A Long Hot Christmas. Barbara Daly

went to her bedroom, took off her clothes and hung them up. She’d left her daytime black-and-white tweed jacket at the office. Thank goodness. If she hadn’t, it would be permanently Shalimarred just like her briefcase.

      She put on a soft flannel granny gown, washed her face, brushed her teeth. She turned down the bed, then stared at it. It stood against the wall just inside the door, facing the view. Nighttime Manhattan twinkled at her from a picture window like the pair in the living room. Already, the week after an early Thanksgiving and not even December yet, the Empire State Building was red and green for Christmas.

      About to slip between the sheets, she paused. As tired as she was, it would be lovely to wake up to coffee set on a timer and already made. Yes. She’d sit on the sofa in the living room and have coffee while she read the newspaper.

      And stared at the front door.

      She tried it out on the way to the kitchen. Weird.

      She passed the sofa again on the way to her bedroom, walked over to it, plumped it with her hand.

      Maybe she’d pick up one of the magazines that had come today and just rest here a minute before she actually went to bed. She felt so wired, it might get her in the mood for sleep. She’d get that soft mohair throw to put over her feet. And a real pillow from the bed.

      It seemed no more than a second later when she woke up to the slap of the New York Times against her door and the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Her body buzzed a little with sleepy warmth and something else, something deeper, something achier. She realized she’d been dreaming of Sam.

      WHEN SHE ran into Benton in the hallway on Monday, he got as far as, “Morning, Ho—” before deep coughs racked his body and he hurried away with his face buried in his white handkerchief.

      At noon on Tuesday, when she went into the executive café in search of an iced tea, she discovered a sign posted on one side of the dining area: “Perfume-Free Zone.”

      At two that afternoon, a group of her colleagues made shadows outside her door without really showing their faces. “Has to be Hope’s office,” one said much too loudly. She recognized the oily-smooth tones of St. Paul the Perfect.

      “She does have a certain aura about her,” said a feminine voice, which then dissolved into a giggle as the shadows vanished.

      Ha, ha. Now that she’d become the office joke she’d have to break down and buy a new two-hundred-dollar padded case. The current one had soaked up Shalimar like a femme fatale dying of thirst in the desert.

      It was only good-natured kidding, of course. But Paul Perkins, his real name, wanted this vice presidency as much as she did, and Palmer vice presidents were not office jokes. If she told them what happened—she’d brought the perfume to the office because she was spending the evening being arm candy, then broken the bottle because she’d tossed her briefcase onto a sofa a Texas-born-and-bred feng shui decorator had moved—she could think of that vice-presidency as nothing more than…

      Ah. Yes. A pipe dream.

      But perfume problems faded from her mind in the middle of the afternoon when her computer, which had performed several random tricks during the day, gurgled twice and froze. So much for the two hundred dollars worth of padding. Resigned to the inevitable, she picked up the phone.

      “Tech Support.” The voice was laconic, sending the message, “Just try to get tech support out of me.”

      “I’d like to report a homicide,” she said briskly.

      “Desk or laptop.”

      “Laptop.”

      “Bring it down.”

      “Wait!”

      Silence. “Yes?”

      “I can’t just hand it over to you. I need it. I can’t do without it.” She was having a panic attack just thinking about it.

      “Then you shouldn’t have beaten up on it.” Sigh. “Bring it down, we’ll put your stuff on a zip disk and give you a loaner to use.”

      “Oh. Oh, well, okay. Wait!” she yelled again.

      “What!” Testy this time.

      “Aren’t you supposed to do the traveling around the building with the computers and the zip drives and the…”

      “How soon do you want it?”

      “Immediately.”

      “You better come on down.”

      She wouldn’t take this kind of cavalier treatment from anyone else in the company. But the tech support group—an ungovernable collection of green-haired, jeans-clad cretins, some of whom had yet to be persuaded that deodorant is our friend—were different. They were geniuses. The entire company relied on them totally and treated them rather like rebellious can’t-teach-them-a-thing-but-we’d-never-give-them-away pets.

      Grumbling, Hope slid back into her shoes, straightened her black skirt and cream blouse and picked up the laptop. Forget the case. She couldn’t take the kind of grief the tech group would give her about the Shalimar. Peeking into the Marketing Department reception area, she found the shared administrative assistants looking not merely busy, but somewhat harried. Okay, she’d take it down herself.

      “THIS IS THE LOANER?” she said, gazing in disbelief at the battered object Slidell Hchiridski had just shoved across a counter toward her. The case he shoved along next, which must have cost in the neighborhood of fifteen dollars, appeared to be covered in cat hair. But with an instrument like this one, she supposed it didn’t matter.

      “Yep,” Slidell said. “Works fine. Abusers can’t be choosers. Your computer looks like you threw it at somebody.” He gave her an accusing glare.

      “It was a terrible and tragic accident resulting from circumstances beyond my…” Oh, shut up, she told herself. These were hardly the pearly gates and Slidell was hardly St. Peter. He’d gelled his hair into purple spikes, for one thing, turning himself into a Statue of Liberty with attitude. The company had assigned him to the front desk because of his interpersonal skills. It made Hope shudder to think what lurked behind the double doors that hid the computer lab where the real work got done.

      “It’s twice as heavy as mine,” she protested. “It’s a generation older.”

      “Mr. Quayle didn’t gripe when he used it.”

      “Benton Quayle used this computer?”

      “Yep. Until his new one came in.”

      “Was it in this case?” Hope picked gingerly at the cat hair with two Sunday-night-manicured fingertips.

      “Nope. The cat had her kittens in this case.”

      “You have a cat back there?” She peered around Slidell hoping to get a peek at it.

      “Want to make something of it?”

      “No.” She paused. “I just wanted to see it.” She paused again. “I’m thinking of getting a cat. If yours has kittens…”

      “The kittens have been assigned to caring homes.” He removed a zip disk from the drive, slapped it into a case and shoved it at her. “Person treats a computer like you do shouldn’t be trusted with a cat.”

      Thoroughly humiliated, Hope slunk back to her office to engage in the subclerical task of copying files from the zip disk onto the loaner.

      The words of her favorite professor in the MBA program came back to her verbatim: Turn each challenge into an opportunity.

      Not a day went by that she wasn’t grateful to Professor Kavesh. Those words alone had pressured her through more than one elbow joint and whooshed her up to her present level in the company. So instead of griping about her broken computer, she’d take this opportunity to look at her old files and delete the ones that were just using up space.

      A