Her shoes now on, Casey picked up her set of house keys.
“You don’t like Ted,” Ella said.
“Pardon?”
“That’s why you won’t go to church,” Ella said. Casey would agree to do most anything with her on the weekends, mundane errands like grocery shopping or a trip to the dry cleaner, but when she invited her to do something, even fun things like movies or dinner, when Ted would be there, Casey declined. And Ella had not forgotten this from their confirmation class days: Despite Casey’s “too cool for Sunday school” affect, Casey was the student who’d consistently asked the singular questions about God.
Casey dropped a book of matches into her white shirt pocket, pretending not to have heard what Ella said. She placed her right hand on the doorknob.
“He’s not easy. I know that,” Ella said.
“What are you talking about?” Casey asked. Had her contempt been so obvious? “Your fiancé got me a great job.”
“It’ll be fun. Please say yes. Unu’s my favorite person. You’ll—”
The phone rang, and guessing accurately it was Ted, Casey walked out, saying, “Ella, you know I can’t make any big decisions without my morning cigarette.”
It was Ted, a fellow smoker, who’d told her about the roof on Ella’s building. Ella was allergic to smoke, and oddly enough, Ted and Casey were unrepentant. But they never smoked in her presence.
Unlike the roof at her parents’， this one was meant to be used by all the residents. There were pink and white geranium plants in terra-cotta pots and metal patio furniture painted a racing green color set up invitingly on the white gravel-covered roof. On summer weekends, young women sunbathed with their bikini strings undone and men in baseball hats and sweatpants plowed leisurely through their swollen Timeses while drinking lukewarm coffee in mugs brought from home.
The residents who’d shared a light at some point said “hey” when they saw Casey. She wore a white dress shirt, her gray knife-pleated skirt, and no stockings, and in her rope-soled shoes, she stood out against the Sunday morning crowd with their bed hair and sleepy looks. The brightness of the day, the young singles relaxing, reminded her of school in the spring when at the first sight of the warm sun, everyone skipped classes to laze in the open greenery. Casey wanted to stay there, smoke the rest of the pack, read the paper, and plan out her life after her first paycheck.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like church. She enjoyed a good sermon as much as she adored a stirring lecture. Ella had spotted the issue accurately. Ted’s teasing felt aggressive and mean-spirited. Just last night, when Ella went downstairs to get her mail, he’d said to Casey, “Maybe I should tell Jay that his girlfriend works on two.” Casey had wondered if this unrelenting behavior was equivalent to a sixth-grade boy snapping the bra strap of a girl he liked, but it wasn’t that kind of retarded flirtation. Besides, Casey couldn’t imagine anyone preferring her over Ella. What Casey understood was that Ted was jealous. He thought they were competing for Ella, and consequently, he treated her as a rival, and from never having fought with a boy, Casey was astonished by the nature of his attacks, so unlike a girl’s—naked, persistent, and lethal. As nice was she was, Ella wasn’t worth this.
Also, Casey didn’t want to meet Ella’s cousin. She was still preoccupied with Jay. Her sister had told her that he’d tried to reach her several times. In the past week, Casey hadn’t bumped into him in the elevator or the cafeteria. The second and sixth floors remained separate, as if they were in different buildings.
As for her new job as a sales assistant, since Casey was by nature an organized person—adept at deadlines and details—except for learning some new software and eating both breakfast and lunch at her desk among several men, the nature of her work was not difficult. After her day ended, she walked home and reread Middlemarch or began another volume of Trollope borrowed from the neighborhood library. She studied an old millinery pattern book bought for a quarter from a homeless guy who sold magazines and outdated textbooks on First Avenue. In her spare time, she worried mostly about money and her future. Her salary minus a discretionary bonus and possible overtime （how much she’d get was hard to figure out at this point—though Delia said she might be able to get as much as half her base） was thirty-five thousand dollars per annum on a pretax basis. With her pay, she’d have to meet her credit card minimums, save up her rent deposit （nearly fifteen hundred dollars for two months’ rent for a cramped studio） with the possibility of having to fork over 15 percent of the annual rent for the broker’s fee, and furnish a new place, since she did not own even a buck-fifty drinking glass. Ella wouldn’t hear of taking money from her for rent or groceries despite Casey’s offers to pay her when she got her check.