If I’d been coolheaded and rational, maybe that question would have occurred to me. Instead, this average woman—me, if you’ve forgotten—reached for the perfume with both hands and a cry of “What? You’d do that for me? Aw, thank you!”
I hope you’ll forgive this ordinary woman (me). It was only my third day on the job, and my endless days in Job Hunt Hell were still fresh in my mind. I was desperate to carve a place for myself in this company, even if I had to ignore some disquieting questions to do so. For that reason, I jumped on the women’s offer without a second thought.
Okay, maybe I did have a second thought. But I was determined not to have a third one. What, me, worry? One thing I knew was that life got easier in direct proportion to how obliviously you could breeze through it.
“But of course. All right, here goes.” Curly Hair put a spritz of the perfume on my wrist. She didn’t rub it in or anything, but she seemed to be savoring the fragrance.
We enjoyed a little more friendly chatter, and then lunch was over, and we returned to our respective tasks.
Destiny, huh? I just wanted my destiny to be right here, at this company. Finally.
“Well, heck!”
I hadn’t been sure I believed the women’s story about the perfume, but I didn’t have to wait long to witness its power. In fact, things around me started changing that very day.
“This is for you! A little something extra for one of our best customers,” the bread baker said, giving me an extra-large loaf when I did my shopping.
“Oh, um, hey. We’re really sorry we bothered you. We should have known you were busy. I dunno what’s wrong with us. Here, take this. Our way of saying sorry.” It was the guys who’d tried to pick me up a few days before, offering me money in apology!
“Congratulations! You’re the ten thousandth customer to enter our store since we opened!” exclaimed the clerk of a random restaurant as I walked in. It turned out my entire meal would be comped.
This sort of thing had never happened to me before in my life.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
So, naturally, I sat there laughing like a big, dumb idiot, luxuriating in the wineglass in my hand. How long had it been since I’d eaten my fill? The thought made me cry a little inside.
“Say, you there. How about I tell your fortune?” asked an ashen-haired fortune-teller I met on the street. I sat down with her, and of course she exclaimed, “My! What amazing luck you have! I’ve never met someone so fortunate in my entire life.” She waved her hands over her crystal ball. “You’ll have many wonderful encounters; yes, a brilliant destiny awaits you…”
Aw, stop. I’m blushing.
“Oh, ha-ha, really? Y’know, I do feel like I’ve been awfully lucky lately.”
“You might like to know that your ‘lucky item’ is bread. If you eat delicious bread, you’ll find luck is ever more on your side.”
“Nice! I eat bread every day, so no worries there.”
“Excellent, excellent. If I may ask, what bakeries do you recommend in this land?”
“I know two places—one where you can get bread that’s cheap but tastes terrible, and one that’s more expensive but pretty darn good. Which would you like?”
“Both, please.”
When I told her about the bakeries, she said she would comp my fortune-telling in exchange for the info.
If the perfume keeps harmful people away from you, by definition, it also makes you luckier. As soon as I put on that perfume, I found everything coming up roses for me—weekday or weekend, every time, everywhere. When I stopped in to do my shopping on my way home, they always gave me a little something extra. Kindhearted people said nice things about me. I walked around town with a song in my heart and a tune on my lips. Each day was wonderful, and everything was great.
I was enjoying that time to the fullest…until one of my days off. I thought I felt someone watching me, but when I turned around, there was no one there. The perfume was supposed to keep bad people away from me, so I was sure whoever had been watching me didn’t mean me any harm…but still, it felt weird.
I was still standing there, perplexed, when a girl coming the other way down the street waved at me. “Oh! MacMillia, it’s you!”
She had a sort of “floaty” vibe. It was one of my coworkers from the real estate office… The one who had given me the perfume, in fact.
“Oh, hey, Ripply Wave,” I said.
“Hey…who?” Ripply Wave gave me a funny look. She told me she’d had time to kill on her day off, so she decided to come into town to do some shopping. In other words, both of us were free, and both of us were by ourselves, so we decided to drop in on a nearby café.
“Hmm,” I murmured as we sat there. I was still trying to decide why I’d felt like I was being watched earlier.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ripply Wave, sitting across from me.
“Oh, nothing.” I shook my head.
“Hey, MacMillia, how’s it going? …With the perfume, I mean. Have things been looking up for you?”
Had they ever!
I told her all about how everything in my life seemed to have changed from the day I put on the perfume. She nodded along eagerly.
“Really? I’m so glad to hear that,” she said.
We segued into some friendly but not very interesting small talk. I found out that the real estate agency was her first job, and she had never once in her life had to change her place of employment. Color me jealous!
“Wow, lucky you,” I said. “Talk about purehearted love!”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, I go through companies like socks. It’s serial monogamy of the worst kind!”
“I’m…sorry?”
Ripply Wave was looking pretty confused. Even so, she confessed to me that she’d been thinking about changing jobs lately, and since an expert in the field (albeit reluctantly) had appeared before her, she was eager to pick my brain.
I told her that if she was happy with my anecdotes, I was happy to share, and for the next little while I told her my story. She nodded along enviously and muttered, “I wish I could change jobs.”
Not long after that, we broke up our impromptu conference. She covered my meal as thanks for my insight—her words, not mine. I didn’t think my life story was all that impressive, and I took out my wallet to pay my own way, but she said, “Let your senior coworker treat you, won’t you? Please?” Then she gave me a friendly wink. What a good person.
I was sorry to hear she was planning to move on, but at least it sounded like she was going to stay with the company through the end of the year. It was great to know I’d be able to work with someone so lovely, even if it was only for a little while.
“All right, see you at the office,” she said and gave me a wave. Then we both went our separate ways.
On the walk home, I was by myself again, which gave me plenty of time to think. When I’d asked Ripply Wave why she was thinking of quitting, she’d hesitated for a second but then said, “The biggest reason is that there’s something else out there, something only I can do.”
She was actually in a jazz band that she’d started with some friends on a whim, just for fun. But not long ago, they’d been invited to go pro. (She played the trumpet, in case you were wondering.)
“I think the connection that got us that invitation… It might have been because of the perfume, too,” she’d said, like she was trying not to look too happy about it.
If she was going to take her act professional, though, she was going to have to quit her job at the real estate office and focus full-time on her music. That was her biggest concern: Leaving a company was unknown territory for her.
“You’ll be fine!” I’d told her encouragingly. “I know it can be pretty nerve-racking if you’ve never changed jobs before, but there’s nothing to be scared of!”
Even as I’d said it, though, I was wondering—was there something out there that only I could do? The thought kept nagging at me as I walked home, but in the end, nothing came to mind. All I could do right now was do the best at the job I had.
The sun was setting, casting a warm orange glow over the people walking down the grand avenue in front of the cathedral. The road went straight as an arrow, and everything on it seemed to shine impossibly bright. The town was haloed in gold, the color of turning maple leaves, and a cool spring breeze caressed the evening.