions we couldn’t recruit for until the new budget year in July. But it couldn’t be helped. Poor Mary looked like death warmed over, there was no way she could have stayed.
“Are you going to be able to handle this on your own, Hernandez?” David asked.
“Sure, it’s no problem. Besides, Mary thinks it’s just food poisoning. She promised she’ll be back tomorrow.”
But Mary wasn’t back the next day. The poor thing had ended up spending the night at the Emergency Room, where she learned she had the flu, not food poisoning. My boss called me at seven in the morning to let me know, and while he wasn’t a fuzzy kind of guy, he did appreciate hard work. He understood that finishing the audit by myself would be a huge task but given that he didn’t have anyone else to send, he had no choice but to let me move forward on my own.
“If you need anything, just call me Hernandez. And if anyone else gets done with their site visits early, I’ll send them over to you.”
“It’s no problem, really.”
After sending up a little prayer that I hadn’t caught the flu from Mary, I headed over to the nonprofit. I had a long day ahead of me, with tons of files to review, and no one to help me. And since I usually audited different types of programs, I needed to learn more about what was in the files so I could understand them better. It wasn’t simply a matter of checking boxes. Mary had been set to review the efficacy of case plans and determine how they adhered to logic models, which was a little bit out of my scope of expertise.
That meant I was going to need help, and there was only one person who could do it.
Gina.
Gina
“Good morning.”
I stopped in the doorway of the conference room to greet the auditors, but only Kimberly was there. The other side of the table was empty, telling me that Mary hadn’t arrived yet even though it was after nine.
“Is Mary still sick?”
I’d seen her coming out of the bathroom yesterday looking like she had every disease there ever was. Rochelle told me later that she’d gone home. Coward that I was, I’d hid in my office the rest of the day, determined to avoid Kimberly after that humiliating experience in the ladies room.
Kimberly glanced up, her expression the tiniest bit frazzled.
“Yeah. She spent last night in the ER. She has the flu, so hopefully she didn’t get any of your team sick.”
“Because we work with the homeless we all get flu shots, so we’ll probably be good,” I said. “I hope she feels better. I know you were hoping today would be your last day here.”
We wereallhoping that today would be their last day here. Having state program auditors onsite was bad enough, but having the woman who you’d fucked over as part of that team was a special kind of hell. I was glad I’d at least gotten a chance to apologize. I knew it wouldn’t change anything between us, but it had been the right thing to do.
