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gone over a cliff! I feel anxious. Tell me how you are.”
    I told her about being back at the company. I danced around talking about the past, she noticed. She gently pried. I deflected. She respected the deflection.
    “I’m concerned that you’re working too much,” she said.
    I had worked fifteen hours that day. “Don’t be.”
    “Do you still have your poor eating habits?”
    I was eating bacon and a vanilla milkshake. “No. I’m eating healthy.”
    “Are you getting enough sleep . . .”
    Three hours last night. Insomnia. “Sleeping like a baby on a cloud.”
    “I’m sewing you an apron. I saw a pattern for one the other day. The picture on the pattern package was bright purple with ruffles, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Meggie!’ I hope you like it. I thought we could make a blueberry cobbler while you wear it. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
    I hate cooking and baking. “It would be delightful.”
    “We could do some oil painting after that.”
    I hate painting. “Lovely.”
    “Then we’ll watch a cooking show.”
    Must we? “I’d like that.”
    “Can’t wait, honey!”
    I love her.
     
    Lacey poured me some healthy green concoction with berries, spinach, and vitamins and set it on my desk. I noticed she looked pale. “What is this yuck?”
    “Drink it, Meggie, it’ll clean you out. Help your bowels.”
    “Sure it will. Looking at it and thinking about it going down my throat is enough to clean me out. No. I’m not drinking it.” I stood up, opened my small refrigerator and pulled out a beer, then grabbed licorice out of my drawer. I don’t know why I like a beer for breakfast. Maybe it calms my nerves. I rarely drink alcohol at any other time.
    “Fine. I’ll drink it,” Lacey said. “So let’s talk business. I’ve tried to keep us afloat. I’m about to kill Tory. I can’t blame her, though, for all our problems. The company’s sinking and I feel like hell about it.”
    “Don’t blame yourself. The economy tanked. People do not need fifty-dollar bras at any point in their lives, and they especially don’t need them when they don’t have a job and their home is in foreclosure. How much longer do we have?”
    “Six months. Tops.”
    I was good at numbers, but Lacey was genius. She could look at any balance sheet and sum it up in seconds. She has a bizarre adoration for numbers.
    “We’re selling, Meggie, we’re selling quality lingerie, but it’s not enough. We have to be selling huge. The competition out there is killer. We need to do something drastic, immediately.”
    “I know. I’m thinking.”
    “Think hard.”
    “What’s our debt level?”
    She sighed. “High.” She told me the number.
    I choked on my beer, and it splattered across my desk. “That’s a disaster.”
    “No question.”
    I swore. “Why? Why did Grandma, why did you, let it get that high?”
    “We went through our savings after the economy collapsed. The debt racked up only this year. I warned her. I showed her the numbers. She gets them, Meggie, but Grandma believes in the company. She believes we’ll turn it around. She didn’t want to lay anyone off, which is what I told her we needed to do. It’s a scary time, and she knew she’d be throwing our people to the wolves.”
    I hate debt. Hate it. When times are tough, the debt is a dead weight against success.
    I stood up and looked through the window overlooking the floor below, where our employees worked at desks and at sewing machines, some with both, and gnawed on red licorice. A few of our employees have been with us since before I was born.
    Take the Petrelli sisters, Edith, Edna, and Estelle. They’re all in their seventies, but they come to work every day, where they run the sales department, even though they have generous retirement programs.
    “We need money to travel during the summers and meet men,” Edna Petrelli told me.
    “Yes. On cruises. That’s where we meet ’em and that’s where we leave ’em,” Edith