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the army nurse in these clothes, German or otherwise!
    I tap the paper on my desk. “You sound surprised, honey.” We’ve exploited ourselves this way at least four times a year for the past three years.
    Straightening his khaki pants, he perches on the corner of my desk, just an old door on two of my Uncle Jimmy’s sawhorses, actually, painted, well, orange. “Oh, honey-girl, I’m just tickled. You know me! And look”—he points to the fourth line down—“there’s the plug for our business. Full name and the basic location. Free advertising! And we can sure use that. I thought for sure this would catch on more quickly than it has.”
    “Give it time. We just need that one big account. Or something highexposure. Like a movie star or something.” Like that will ever happen in staid and stodgy, provincial Baltimore. Talk about an unorange city. “Until then, we’ll just have to tighten our belts and hang on until the line of credit runs out. You got any aspirin? My head is killing me.”
    “Yeah, I’ll get you some in a minute. Just one of those crazy tech companies out in California would give us enough business for a year straight! They do a lot of crazy retreats and meetings and stuff, don’t they? How do we get the word out?”
    Cristoff is not only my best friend, he’s my business partner. We’ve known each other since seventh grade when, as the new kid, freshly transplanted from Virginia, effeminate and skinny enough to be the offspring of a dogwood tree and a clothesline, nobody else wanted anything to do with him. Well, Teddy and I reached out. Some trio we made once we hit high school. The loud-mouthed, bookish yet athletic girl who paused during every gym class and every lacrosse practice to puff on her inhaler, and Teddy, the love of my life, childhood sweetheart, smarter than both of us put together, taller than both of us put together, and possessing more self-reliance, passion, and daring of spirit than anyone I’ve ever known. God, You remember how I miss him, don’t You? “So what you got going today, honey?”
    He looks through my office door to the conference room and the wall-sized whiteboard that organizes Extreme Weddings and The Odd Occasion. “Three days until the Winslow wedding. I’m just figuring up the number of stems I’ll need before placing the final order this afternoon. You got everything ready on your end?”
    “You know it. The hill behind their house now looks like a pyramid, and you should see the job Pleasance did with the attendants’ clothes. They’re in the storeroom. A sample napkin came from the rental company. Wanna see?”
    “Yepper. I may want to rethink the astilbe in the table arrangements if the dye lot of the fabric is off a bit.”
    Hard to believe someone who played a sport every season, read all of Francis Schaeffer’s writings by the time she graduated from high school, and composed more useless papers on literary themes and comparative analyses of poems and essays in her undergrad program because she couldn’t write a lick on her own and didn’t dare enter the most orange of all the English programs, creative writing, now spends her days talking about hors d’oeuvres, fabric, flowers, and music. See? Throw that MBA in there and, yep, it isn’t any wonder I tang with confusion.
    So, here’s what I think about God: I think sometimes He gives us innate obstacles directly related to our gifts in order to make us work harder, to rely on Him for improvement, to hone us to a finer, sharper point. Just look at a pencil sharpener if you want to really know what I mean. Those grinding metal rods with lines dug into them. I mean, who hasn’t wondered what it would be like, your pinky being small enough, of course, to put your finger in one of those and give it a quick turn?
    As expected, Cristoff takes one look at the napkin and runs to his small office at the back of our unit screeching, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, this astilbe will never do