Grumpy Best Friend

1

Jude

Sometimes working for Lady Fluke felt like cooking a very expensive, painstaking meal over several hours, then smashing all that glorious food on the floor.

I could spend weeks on a project, devote hours of my time and untold amounts of energy, and suddenly have it scrapped with no more than an email. She wasn’t a bad woman, and wasn’t particularly indecisive, but she spent most of her time in London and I was based in Philadelphia, which meant whatever I did was somehow less important than whatever was going on in England. The American office for the Fluke Biscuit Company was essentially my bedroom, and sometimes my living room, if I felt like working in front of the TV.

All of which was why I felt surprised and a little upset when I got a call one Monday morning from Lady Fluke herself, instructing me in her very proper English accent, each syllable perfectly clipped, like she was trying to win first prize in a diction contest, that I was no longer to work on the Ackerman accounts, which was a series of competitive intelligence analyses I was supposed to write about an American cookie baking company and that I had been painstakingly researching over the last three weeks, because why not, apparently I write about cookie companies for absolutely no reason these days, and I was instead supposed to go running off to some downtown office building with basically zero warning or explanation.

I wanted to jump off a bridge. Instead, I got coffee, and hustled my butt through the morning Philly traffic, along the dirty sidewalks past brick-front rowhomes and the sweeping arches of their old stone facades, past the young men carrying briefcases and wrapped in expensive suits staring at the ground like they wanted to break their faces through it, past Rittenhouse Park and the buskers already tuning up their guitars, and into a glass monstrosity of companies stacked one on top of each other. I signed in as a guest of Flowers Construction, Incorporated, up front, although I’d never heard of them before, and rode the elevator to the twentieth floor.

The vista outside the window of the waiting room was surprisingly beautiful. The city was spread out along the space between the Schuylkill River on one side and the Delaware River on the other, jammed between two bodies of water and packed as densely as it could, the buildings glittering in the morning sun, people moving down on the sidewalks like toys. The receptionist gave me one look, pursed her thin, painted pink lips, and hit a button.

“Judith Pike is here to see you,” she said, although I had no clue who she was talking to. I assumed it was Lady Fluke—but I didn’t know what she’d be doing in the office of a construction company, and I knew better than to ask. One too many questions would get only a flat stare, or a blank email in response, which was Lady Fluke’s way of saying, fuck off, Jude, and figure it out.

The receptionist smiled at me in that sweet way front office workers had, like she knew she had to be polite but really didn’t feel like it, and I smiled back, feeling pretty much the same. I wracked my brain trying to figure out why Fluke would bring me to this place, with its old, out-of-date chairs out front, looking like a dental office from the ‘90s.

She didn’t have any plans to build anything, at least that I was aware of. The Fluke Company made biscuits, these really bland, but surprisingly popular cookie things that British people went insane over. All of the Fluke Company assets and manufacturing were over in England, and I was the only employee in America. She kept me around doing small odds and ends for the most part, writing reports, researching competition, but mostly I was her guide and her assistant when she came to the States, which was less and less often.

I’d been working for Fluke for the past three years. At first, she visited almost every few months, but slowly that tapered off, until it stopped completely. She hadn’t been back in a year, and I’d been left floundering on my own, doing whatever minor thing she sent my way, but mostly wasting my time. If it weren’t for the good pay and benefits, I would’ve quit a long time ago. Besides, I liked working from home, and I did have a strange amount of freedom, mostly because Fluke didn’t bother to check on whether I was actively doing my job or not, so long as I replied in a timely manner and did what was asked by the deadlines I was given.

In some ways, she was an easy boss. And in others, she was a nightmare.

The intercom buzzed and the receptionist beamed at me, probably glad to be alone again. “He’ll see you now.”