Page 5 of Scotlander

Willa pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it. Seriously? Martina wanted her to work on her sick day? Then again, not a huge surprise. Everyone was replaceable in this town and most employers relied on that exact fear factor to keep staff in line. To be fair, she wasn’t actually unwell. She’d overeaten, barfed on a major celebrity and was pulling a sickie to go to the will reading of a (non-celebrity) friend who, to Willa’s knowledge, had nothing to bequeath. As Martina was already working her way through her bullet points, she quickly pressed the phone back to her ear and began taking her usual fastidious notes.

By the time she’d hung up, she had a full day’s work ahead of her. Just the spur she needed to get out of the car and find out what her bossy bestie had been up to when she hadn’t been looking.

From the second the restaurant door whooshed open, Willa was cocooned in aromatic wafts of lemon, parsley, onions, mint, cumin and . . . maybe coriander?

Inside was a bright, welcoming, trendy fast food falafel bar. It was not a lawyer’s office. Behind the counter stood a portly red-headed man wearing a ‘Body by Babka’ apron and a jaunty green beret. He looked like a cross between a leprechaun and Santa.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, eyes twinkling with delight, as if he’d been waiting for her with great anticipation for many, many years. ‘I’m guessing you’re Willaford Jenkins. Fool?’

Ermm . . . She didn’t really know where to go with this. ‘Are we role-playing A-Team characters?’

He laughed as if she’d just said the most hilarious thing in the world, introduced himself as Elijah Gottlieb, then grabbed a spoon, took a huge dollop of a hummus-like dip from one of several beautiful ceramic bowls and lavished it on to a piece of flatbread. He sprinkled on some herbs, some crumbly feta and a smattering of chopped tomatoes, then deftly folded everything into an envelope shape, wrapped it in some brown paper and handed it to her. ‘Sustenance,’ he said gently. ‘Just like my Bubbie used to make. I always find fava beans make these things easier. We’ll have falafel after,’ he added, as if they were heading off to play a couple rounds of miniature golf rather than hear her best friend’s last wishes.

She held out her hands for the proffered gift and, so as not to be rude, took a bite. ‘Ohmygod.’ She beamed across at him. It was like an entire Middle Eastern spice market was having a party in her mouth. ‘This is amazing!’

Elijah beamed. ‘It took years of practice to get the recipe just right. I did all of this research’ – he patted his belly – ‘for you.’ He pointed at her like a cheesy car salesman about to offer her the deal of a lifetime.

‘Didn’t you just say your grand—’ she began as he stepped to a fluttery flyscreen door panel and asked, ‘Shall we head back?’

He swept aside the multi-coloured tassels and beckoned for her to follow him.

After walking down a short corridor lined with personalised food hygiene signs (‘Keep Your Matzo Offa My Meatballs’), they walked through another flyscreen panel, beaded this time, and entered what felt like an alternate universe. One Brad Pitt might have designed in between filming blockbusters and building houses for the poor.

Here there was an abundance of glass and beams, but there was also warmly polished reclaimed redwood, a sprawl of beautiful handwoven carpets, and an opulence of cushy leather chairs and lovingly worn-in sofas that looked so inviting they had to have cost a fortune. An actual, enormous eucalyptus tree grew right in the centre of the office and was surrounded by a circular bench upon which two fifty-something hipsters sporting yarmulkes sat drinking espresso. They leapt up upon Willa’s approach.

‘Shalom aleichem! Welcome,’ said the beardy one. ‘I’m Marty Garrish.’ He pressed a hand to his chest. ‘My condolences for your loss, Willaford.’ He stretched out the same hand for her to shake.

She winced at the use of her full name, then, realising there was tahini sauce dripping down her wrist, morphed her expression into an I’m-too-gross-to-shake-hands apology face.

He laughed and introduced the other man, Leo Greenwood, after which, in unison, the three men chimed, ‘And we’re Lawful Falafels!’ They chortled, gave happy sighs, and patted one another on the back as Willa tried to figure out how on earth Valentina had found these guys. They were strangely and wonderfully comforting. And making a really, really emotional situation much easier to handle. Then finally, it clicked. ‘Is your phone number 1-800-LAWYER?’

They all brightened, and Elijah said, ‘Yes! How did you know?’

Her voice cracked as she squeaked, ‘Lucky guess.’

When she’d moved to LA, she’d known nothing and no one apart from the phone number of a casting agent her high school drama teacher had given to her. She’d scraped together her entire new adult existence with the help of Craigslist and hopeful guesses in the 1-800 number department. She’d needed a bed so had dialled 1-800-MATTRESS and voila! A blue mattress with fluffy clouds printed on it appeared the next day. She’d needed a job (the casting agent thing hadn’t panned out) so called 1-800-GET-A-JOB and reached a temp agency that got her a two-week post as an assistant to a vice-president of marketing’s assistant which had, after a very long eighteen months of waking at dawn and driving the length and breadth of LA to photocopy or type or anything else that would get her closer to her goal of being an entertainment reporter, finally led her to her first job at TiTs, which came with health and dental insurance. She hadn’t had her teeth cleaned in two years and needed a dentist. So she’d dialled 1-800-DENTIST and had met the woman who would become the sister she’d never had. Valentina Ortiz.

Tears threatened as more memories poured in. The ‘guac and talk’ nights they’d started having every other Tuesday. The shared passion for kitsch and Disney and dressing up her husband Diego’s scrappy rescue dog in their little girls’ hand-me-downs. The competitive cartwheel contests that always landed them both dizzy and weeping with laughter on the tiny patch of lawn where they’d had countless barbecues. Knowing she was loved no matter what. Her body strained against the scratchy feeling at the back of her throat. She’d not cried once since Valentina had died. Sworn to herself she wouldn’t. Vowed to be strong for Diego and the children who had, equally desperately, tried to cling to their old routine until the memories had proved too powerful. In what felt like the blink of an eye, Diego packed up the house and took the kids back to the families he and Val had left behind ‘to see what adventures they’d find outside of the Ortiz Orbit’.

One tear fell. And then another. She held out her wrap and sobbed, ‘What did you put in this thing?’

Rather than ignore the show of emotion or try to happy talk her tears away, the three men fell into a practised calm, dug in their pockets for fresh handkerchiefs, led her into an office off the foyer and gave her the room she needed to cry.

What felt like twenty hours of gale-force tears later, Willa made herself drop her balled-up fists into her lap and take in the room. It had the aesthetic of a five-star treehouse rather than an office (the mini-mall was positioned on the edge of a ravine). She mopped her face clean and blew her nose (once she’d been gifted the soft cloth handkerchief speckled with floating loaves of bread and the logo ‘Happy Challadays’). As Elijah slid a mug of fresh mint tea in front of her, she gave him a watery smile of gratitude and pronounced herself ready.

‘Best way to start a meeting,’ he said in an enthusiastic way that implied he regularly handed people a snack, brought them into the welcoming cocoon of his workplace, and offered so much kindness and warmth that the only possible reaction was to weep. He sat down at his desk, tapped a couple of papers into order, then gave her a bright smile. ‘Right! We’ll just wait for the other party to appear and then we’ll get this show on the road.’

‘Umm . . . We’re what-ing for who?’

There was no other party. She’d been Valentina’s best friend. Sure, Val had known people. The ones at work, the ones at the school gates. The ones at the gym where she taught Zumba on a Saturday (aka the Cheesy Burrito Bootie Burn). But none of them had been there when Valentina had needed someone to hold the barf buckets or try on unicorn-coloured wigs or—

A knock sounded on the doorframe and a rich, shiver-my-timbers baritone asked, ‘Apologies. Erm . . . Is this the right office to find Mr Gottlieb?’

Elijah bounded out from behind his desk and began shaking hands with – ooohhhhh, heavens – the most beautiful man Willa had ever seen. And that was saying something because she had interviewed practically everyone from the Marvel franchise.

If perfectly beautiful men were her thing, she’d be melting into a puddle of drool and oestrogen, leaving her poor neglected ovaries to dance the tarantella in an attempt to win his heart. But perfectly beautiful men scared her a little. And by ‘a little’, she meant a lot.

‘You must be Gabriel,’ Elijah said, ushering the six-foot-something wall of hunk-a-liciousness to the chair next to Willa’s.