Read Online What Pretty Girls Are Made Of by Lindsay Jill Roth - Free Book Online Page B

and I was sure even her nine-year-old son could handle it. Also perturbing was her use of “ur” for “your,” “you are,” or anything of the like in business emails—not texts to friends. I picked up the phone to call her at 9:01 a.m., hoping she wasn’t counting the minute against me.
    “Good morning, Alicataracts,” she answered after one ring, then rushed on. “I need you to set up a meeting with the studio staff ASAP. This is a matter of great importance.”
    Ali . . . cataracts?
    “Sure thing, Sally. How much time do you need me to block out for it?”
    “Well, unless you can settle this now and tell me who is stealing rolls of my toilet paper and paper towels and overusing garbage bags, I would say that we’ll need a good hour for me to get to the bottom of this. It’s really a plain and simple concept, the use of garbage bags, you know. You fill them up until you can barely tie them shut, and when you have not an inch of space left, you tie them up.”
    “Sally,” I said as evenly and calmly as I could without bursting into peals of laughter. “We use garbage bags for both trash and UPS packages. We separate our packages based on shipping—next-day air, ground, et cetera. So the garbage bag that you saw that wasn’t full was because we only have a few next-day-air packages. And as for toilet paper, I have the intern order one-ply. Do you really think that the girls are walking off with one-ply?”
    “I don’t need you to make things difficult right now, Alison. Unless it’s you who is pilfering my paper goods or taking your stuff home in my garbage bags. I would like this settled right now. I’ll wait for an email from you telling me when this meeting is set up.”
    “Okay, Sally. I’ll get it on the schedule.”
    And I did. But only after I went and used the bathroom—with the Charmin stash that the girls and I contributed to privately and carried around in black garbage bags.
    Jolie loved hearing about the start of my day. The irony of it was that Sally would give away anything to her clients—product replacements, coffee machine cartridges if they liked the studio coffee, free sets of lashes—yet with us, Sally was worried someone was stealing the recycled one-ply bathroom tissue that came a thousand sheets per roll, forty rolls per carton for $49.98.

    “You know what’s coming up, Alison, don’t you?” Helen said as she walked into my office one November morning with a buttered bagel and a cup of coffee. It had taken me a few months, but I’d realized how Helen, an old woman (Sixties? Seventies? She wouldn’t reveal her secret), could be in better shape than most forty-year-olds. It took her a full day to eat a bagel—a bite an hour. Literally.
    “Want some bagel, darling?” she asked, as usual. “I’m not going to finish the whole thing.”
    “I don’t know how you do it, but I would demolish that thing in about two minutes,” I said, craving the taste of an egg everything slathered in cream cheese. She laughed her throaty laugh and stood over me, lingering.
    “So what’s coming up?” I asked, remembering her original question. “Thanksgiving?”
    “Besides Thanksgiving.”
    The holiday was in only a few days, yet it didn’t feel like Thanksgiving season, with unseasonably warm temperatures outside and no one at work having taken any vacation time. I couldn’t wait to cook, eat, and relax with my family.
    Fueled by the blank look on my face, since I really didn’t know what she was getting at, Helen pulled up a chair. “It’s the week of Sally’s father’s death. Nine years ago.”
    “Right,” I said with a deep breath and a sigh, even though this was news to me. “I knew he died, but not when.” I gathered that Sally and her father had been very close. “What does this anniversary mean for us at work?”
    “It means that she’s fiery and unpredictable. And—”
    “More than usual?” I interrupted.
    She smiled but didn’t laugh. “More than