In the Drink by Kate Christensen

I’d had at the time, I lost my benefits, stopped going and hadn’t seen her since, but she still managed to descend on me free of charge every so often. “Why do you think you don’t deserve to have your feelings known?” she said. “So what if he knows how you really feel?”
    “Shut up, Ruth,” I muttered, but I felt obscurely better. I walked along West Eightieth Street, crossed Central Park West and set off across the park. Yesterday’s promise of spring had been retracted overnight. Ice rimed each spear of long grass around the pond by the Delacorte Theatre. Although I waswrapped in a coat and scarf and had swaddled my head in a woolen cap, the icy wind penetrated the porous tissue of my bones and froze my legs to numb logs. The low rays of the morning sun knifed through the naked trees and blinded me. I bent squinting into the wind, hugging my coat around me, ears aching, eyes and nose streaming.
    When I arrived at Jackie’s, her maid was preparing the breakfast tray. Juanita, who’d come to the United States more than ten years ago, had not felt it worth her while to learn any English, which struck me as both xenophobic and admirable; Jackie communicated with her in sign language and a rudimentary Spanish invented from her knowledge of Italian and French. She paid Juanita less than half the going rate for maids, and was able to justify “supporting” one of “those illegals” by telling herself how much money she was saving; in the interests of further economy, she had Juanita come for the mornings only. How Juanita spent her afternoons or how she managed to support her children on the pittance Jackie doled out to her I had no idea, because Juanita and I were unable to share any but the most fundamental and nonverbal solidarity. No doubt Jackie preferred it that way.
    “Good morning,” I said, hanging my coat in the broom closet. My face burned and my nose ran, thawing in the warmth.
    “Buenos días,” Juanita said, knocking the top off a soft-boiled egg. “Cómo estás?”
    “Okay,” I said. I went to Jackie’s room, knocked briefly on the door and went in. She was in her pink satin bed jacket, propped up against six or eight pillows, holding her reading glasses in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
    “Good God!” she said when she saw me. She shielded herself with the newspaper as if to fend me off.
    “What is it?”
    “Oh, it’s you, Claudia! Good heavens, you scared me! You look so fat with that hat on! Your face, I mean. I thought you were a stranger!”
    “Sorry,” I said, and removed the hat, which I’d forgotten I was wearing. I ran a hand over my hair to calm it down; it crackled and stood up against my palm.
    She laughed breathlessly. “What a shock!” she said, fluttering a hand against her breastbone. “You looked like one of those women.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. What women?
    Juanita came in with the tray, which held the soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, four crustless triangles of dry white toast, a pot of marmalade, a teapot, and an assortment of tea things and silverware. Juanita set the tray on the bed, and Jackie waved her away. When my eyes met Juanita’s on her way out, we kept our expressions carefully impersonal.
    Jackie shuffled everything around the tray until it was organized to her liking. “What are you standing there for?”
    “You said you wanted to see me first thing when I got in.”
    She looked vague. “I suppose I wanted to tell you—never mind, I took care of it last night. Go on, you’ve got plenty to do.”
    I set up my table in the dining room, wheeled out the computer and printer, and looked through my work from yesterday. The photographs were right on top of the stack. I checked to make sure they were all there. They weren’t. One envelope, the one with the picture of Imelda in the flower bed, was missing.
    I didn’t worry at first; it had to be somewhere. I went back out to the pantry and checked the shelf. It was empty. I looked