Janice sat at her desk, looking at the brief the junior associate had given her. Bright kid, a little too flip. This brief was clever, but it wasn't a winner -- he'd put enjoying his words in front of his duty to win. Janice shook her head as she continued to cross out and make notes with her red fountain pen. Responsibility was her middle name.
She'd put him on the gigantic document review to teach him some humility.
In the month and change since she and Taylor had moved to town and she'd started at her new firm, Janice had gained a reputation as the kind, but firm, go-to partner at Malvane & McKinney. She kept a thousand balls in the air, and she never backed down. When Rick Alderson, arguably the best litigator at the firm (before she arrived) pushed back at her over an approach to an oral argument, she heard him out, thought about it, and told him to do it her way. When he got up at the hearing and started to do it his way instead, she stood up, politely asked the judge for a minute, told Rick he was fired, then got up and put on the argument herself.
And won. While Malvane & McKinney valued Rick, they backed her to the hilt. As she'd told her daughter that evening, it just proved her lifelong motto: Take responsibility and stand up for yourself, and the rest will fall into place.
Amazingly, Taylor had actually smiled at her and nodded. Nothing more than that, but still, that was a remarkable improvement. Just a month or so of hanging out with that Karyn girl had already made a world of difference. Janice found that she liked that Karyn girl a great deal. Sort of odd, the way she looked at Taylor as if looking at a puzzle -- but overall, a good influence.
And though it had been a while since she'd been Taylor's age -- heck, Janet Jackson was still wearing giant shoulder-pads back then -- she was pretty sure that her daughter was nursing a crush.
That made her briefly realize how much she missed intimate company. She missed Taylor's dad terribly, and she missed sleeping next to a man almost as much.
As quickly as she started to drift down that line of thought, she whipped back to attention as if by reflex. She had a job to do, and it was irresponsible to sit here daydreaming.
She owed it to the firm -- the routine she'd developed here had helped her adjust to the new house, the new routine, and her new start in her career. She'd had fewer moments of deja vu lately, and she credited it to the firm.
She should have credited it to the Transformation Wing, who'd taken Zelda's security violation seriously enough to begin sending directed reinforcement programming into the Adamses' televisions and car stereo. Janice was more Janice now than when she'd left the hospital, not that she particularly remembered being a patient there any more.
She picked up her phone and dialed her assistant, Mary O'Connor. Mary had interviewed with Janice just after Janice had started at M&M;, and Janice had taken an immediate shine to her. A pretty, slender girl with a sprinkle of freckles and horned-rim glasses, Mary was also gifted with a mind that could handle a hundred projects at once and a spine of steel. Mary was seeing someone, Janice was sure, but her personal life never crossed M&M;'s threshold.
It was like someone had custom designed Mary to be the perfect secretary for Janice.
That was the way it should be. Take responsibility for your actions, be assertive, and life will fall into place.
Janice smiled as she asked Mary to send in the junior associate. Time to teach.
