Page 139 of Ten Years and Then…
Finally, she got a genuine laugh out of the girl. “I guess I am.”
The conversation flowed more freely after that, until Nora’s Palm Pilot bleeped fifteen minutes later. “We’ll have to cut it short. One of the drawbacks of being editor-in-chief. You can’t skip meetings when you’re supposed to be running them.”
Nora, two hours later
When her two o’clock meeting finally ended, twenty minutes over time, Nora took a detour by the cubicles on the other side of the floor. She hoped to see Julia hard at work revising her article, but instead the girl was listening to a message on her cellphone. Listening to it repeatedly; she was pulling the phone away from her ear, pushing a button and then listening again, over and over.
It wasn’t a good message, if the curses she was mouthing were any indication. Nora was no lip-reader, but some words were impossible to mistake. And there was a particular combination of anger and sadness in her eyes that was all too familiar.
She headed back to her office, telling herself, this is none of your business. Except, being a mentor—and that was what she was acting as earlier, wasn’t it?—didn’t fit into a strict little box. Life was messy and the personal bled into the professional and vice-versa.
Hadn’t she told Julia she wanted to have get-to-know-you lunches with her staff? Might as well start making time right now. As soon as she got back to her desk, she sent Julia an invite for tomorrow at noon. Somebody had to be first, right?
Nora, March 27
“I hope you like Thai,” Nora said when Julia met her at the elevators precisely at noon. “The red curry will change your life.” Julia didn’t seem convinced. More than that, she looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“I’m fine, Ms. Langley. I appreciate your time yesterday, and your advice. But…”
“But nothing,” Nora said with a shake of her head. “I told you, I was thinking about lunches with the staff. You’re just first. And it’s Nora, please. The last person who called me Ms. Langley was my senior thesis advisor. Okay?”
Julia nodded, still looking unconvinced but apparently not willing to directly contradict her.
“Good. So, ground rules. No work talk, unless you want to bring it up. I’d much rather get to know you better. This is a workplace, but we’re all humans, too. Well, except for Jack Elliott, maybe.” That earned her a brief grin. “Actually, even him. Get him talking about his bulldog and you’d think he’s a totally different person. And that’s the point. We’ll all work together better if we really see each other as whole people. Fair enough?”
Julia nodded her head dutifully, but Nora didn’t think she was really on board with the idea. But by the time they got to the restaurant, the girl was talking less guardedly, and it came out that she was an only child of divorced parents.
Nora already saw so much of herself in Julia; it wasn’t even a surprise to hear that her upbringing was so similar. “When did it happen? My parents divorced when I was eleven.”
“Twelve. It really sucked—pardon me. I mean, it wasn’t good.”
Nora laughed; she couldn’t help it. “Julia, you can say ‘sucked’ in front of me. If anybody understands how much it sucks when your parents split up, I do. So which one of them did you lean towards?”
“My father. But my mother made me feel guilty about it, and it was—it was pretty ugly for a while.” Nora heard the pain in her voice that she was trying to suppress. “They—they’re still pretty awful to each other, but they managed to sit in the same row at my graduation. So I guess that’s progress.”
Nora shared stories about her parents until their food arrived. “Like I said, trust the red curry. It makes everything better.”
It worked, too; Julia seemed a lot more comfortable after her meal. Enough so that Nora thought she might be willing to talk about whatever—or more likely whoever—was bothering her yesterday afternoon.
“It’s none of my business, obviously, so feel free to tell me to shut up if you want to—and that’s an order, by the way. But if you do want to talk, I’m listening—what was that voicemail you were so upset about yesterday?”
Julia hesitated. “It’s personal, Ms. Lang…Nora. It was just some guy, I don’t want to talk about it.”
But on the walk back to the office, totally unprompted, Julia did talk about it, in great detail, and Nora might have been listening to her teenage self talking.
“I don’t have any advice about him, other than to block his calls going forward. But I can tell you one thing for sure, because I lived it myself. You are so much better, so much more deserving than you think you are.”
She hadn’t even realized her hand was in her purse. But now the Mont Blanc pen was in her fingers, held out for Julia to see. “I didn’t think I was, until I met someone who saw everything in me that I couldn’t see for myself.” She tapped Julia’s forehead gently with the pen. “He gave me this after we broke up. Right before he graduated. Just because he wanted me to carry something of him—and so I’d always remember everything he saw in me. For a long time, I didn’t believe it. And I still forget sometimes.” Like on the cruise, a year and a half ago. “But every time I use that pen, it reminds me that I really am worthy. I am everything he thought I was.”
Julia didn’t say anything for a minute or two. “So I need to find a man who’ll make me believe in myself?”
That’s what Nora herself would have taken from the story. “No. You might. I hope you do. I think you will, because you
have a hell of a lot going for you. But you do need to believe in yourself, and take reassurance wherever you can find it. Like right now, from me. Or from Jack Elliott, because for all his bark, if he didn’t think your work was good, he’d be demanding that I fire you. Or, sometimes you just have to lie to yourself until you start to believe it. I’ve done a lot of that too.”
Julia thought that over. “I’ll keep all that in mind, Nora. Thank you. You didn’t have to spend all this time with me and my stupid problems.”
Nora patted her arm. “Yes, I did. Because there’s a whole long line of people who did that for me. And one day, I expect you to repay it to someone young and inexperienced who needs it. That’s definitely an order. Fair enough?”
