As You Wish Read online

  Kathy smiled. “It was a wonderful day! We didn’t leave the office until after two a.m. We were exhausted, but we had some good-looking campaigns to present to my father.”

  “How did he take your presentation?”

  Kathy got up and went to the window to look out for a moment, then turned back. “Sorry, but it still makes me angry. My father—” she swallowed “—refused to look at them. It was the next afternoon and he was in a bad mood—as he always was when Ray was out of town. He had an office full of men and he was telling them their ideas were garbage. I was standing there with Martha, Bob, and Dave behind me, our arms full of storyboards and recordings. That man, my father, gave a snort of derision, then waved his hand for us kids to go away. And we did. We backed out of the office like the cowards we were.

  “‘That’s that,’ Martha said. ‘Ray will have to show him what we did.’

  “‘And take credit for all of it?’ I said.”

  When Kathy said no more, Elise and Olivia stared at her.

  “What did you do?” Elise asked.

  “Let me guess,” Olivia said. “You used what you’d learned from Ray and attacked.”

  “Exactly!” Kathy said. “I’d gone back in time to change things, but that man just dismissed me like I didn’t matter? Not this time! It turns out that I really am my father’s daughter because I lost my temper. What was really making me angry was that half the good ideas Ray presented were from me. But my father only wanted to hear them if they were filtered through a man.”

  “The worship of the penis,” Olivia said. “I see it in my work all the time.” She saw the shock—and interest—on the women’s faces. “Sorry. This time around, I’m a psychologist.”

  “Disappointing,” Elise murmured. “I thought you were speaking from experience.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “You’re right,” Kathy said. “That’s what it was. I went back into my father’s office but then I turned coward. You can’t break a lifetime of fear in just seconds. But then I saw Cal. He was smirking at me. I could take what my father handed out but not him. Why did he always look at me with contempt? What had I ever done to make him so nasty to me? The whole thing with Felicity hadn’t happened and never would, so what was his problem?”

  Kathy took a breath to calm down. “That’s when I really and truly lost it. Because of Cal, not my father. I slammed all the papers down on Dad’s desk, leaned over him, and made him look at them. After a flash of surprise, he showed no more emotion. But children know their parents. He was shocked, stunned. Not by me, but by how really, really good my ads were. They were finished products that I knew would work. The next year, one of them won a People’s Vote prize for the third-best ad of the year,” Kathy said. “Is there any more of this white wine?” She sounded as though she was finished with the story.

  Olivia looked at Elise. “Shall we sit on her?”

  “I’ve heard of something called waterboarding. I think it’s a torture, so I say we use it.”

  They looked back at Kathy with laser glares, and she smiled. “Okay, so things changed between Cal and me.”

  * * *

  After she left her dad, Kathy went back to Ray’s office—and her body began to shake. Anger had given her strength when she’d faced her father, but now that was draining away and fear was filling her. When she’d finished her presentation, he’d said, “What title do you want?”

  She knew what he meant. He was never going to say that he liked her campaigns. Praise was not something Bert Cormac gave. But what he did give were jobs and bonuses.

  When she realized that her father had just offered her a real, actual job, it was as though all the energy suddenly drained out of her. She was leaning over her father to the point where their noses were almost touching, and she stood up straight.

  The room was still full of her rage. She could feel it, and it was an anger she hadn’t possessed before she married Ray. Marriage to him had changed everything inside her.

  Suddenly, she could see her marriage more clearly than she’d ever been able to. His ferocious ambition, his obsession with body image, his insatiable work ethic, had all seeped into her. It was Ray who’d pulled her into the advertising firm. His mantra had become “Kathy can do it.” He’d volunteered her to plan company parties, arrange schedules, whatever was needed. At home, he’d started handing her ads and having her rewrite copy. When she made a suggestion, he’d listened.

  By the second year of their marriage, they were discussing his every ad campaign. By the third year, she was as involved in his work as he was. In the fourth year, he began plopping accounts down on her home desk and telling her to take care of them—and she did.

  When she met Elise and Olivia, Kathy had been married for six years, and she was as involved in her father’s advertising firm as any of his employees.

  But Kathy wasn’t paid. Or acknowledged.

  Ray thanked her. Praised her. But he didn’t offer to try to get her a job in the company.

  When she mentioned it, he said, “Baby, you know that what is mine is yours. Go buy yourself something nice. Something sparkly.”

  As she stood in front of her father, his desk stacked high with papers and boards and tapes of recordings, it hit her that everything with Ray hadn’t happened yet. There was no reason for the rage Kathy had just shown. Sure, her father had dismissed her, but then to him, she was a girl who only planned office parties and entertained clients.

  And to the men sitting in her father’s office, she was just the boss’s pretty, plump daughter who sometimes brought them homemade muffins.

  The face Kathy wanted to see was Andy’s. He was the man who got away. Her father had just offered her a job so maybe she and Andy could work together. Had he been impressed with her?

  Kathy turned around slowly to look at the men in the chairs behind her. A couple of them seemed to be admiring. Impressed. But Andy, he was disgusted. Repulsed. His upper lip was curled into a sneer and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  She thought of the woman Andy would eventually marry. Yeah, Cheryl was built like Kathy, but she was so gentle and sweet that the whole office took advantage of her.

  Kathy didn’t pick up any of the papers she’d slammed on her father’s desk, didn’t look at another person, just went to the door and opened it. None of the men held it for her, not after the unfeminine display she’d just made.

  The distance to Ray’s office seemed long, but she made it and was even able to close the door behind her. But she was standing there shaking—and she didn’t know if it was from fear of having at last stood up to her father or from having seen the disgust on Andy’s face.

  Okay, she thought, as she walked to Ray’s desk. She’d achieved one of the things she wanted, which was to get herself into her father’s company. She was not going to think about what happened when the three weeks were up and she no longer knew about the future. How was she going to live up to what she’d just done? Maybe she shouldn’t have—

  “Don’t turn coward now.”

  She turned to see Cal Nordhoff standing in front of the closed door. She hadn’t heard him enter. Kathy dropped down into Ray’s chair. “Go away.”

  “And miss the aftermath of that display? Never!” He went to a cabinet, opened it, and poured vodka and tonic water into a glass and held it out to her.

  “No thanks,” she said, but when he didn’t put it down, she took it and drank half of it in one gulp. “Shades of Mad Men,” she muttered, not knowing if the show was on the air or not.

  Cal smiled. “Are you Peggy, but you look like Joan?”

  Kathy almost smiled at his allusion, but she didn’t. “Why are you here? To tell me I’ll never make it in a man’s world? That my father and the other men will eat me alive?”

  Cal’s handsome face lost its smug look and he seemed genuinely puzzled by what she’d said.