One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) Read Free Page A

Amy thought. But they’d been over that argument a thousand times and Amy wasn’t going to revisit it.
    “It was nothing,” Amy said. “I just saw a dog get hit in front of the café today, and it’s still on my nerves.” There was no reason to mention Mr. Brown Eyes.
    “Oh.” Clearly that wasn’t interesting or personal enough for her mother to pry into. “So how is the job hunt coming?”
    “Is that what you called about?”
    “I guess. I just wanted to know how you are doing. And to see if you want to come to L.A. for Robert’s birthday party at the end of the month.”
    “Uhhh …” Amy didn’t mean for it to come out as a whine, but it did. Rachel knew that Amy wasn’t fond of her step-father, and it wasn’t just because he had moved her mother to L.A. way back when. Amy found him to be a boor and a blow-hard. What her mother saw in him she couldn’t fathom.
    Robert had been an insurance agent who sold policies to labor unions, and he had the gruff manner of someone who’d surrounded himself with Teamsters and IBEW bosses his whole life. Amy imagined there weren’t a lot of women at the heads of those organizations back in his day, and he’d never developed a talent at treating women as anything but a “pretty little thing” hanging on a union boss’s arm. He had retired ten years earlier, and now there was no chance a new generation of union heads was going to help him get up to speed with modern gender politics.
    “Did you say no, Amy?” Her mother knew how to sound hurt on the phone. She’d been doing it for years.
    “No, I didn’t say ‘no.’ I said ‘Oh.’”
    “Is that an answer?”
    “Look, mom, I’ll think about it. I’ll see what’s going on. What’s the date?”
    “The twenty-eighth. I can’t imagine you have anything going on,” her mother retorted. “Aren’t you still working weekdays at that dive?”
    “Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t call it a dive.” This was not a new topic either. Did they ever have anything nice to say to each other anymore? “We have dozens of regular customers who love to come in and who are glad the place hasn’t changed.”
    “Yeah.” Her mother snickered. “It hasn’t changed in about forty years. It’s not one of those places in Palm Springs that thinks it can still capitalize on the old Rat Pack mystique, is it? I mean Formica doesn’t really speak ‘Frank Sinatra’ to me.”
    Amy couldn’t help but laugh. That was one sentiment she shared with her mother: the time for reliving and celebrating the old Rat Pack days was well over, but too many establishments in town didn’t yet realize it.
    “No, mom,” she said. “We don’t have a single picture of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. or Frank Sinatra on our walls. But, okay. I’ll look into coming over for Robert’s birthday. Just promise me he won’t play Frank Sinatra on his fancy stereo system while I’m there if I do.”
    Now it was her mother’s turn to laugh.
    The last thought Amy had before falling asleep that night was of the dog. Somehow, talking with her mother had helped her push the guy in the BMW to the back of her mind. The last thing she needed was another man to distract her from moving forward with her life and proving her mother wrong. But, the dog was a different matter.
    She hoped the little guy was okay.

~ Two: Rick ~
     
    The front of Rick’s Armani suit was covered with dog hair, but otherwise, neither he nor his car had suffered much from the run-in with the dog on his way to work. The only problem was how to get the hair off his clothes before his meeting with the bankers that morning.
    Why had he decided to turn down that side street that morning instead of the main route he usually took on his two-mile drive to the office? He had no answer. It couldn’t be that he was fated to hit that dog and run into that tall, pretty brunette. Rick didn’t believe in a teleological universe; things didn’t happen for a reason. There were reasons things