Too Hot To Handle. Barbara Daly

he’s the artist and Ray’s the writer and…”

      “You’re killing it with analysis,” Annie interrupted him.

      “Thank you, Annie,” Macon said. “The point, Sarah,” he went on, “is that you’re obviously unhappy, and if you won’t do something about it, we’re moving on.”

      “Like wagons at dawn,” Sarah said, gazing at them sorrowfully, “leaving the sick and wounded behind.”

      “You got it,” Ray said. “Now on the other hand, if you would lend a receptive ear, we might suggest a cure.”

      If Ray offered to solve her problem as Macon had, she’d scream. It was unlikely, given that Ray and Jeremy were a couple. “My, my, the rhetoric is just flowing this afternoon,” Sarah said. “If only we could put this same creative effort into our copywriting, Ray, we might…”

      “You’re doing it again,” Jeremy warned her.

      Sarah waved both hands in the air, noticing sadly that they flinched. “I’m turning down your resignations. Okay, what do you think I should do?”

      “Call him,” Annie said.

      They didn’t understand. “I can’t, Annie, I just can’t. What he did to me…”

      “About a million years ago,” Jeremy interjected.

      “I take it Macon has given you the gist of the story.”

      “It was the only way he could talk us out of e-mailing our resignations and sneaking back in the dark of night to clear out our desks,” Rachel said.

      “Oh. Then I suppose I should say thank you,” Sarah said, turning to Macon.

      “It would be a change.”

      Her grudging smile segued at once into a glower. “Okay, okay, it was twelve years ago, I admit, and I was dealing with it just fine until I saw him again. Well, I was,” she retorted, reacting to the expressions on their faces.

      “But now that you have seen him again,” Rachel argued, “you’re going to have to resolve your feelings about him.”

      “Or you’ll resign,” Sarah said, feeling sulky.

      “Or you’ll explode,” Jeremy said.

      “Or implode,” Ray said.

      “I wouldn’t mind if she’d implode,” Jeremy said. “It’s the exploding that’s making me think that job with Hall & Lindstrom wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

      “Jeremy, you wouldn’t!”

      “Sarah,” he mimicked her, “I would and will if you don’t…”

      “…call him,” her five devoted employees chorused while Sarah glared at them.

      SHE WOULDN’T. She couldn’t. They didn’t understand.

      That summer, the summer after she and Alex graduated, they were more desperate for each other than ever, knowing that soon they’d be going away to college. They would be apart in body, but not in spirit. They would work it out. What they had was too perfect to let go.

      No one could imagine how she felt the night she waited for him, hot and tremulous, already wet and ready for him just knowing she would see him in a few minutes. It was agony to act normal in front of Aunt Becki. But this time Alex simply didn’t arrive. No letter, no phone call, no Alex. Not ever again.

      Her knees buckled as she went up the steps to her building. Gritting her teeth against the pain she’d managed to keep in a separate compartment of her soul for so many years, Sarah turned the key in the lock, heard the reassuring click and pushed at the main door, surprised when very little happened. She shoved a little harder.

      “Don’t knock over the flowers!” It was her first-floor neighbor Maude who shouted at her from her apartment window. While Sarah hesitated, a door slammed, indicating that Maude had come out into the narrow entrance hall. A series of mutters followed, alternating with oofs and grunts. “You think I have nothing better to do than sign for your deliveries, collect your menus from Chinese restaurants? Where’s my big Christmas tip, that’s what I’d like to know.”

      Maude, being a writer and a famous one at that, worked at home, and so, by default, was the building’s doorperson. Her diatribes on this subject were long, loud and venomous.

      “Sorry, Maude. What flowers?”

      “Your flowers,” Maude said. “So stop trying to break down the door until I get them shoved out of the way.”

      The staff had sent flowers to cheer her up, let her know they didn’t really hate her. How sweet of them. They shouldn’t be spending their money, what little they had of it, this way. The door suddenly burst open and Sarah fell into a virtual conservatory.

      If not quite a conservatory, it was certainly an enormous bouquet, largely composed of white orchids whose long streamers of blossoms waved toward the high ceiling of the entry. The vase wasn’t a standard florist’s container, but a frosty-looking piece of handblown glass in a pale, smoky hue. Sarah gazed at it, feeling stunned.

      “How’re you going to get it into the elevator?” Maude said. Her expression was sour. Beside her, a doleful basset hound uttered a soft moan.

      Sarah’s ears buzzed and her voice seemed to come from a distance. “I can’t imagine. Call the Longshoreman’s Union and see if somebody wants a job on the side?”

      “I’ve got a dolly.” The words dripped out as slowly as liquid through an intravenous tube.

      “Why, thank you, Maude. Just give me a sec to read the card.”

      If she wasn’t mistaken, the cardholder that feathered up through the orchids was crafted in sterling silver. Her entire staff put together didn’t have that much money to spare. She knew what the card would say even before she opened the tiny envelope:

      Dear Sarah:

      Sorry this weekend didn’t work out for you. How about next weekend? You can reach me at any of these numbers….

      Her eyes blurred on the string of numbers, written in the neat hand of someone at the florist’s shop, not in a large, rounded scrawl. If the card had actually been in the handwriting she remembered so well as being distinctively Alex’s, she might have fainted.