This morning Monica alighted at Yolanda’s elbow, the fingertips of one hand tense against the gleaming desktop. “What’s going on with you, Yo?”
Yolanda blinked gluey eyes. On her computer, an email from Facilities Operations regarding an upcoming carpet cleaning. She wondered what she’d been doing in the moments leading up to Monica’s arrival at her side.
Monica peered at her with an intensity usually reserved for her job, her carefully shaped eyebrows canted. “Are you working too hard?”
Yolanda’s throat knotted, because, as busy as Monica is, she noticed.
But Monica didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell you what,” she said briskly. “Let’s go out tonight, yes?” Then Monica pushed off Yolanda’s desk, propelling herself into the next task.
Monica has invited Sylvie and Bunny, too. They’re waiting in the doorway with their coats and purses. “Cocktail time,” Sylvie calls.
“You girls ready?” asks Bunny, her tone, as always, laced with concern. Bunny Flores has a small face with features that crowd inward toward her pointy nose. She is only in her fifties, but suffers a host of physical problems. A bad hip, even after two surgeries, causes her pain. She also has problems with crystals in her ear and about twice a year gets sudden, debilitating vertigo. Once Yolanda came upon her in the women’s bathroom, on her hands and knees, clutching the tiles as if the floor were a vertical wall she was trying to climb. Bunny is single, openhearted and generous, considerate of her friends in the way of female saints and sickly Victorian children. If you compliment a necklace, she’ll take it off and give it to you. Yolanda always attributed these kindnesses to Bunny’s failing body, but now that she herself is ill, must concede that Bunny is simply a good person in a way Yolanda will never be.
“Let’s go to the Cowgirl!” Monica says, rushing out of the inner office with her purse and about five totes from various state conferences. Yolanda has nothing against the Cowgirl, but she is uncharacteristically irritated that her boss doesn’t leave the choice of restaurant open for discussion. Isn’t Yolanda the point of this dinner?
A proper dying woman would set aside vanities and desire, would smile at strangers and loved ones alike with wan generosity. But Yolanda is just as easily peeved as she ever was. She still expends her swiftly draining energy on annoyance with Monica Gutierrez-Larsen for bossing their girls’ night.
Yolanda massages her eye sockets, trying to will herself into a better mood.
“Let’s walk, shall we?” Monica suggests.
“No way,” says Sylvie, to Yolanda’s relief. “In these shoes? Besides, Bunny’s got a handicap placard.” So they all pile into Bunny’s SUV and she drives them the half mile to Guadalupe Street.
A bluegrass band is playing, the name of which Yolanda forgets the moment she reads it on the poster: a young bearded man in flannel and slim jeans and vintage cowboy boots works a fiddle, his face contorted in concentration, while a big girl in a black slip and vintage boots of her own alternates between guitar and mandolin. They’ve perfected an old-timey sound punctuated with whoops and thigh-slapping, and when they address the audience between songs, they do so in a breathless, ambiguously rural accent that’s probably put on.
“First pitcher of margaritas on me!” Monica’s spirits are so high that Yolanda wonders if she’s drunk already.
Yolanda herself feels quiet and stiff and strange, and is having trouble attending to the conversation, which consists entirely of work gossip. Leonor Nelson is having an affair with Paul Marcus, who everyone, apparently, thought was gay.
“Oh, come on, Yo,” says Sylvie. “How could you not think he’s gay? He’s always been single. He walks with his shoulders back like this!”
“Poor Leonor,” says Bunny. “For her sake I hope he’s not gay.”