Page 12 of This Is How It Started
Chip’s door swings open. From his chair, he holds it open with his foot and searches me out across the room. “Hey, Rachel, come in here for a sec.”
I take a fortifying breath and a circuitous route to his office, passing the coffee bar, where I slip my cup into the dishwasher. Suddenly, I’m in no rush to have this conversation. Niki is still there, taking up Chip’s blue loveseat with her Christian Louboutin tote bag, Burberry shawl, and larger than average ass. She’s about my mother’s age. The similarities between them stop there, though. My mother’s attitude toward designer labels is, why should she pay an exorbitant price for a logo only to give the designer free advertising? Unlike Niki, who colors her hair an unnatural shade of red, my mother let hers go gray years ago. And unlike Niki’s cosmetically enhanced face and neck—ass withstanding—Shana Gold has never gone under the knife, despite once being married to a renowned plastic surgeon. And still, everywhere my mother goes, she turns heads. She just has a certain style that’s age defying.
But that’s superficial bullshit. The thing about Niki is she’s one of the hardest-working real estate agents in the business, continually named top salesperson in the city. She also has a client list that rivals Oprah’s address book. Celebrities, athletes, politicians, billionaires, and tech moguls. Oh, and the occasional relative.
“Have a seat,” Chip says.
I take the chair facing the window with a view of the gym across the street. There’s enough tension in the room to start an electrical fire.
Chip breaks the awkward silence with, “Niki says you’re a bad communicator.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it.” Niki leans toward me, her hands on her knees and an almost bored expression on her face. Her bearing says,You’re not in my league, child, and now I’m going to bitch-slap you to kingdom come.“What I said is that you cost this agency a hefty commission because of your incompetence.”
What she really means is that her niece didn’t get the house and I made her look bad.
“Niki, you know as well as I do that clients aren’t always flexible, that they often believe their homes are worth more than the market will bear.” It is a polite way of saying my seller was a greedy, delusional son of a bitch. He thought his Bernal Heights contemporary was an architectural masterpiece. Josh certainly didn’t think so. He’d taken to calling the house “the toaster oven.”
“Well, it’s your job to make them understand what the market will bear,” Niki says with a sneer. “For God’s sake, Rachel, we were twenty thousand dollars apart. Twenty goddamn thousand dollars.”
Really only ten when you take into consideration that Niki and I had agreed to scrape off some of our commission to close the deal. But at the last minute, Irving Toaster Oven Jones decided he wouldn’t be nickeled and dimed for a home as significant as Fallingwater. He accused me of being “unscrupulous” and plotting with the buyer to “steal” his house out from under him.
“Niki, I did all I could do. It’s not like I could force the guy to sell.”
“Not force,” Niki says through gritted teeth, “but a good agent”—she puts heavy emphasis on the wordgood—“has the power to persuade. You should’ve explained that this market won’t last forever and that he should take the inflated price we offered and run.”
As if I didn’t say all those things. But when you think you own freaking Manderley, you don’t listen to real estate agents. To Irving, I was no better than a worm.
“I have a listing for a nice house in the Outer Sunset your niece might like,” I say, knowing it will provoke Niki beyond reason.
Before she can throw her Louboutin bag at me, Chip steps in. “Why don’t we chalk this whole situation up to a learning experience and move on.” Always the diplomat. Except Niki’s hair looks like it’s about to burst into flames.
She starts to say something when my phone rings. I glance at the caller ID. Mommie Dearest. Normally, I’d ignore the call, but it is an excellent excuse to extricate myself from Niki’s wrath.
“Excuse me, I have to take this.” I wave the phone in the air like it’s Sam Zell on the line and hightail it to the conference room.
“Whassup?” My mother hates when I do that.
“Rachel?”
Who else would it be? It’s my phone, for Pete’s sake. “Mom, I’m in a meeting.”
“Where are you?”
“At work...Windham.”
“You need to get to San Francisco General as fast as you can. I’ll call you an Uber.”
“What are you talking about?” I’m waiting for her to tell me that Hannah has a hangnail or that Adam ate too many edibles. My mother is a bit of a drama queen and is never happier than when she’s blowing up a minor incident into a mega tragedy. She can’t remember what she had for breakfast but can recount the aftermath of Uncle Hersch’s two-year-old hernia operation in excruciating detail. But today there’s something in her voice that’s different.
My mind immediately travels to Josh and his earbuds, and my heart races. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“It’s your father. He’s had a heart attack.”
Chapter 5
That Same Year
They say the dead come to you in your dreams. I keep waiting for my father, but he’s a no-show. In hindsight, there are so many things I wish I’d told him. “Thank you for being the best father ever.” And “Why did you leave Mom for a woman half your age and ruin our family?”
