At the end of lunch, Iris turned to me. “I have an appointment uptown. Could you give Charlotte a lift back to the office?”
Max responded, even though Grandmother hadn’t spoken to him. “I can give her a lift.”
“It’s a Tuesday, you don’t usually come to the office.” I buttoned my suit jacket. “Don’t you have a massage or some other pressing business to attend to?”
My brother slipped his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Nope. I’m free all afternoon.”
We already had embezzlement going on at the office; the last thing we needed was a sexual harassment suit. I put my hand on Charlotte’s lower back. “We have actual business to discuss. So we’ll see you back at the office.”Neither of us said a word for the first five minutes of the drive back downtown.
Eventually, I broke the ice. “Good job picking up on that check inconsistency.”
She stared out the window and sighed. “It doesn’t feel so good. It feels pretty lousy, actually.”
“It’s never fun to discover that a person you’ve trusted has betrayed you.”
“I know. Believe me, I know. But it’s Christian that I feel badly about.”
“Christian?”
“Dorothy’s grandson. He’s only six. And the cancer isn’t just in his eye. He spent months sick from the treatment of a tumor in his lungs only to have it metastasize to his eye. He should be playing peewee baseball instead of being home-tutored and living in hotels with his mom while she desperately runs him around like a guinea pig.”
I caught myself rubbing at a spot on my chest, but it was inside that hurt. I side-glanced over at Charlotte. “How do you know so much about his illness?”
She shrugged. “We talk.”
“You talk? You’ve only been at the company for what—three or four weeks?”
“So? That doesn’t mean I can’t make friends. You know that cute picture of him in the Boy Scout uniform on her desk?”
I didn’t but skirted the issue. “What about it?”
“Well, I commented about how cute he is on my second day, and she just broke down crying and told me the story. We went to lunch together a few times after that.” She paused. “Now I’m the person who got her into trouble.”
“That’s not on you, Charlotte. She got herself into trouble. I understand you feel badly. But you did the right thing.”
Charlotte gazed out the window as a moment of silence passed. She was so damn sensitive to everyone’s feelings, which was admirable but also a detriment sometimes when it came to business. Although when you’re talking about a kid with cancer, all bets are off. The entire situation was horrible.
“What are you going to do to Dorothy?” she finally asked.
I glanced over at Charlotte and then back to the road. “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
She took some time to think about her answer. “I wouldn’t fire her. She really needs the job. What she did was absolutely wrong, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t have done the same thing given no other alternative. People aren’t perfect, and sometimes we need to balance the one wrong they did with all of the rights they’ve done. Dorothy has worked for you for a long time and was helping her daughter and grandson.”
I nodded. We were both quiet for a long time after that.
It was Charlotte who finally brought us both out of deep thought. She turned to me. “I appreciated the French translations, by the way. I never thanked you. Thank God for Google, though, or else I might’ve accidentally bought granny panties for my upcoming nonexistent trip to Paris.” She rolled her eyes.
“I see you checked my work.” I chuckled. “And, de rien. You’re welcome.”
“So why did you stop the French lesson at the point where I scheduled ‘Blind Date’?”
Trying to skirt around the question, I said, “What do you mean?”
“You stopped translating my schedule right at that spot. It was like the second-to-last item, and you decided to stop right there. That was random. Is there no French translation for ‘blind date’?”
Shit. How was I going to explain that one?
Well, Charlotte, I stopped translating because the idea of you going out with some random man makes me feel violent.
“I was no longer having fun with it, so I stopped.” Clenching my jaw, I glanced over at her and asked, “Anyway, why are you going out on a blind date? In this day and age, you have access to so many ways of meeting people. Someone like you doesn’t need to resort to that.”
“Okay . . . what do you mean, someone like me?”
Of course she wanted me to spell it out.
“Someone . . . attractive and with an outgoing personality doesn’t need to go on a blind date. It’s too risky, especially in this city. You should really do your homework before you agree to meet someone.”