Synopsis
Book by Proulx Suzanne
Extrait
Lucky Is My Middle Name
Don't talk to me about luck.
I nearly collide with Harley Sloane while stomping into my office. I'm in
a vile mood after going all over creation on the stupid bus. I am
temporarily without a car but got a ride
to the meeting of the Colorado Hospital Association of Risk Managers,
otherwise known as CHARM. Then my ride had to deal with a sudden crisis
and couldn't drive me back. "Be glad this isn't happening at your
hospital," she said. "You're lucky. I'd a lot rather ride a bus back
downtown than deal with this."
Oh, and the CHARM meeting was really a bore.
Whenever somebody tells you how lucky you are, what they mean is things
could have been worse. For instance, three weeks ago when my car caught
fire, I was lucky--I had just completed a round of errands, ending with
dropping off my dry cleaning. I was on a major street, not on the highway.
Found an empty place to pull over on Grant Street, at rush hour. Lucky! It
didn't blow up. Fortunate, indeed! A man working in an office building
came right out with a fire extinguisher. And hey, my car could have been
totaled, but it wasn't. What a godsend!
Would a lucky person's car catch fire in the first place? It's not a very
old car, nothing like the wrecks I drove throughout nursing school and law
school, and they never caught fire.
"Hey! Lucky I caught you," Harley says. I think he means he's lucky, but
he could be saying my name. Actually, my last name--spelled Lucci,
pronounced Lucky. It would sound so much neater if it were my middle name.
"Whatcha need, Harley?" I try not to sound too surly. He is, after all,
the chief operating officer, a decent human being, and my boss's boss.
"We have a problem. Nobody's seen Jette all day." Jette Wakefield, my
boss, is our vice president of legal affairs. Geri, her assistant, nods
and tries to assume a worried look.
I shrug out of my coat and reach around my door to hang it up. "So? That's
a problem?"
"She's missed a meeting. And she's got some other things on her schedule
that are important." Harley puts his jacket on, armoring himself for
wherever he's going. "A deposition in some personal injury case."
I lean on the ledge that we still call the secretarial corral, even though
we now call the people behind it assistants. I
believe the ledge is there to keep us away from their office supplies.
"Jette probably took the day off," I say. "She's probably on the golf
course. It was a pretty nice day, off and on." It was a nice day when I
was on the bus and lousy whenever I got off to walk or to wait. Our bus
system has been known for years as The Ride; its clientele ignore the
Madison Avenue moniker and call it "The Walk and the Wait."
Harley paces around the coffee table in the reception area. "She's so
meticulous about calling in. She doesn't miss meetings. I'm worried."
"All right." I assume this falls under my job description. I'm the risk
manager for Montmorency Medical Center. I guess that means I'm supposed to
find her. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Her job, I guess." Harley spreads his hands, giving me the
serious look that makes him resemble Alfred E. Neuman. "Check with Geri,
check Jette's calendar, make sure things she needs to do are covered. See
if you can find anybody who's seen her."
"You're the boss."
When I first started here, I reported to the CEO. So did Harley, and so
did Jette. Then the old CEO left, a new one,
Dr. Langstrom, appeared, and almost instantly things were changed so that
Jette reported to Harley and I reported to Jette. In other words, in one
pen stroke I slipped two rungs on the corporate ladder, through no fault
of my own.
Doing her job is not going to be a problem. She already gives me all the
dreary stuff, while she keeps the exciting stuff--like policy meetings and
deciding what sort of corporate entity our new sports clinic should be--to
herself. Yeah, I know--choice of entities, exciting?
Still following the line of the secretarial corral, I move to Geri's desk
and address her. "Guess I'm covering for Jette," I say. As if she hadn't
been sitting right there during the entire discussion.
Geri nods. She doesn't like Jette. In fact, nobody does. Not that Geri
looks thrilled to be working for me, either.
"She missed a lunch meeting," Vanessa says significantly.
Vanessa is the assistant to Dr. Ben Langstrom, the CEO, who is not a
doctor, at least not a medical one.
"Well, she's dieting," I say. We all know this because Jette's been quite
vocal about it. "Hey! Maybe it worked, maybe her diet suddenly took. Maybe
she's in there, in her office, only she's so skinny none of us has noticed
her."
Behind me, Harley chuckles.
Geri sniffs. "Very funny. She missed the meeting with the board
representatives and the physician recruitment meeting--that was the lunch
meeting. She's supposed to cover a depo with a doctor today at five."
"Okay," I say, visualizing a nice, posh, downtown lawyer's office. "I'll
go hold his hand."
"Her hand, okay?" Geri says. "The doctor, that is. It's at . . . Let me
get the file. I hope Jette doesn't have the file with
her, wherever she is."
"She won't, I'll bet," I mutter. I am a veritable pack mule, taking my
briefcase and lots of heavy documents with me wherever I go, but Jette
often breezed into a meeting carrying only a notepad.
"No, it's right here." Geri drags a legal-size file folder out. "Okay.
It's a personal injury case and the doctor was the on-call in the ER when
the patient came in."
Simple enough.
"But she hates lawyers," Geri adds.
"Who doesn't?" Vanessa puts in.
"The depo's at--wow, 6312 South Fiddler's Green. Is that in the Tech
Center? It just says Arapahoe County."
"Arapahoe County!" And me without a car. "Shit. I just got back from
fucking Arapahoe County, on the bus, and it took me two hours!"
"Really, Vicky?" Harley's anxious look changes to feigned innocence. "The
whole county? And it only took you two hours?"
"I thought you were leaving."
He grins.
"Hostile work environment," I say. "Somebody write me up a complaint." I
throw my pen at him. He dodges.
"Harley, I can't do this. I don't have a car," I moan. "The bus schedule
is not that regular." And if you think the schedule's irregular, you
should see the passengers.
"Take mine," he suggests.
"I don't know. The depo starts at five," I say. Probably in deference to
the doctor's clinical schedule. "It could go on, it could be late . . ."
This is overreacting. It will last one hour, as scheduled.
"That's okay," Harley says. "Bring it in tomorrow. I'm meeting Bebe
downtown. She's got some kind of awards banquet. I can go home with her.
It's the big one." He means the car, not the awards banquet.
"I guess you'll drive the little one in tomorrow," I say. "And then put it
in the backseat of the big one to take it home."
"We'll work something out," Harley says. "I'm not meeting Bebe until seven
or so. Give me a call when you get back, but if I'm not here, don't worry."
He tosses me the keys, much in the same spirit with which I threw my pen
at him. "The access card's in the pocket on the driver's side. The windows
are automatic. Try not to set it on fire."
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