re lations, or if she'd been adopted as a child.
"QUILL!"
Quill jerked to attention.
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Displacing. You always go vague and think about other stuff when the stress level gets too high. It's called displacement. You must have heard of it, you do it all the time. Anyhow, you shouldn't be displacing over lay offs. We've had to lay off people temporarily before. It's worse, whatever's bugging you. So spit it out. Forget the termination formulas, which always sounded too grisly anyhow. What is it?"
"John's taken a job on Long Island."
"John quit?"
"He didn't quit, exactly. He said he started looking for another job about a month ago, when he realized that we wouldn't be able to afford him after the first of July. Actually, we haven't been able to afford him since Christmas. He said."
"And he's going to work where?"
"For a bank. The headquarters are on Long Island. So he's going to move."
Meg punched the pastry with two vicious jabs of her knuckles. I may displace, or whatever the correct verb would be, Quill thought. At least I don't punch defenseless pastry. "I don't believe it."
Suddenly, Quill was too tired to respond to this with other than a shake of her head. Her feet hurt. She needed a nap. She'd walked for hours in the land surrounding the Gorge, looking for the stupid dog, and all she had to show for it was a blister on her left heel. She'd come back to the Inn just before the dinner hour, hungry and depressed. A quick check of the dining room had de pressed her even further. The Crafty Ladies were cheer ful and noisy over drinks which seemed to be made of rum and various kinds of juice at table seven; otherwise the place was empty. She'd walked into the kitchen to find Meg, alone, working on desserts, made herself a cup of latte, then sat at the high counter surrounding the center island to give her the news about the current lack of money. The other news—the sell-the-Inn-because-it-will-never-make-it news—could wait for another time.
Meg stuffed the warm choux into a pastry bag, then reached for the first in the pile of aluminum cookie sheets stacked to the right of her worktable. She grabbed the top one, set it aside with a clatter, grabbed a second, cursed, and slammed the sheet onto the marble pastry board with an exasperated "Tcha!"
"What do you mean, 'tcha'?"
"I mean 'goddammit,' that's what I mean. I said 'tcha' instead. I'm too polite to say 'goddammit' when you're under all this stress. And the reason I went 'tcha' is that the cookie sheet hasn't been prepped. You know, buttered and floured. I keep forgetting we laid off Bjarne." She bent over and searched the shelves under the counter, muttering. She reemerged with the flour shaker and cast a wild glance around for the small canister of warm butter the sous -chefs used to prep pans. If, Quill thought, there had been any sous -chefs to prep pans, which there weren't. At least when the chefs were laid off, they simply went back to the Cornell School of Hotel Management—where they all had come from in the first place—and looked for another co-op job. There wasn't going to be any comfortable, reassuring co-op job for Doreen. Or Kathleen Kiddermeister, their waitress. Or for Quill herself, for that matter.
"I'll get the butter." Quill got up from the stool—a little stiffly because of her long walk—and retrieved a jar of cold butter from the refrigerator. She set it carefully by Meg's elbow and sat down again. Her coffee was getting cold. She wondered what her chances were of getting some soup and several large chunks of Meg's fresh breads when her sister was in this kind of mood.
"It's not that I mind prepping pans myself," Meg said. She broke off a piece of the butter and rubbed the cookie sheet energetically. "Not a bit. Nossir. I only studied for three years in Paris, in a language I only partly understood, and took another year as an apprentice in that hellhole restaurant in New York just so I