I offered him a sugary smile before sipping my coffee. “Maybe you should listen for a change.”
Allowing him to consider that thought, I left him in the break room alone.While Reed and his brother primarily focused on real-estate sales, Iris’s side of the business managed properties that the Eastwood family owned and provided management for clients who owned commercial buildings. Although there was some crossover where the brothers kept a building to manage if they had sold it or had a relationship with the owner.
One of the projects on Iris’s list was to compile one database of all the cleaning-company vendors that they used so she could solicit bids for managing multiple properties for a cost savings. In order to do that, I had to go into each of their individual folders on the system and pull up information on every property. While Max’s files were a disaster, with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets strewn all over the place and no clear file-naming system in place, Reed’s were as organized as I would have expected. Each property had a separate folder named with the building’s street address, and inside each folder were separate subfolders that were logically organized, such as the one labeled MAINTENANCE, where I found most of the information I needed.
It took me a few hours to compile almost everything. Information from only one property of Reed’s was missing: 1377 Buckley Street. After checking the property’s folder a second time, I clicked around to check a few other folders that were not labeled with addresses. One such folder was simply labeled PERSONAL. Inside there were a dozen subfolders. I perused the titles for anything that might be misfiled and found folders such as MEDICAL, CONTRACTS, LEGAL . . . there was even one labeled WEDDING. Curious, I left-clicked on the mouse to look at the last time the folder had been opened. It hadn’t been accessed for more than six months. I was just about to close out and take a walk over to Reed’s office to ask him if he knew where I might find the information for the remaining building when I saw there was one lone, unfiled Word doc. This file was labeled BUCKET.
Thinking nothing of it, I clicked to check out the contents. What I found shocked the crap out of me. Reed had made a fuck-it list of his own.Throughout the entire morning, I couldn’t get Reed’s list out of my head. Although it wasn’t necessarily the contents of his list but more the fact that he’d made one at all that boggled my mind. The man had laughed when I’d told him I was working on my list. Yet he’d made his own bucket list? And I’d checked the time on the file. It had been created at eight o’clock last night and last updated a little after ten. He’d still been in the office when I left around seven. I just couldn’t imagine that he’d stuck around for hours, working on his own list. It seemed too out of character for him. There were definitely two sides to Reed Eastwood—a side that he showed me and the rest of the world, and a side that he kept hidden. I could totally see the man who penned the beautiful blue note having a bucket list of things that he wanted to achieve in life, but certainly not the condescending Reed that he was to me most of the time. Then again, there were these brief moments when I felt like I was catching a glimpse of the other Reed. But they never lasted for very long.
I strolled the aisles of the dollar store on my lunch hour with a basket in my hand, lost in thought. I’d come to pick up silver baking trays, paper towels, and rubber gloves—three things I used in excess when I worked with pottery clay—but I never left the dollar store without a bunch of junk I didn’t really need. My basket had tissues, a few plastic bowls, hair ties, and a bunch of spices that were too cheap to pass up even though I didn’t have a clue what I’d use them for. When I arrived at the shelving with seasonal mugs, I decided to pick one up for Reed so he’d stop using the Styrofoam ones for his coffee.
Fingering through mugs with Halloween pumpkins, Valentine’s hearts, and menorahs on the front, I snorted when I picked up one particular red mug. It was Christmas-themed, and the cartoon picture on the front was of a group of boys wearing sweaters and scarves while singing Christmas carols. I couldn’t resist buying it, considering what he’d written as number three on his bucket list.
Sing in a Choir.Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, it dawned on me that maybe Reed had planted that list on the server to screw with me. Could he be poking fun at me? Or did he have an epiphany after hearing about my list and truly decided to make his own? I couldn’t very well come right out and ask him since I’d be admitting that I’d snooped in his personal files. Well, I could, of course, but last time I did that he’d gotten pretty pissed off. So I decided that I’d gauge his reaction to the mug I’d bought him. If he’d planted that list and made up the crazy part about singing in an all-male choir, I might be able to see it in his face. So around five o’clock, I made a fresh pot of coffee and fixed a cup just for my boss in his new mug.