The River House. Carla Neggers

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СКАЧАТЬ and come back for more pizza deliveries and Judge Judy. She’d have prolonged the inevitable, and so she’d skipped the brownies and left.

      When she’d knocked on Gabe’s door after losing her latest job as a financial analyst, she hadn’t expected to stay for more than a day or two. She’d been broke, in debt, kicked out of her apartment, desperate not to go crawling to her parents for help. She’d turned to Gabe, then living in the smaller of two apartments in a house he owned on the Charles River in Watertown, just outside Boston. They’d known each other since nursery school. He’d taken her in, but he hadn’t been that excited to see her. “Again, Felicity? Wasn’t this job supposed to last three years?”

      “It didn’t.”

      “Did you quit or get fired?”

      “I was outsourced.”

      “Fired, then.”

      He’d let her sleep on his couch and take as many hot showers as she’d wanted. It had been winter. The showers helped with her perpetually cold feet. After five days of putting up with her camped out in his living room, he’d read her the riot act. It couldn’t have been more than an hour before he’d written his fateful note. Maybe he’d already had it written, because he’d started his speech while she’d been getting out of the shower.

      “You need a career change,” he’d told her. “You’re a lousy financial analyst.”

      “How would you know? You quit college. I have an MBA.”

      “Your MBA isn’t doing you any good, is it? You get jobs, but you don’t keep them. Why is that?”

      “Bad luck.”

      “Bad career choice. Do something else. You’re hacking away in the wrong jungle.”

      She’d been incensed. How could he be so blunt? How could he not get how terrible she felt about herself?

      She’d shouted through the bathroom door about his lousy people skills.

      He hadn’t responded, and she’d stared at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She’d seen the truth of what he said in the dark circles under her eyes, the lines of fatigue at her mouth, the puffiness of her skin. Brown hair dripping, eyes somewhat bloodshot from too much television and last night’s bottle of wine, full lips, high cheeks, a strong chin. In high school, Gabe had said she reminded him of Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man. Felicity had taken that to mean he’d wanted to spank her and told him as much, thinking it was funny—but he’d found it sexy, provocative.

      She’d loved Gabe Flanagan then, as a teenager, before college and graduate school. Her first jobs after getting her degrees hadn’t worked out, but she’d had high hopes when she’d landed a job at a large insurance firm in Boston’s financial district. She hadn’t known many people in Boston, and she’d been so busy keeping her nose above water, scrambling to learn the job, that she hadn’t made many new friends. Certainly none who would take her in after she’d been fired.

      There’d been Gabe, and she’d landed on his doorstep with her weekender bag in hand, explaining she needed a couple of days to regroup. She’d rented a house with two other women, but they had a friend willing to take her room, since she could no longer afford it. Gabe hadn’t asked for details. He was successful and hard-driving and impatient, and he could read between the lines and didn’t need her to spell out how broke she was.

      She’d been making wrong choice after wrong choice. But it hadn’t seemed that way. It’d seemed—she’d truly believed—she just needed the right fit, the right job. She just had to tough it out. Persevere. She wasn’t a quitter, she’d told herself—and Gabe. But that had been part of the problem. She’d needed to quit. He’d pointed out he’d started businesses that failed. He’d made mistakes. “I learned from my failures. That’s the trick, Felicity. Acknowledging your failures and learning from them.”

      In all the years she’d known him, she’d never let Gabe see her cry. Even when he’d broken her heart that summer after high school, she hadn’t let him see her melt down. It wasn’t as if it had been unexpected. That’s what Gabe Flanagan did in high school. He broke girls’ hearts. Everyone knew.

      Still, they’d been there for each other through high school, college, their first jobs, various ups and downs. They’d go weeks without speaking, texting or emailing, and then she’d call him to tell him she’d just burned her mouth on a hot pepper or he’d send her a silly puppy video off the internet at 2:00 a.m.

      She’d known their friendship had needed to change. They were proper adults. Gabe needed to be free to get on with his life. He’d sell his place and move into something grander, more expensive. He’d meet other up-and-coming, hard-driving entrepreneurs. People who got him. People he got. He’d come to rely on her, the hometown girl, to be there when he didn’t have time or want to take time to socialize. She was easy, familiar and there.

      She’d needed to figure out her life, but she resisted confronting how she’d managed to find herself out of another job. She’d had a five-year plan, but she’d kept having to restart the thing.

      Back to Go, Gabe would tell her. You can do it.

      By that day in his apartment, even he had lost patience.

      And he’d lost faith in her.

      After her shower, she’d put on clean clothes, including socks and shoes, dried her hair—Gabe had actually owned a decent hair dryer—and hung up her towel on a peg next to his threadbare towel. He had pegs, not towel racks. She didn’t know why she’d noticed that or what it said about either of them. Probably nothing. When she’d emerged from the bathroom, she’d felt more in control of herself, but Gabe was gone.

      That was when she’d found his note on the counter where he kept his recycling schedule, take-out menus, pens, stamps, paper clips, notepad and phone charger. There was a clear block with a photograph of the covered bridge in their hometown, a mile up the river from where he’d grown up with his brother and their unreliable but otherwise wonderful parents. They’d had dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters and at least one cow. And chickens. Felicity was positive she remembered chickens.

      After dashing off her response, she’d returned the Sharpie she’d borrowed to its mates. She wiped crumbs off the couch, folded the throws she’d used during her stay, fluffed the cushions, ran the vacuum and took her dirty dishes and various leftovers into the kitchen. She’d loaded the dishwasher, run the garbage disposal and taken out the trash, including her pizza boxes. She’d packed up her meager belongings, folded her blankets, put her sheets and towels in the wash—of course he had an in-unit washer and dryer—and gathered up her garbage. Twenty minutes later, she was on her way in the February cold.

      By the end of the week, she had a job with a successful event planner in Boston. She’d meant it to be a temporary job—an ultra-temporary job, for that matter—to make ends meet and get herself on firmer financial footing. She wasn’t going back to Gabe’s couch, or moving in with her parents. But a few weeks turned into a few months, and then it was summer...and fall...and finally she’d realized she’d found a career she truly enjoyed and was good at. Serendipity, desperation, strategic thinking, accident—whatever it had been, she’d never looked back to emerging markets, municipal bonds and any of the rest of it.

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