“Well, well, well. I wondered if I would ever see you again, Zack.” I recognized the voice. Not the hair, makeup, and clothes. I closed my eyes, wondering if it might help me remember the perfume she wore. It didn’t. I must’ve looked like a deer caught in headlights standing at the valet station because she slapped my cheek. Not hard, mind you. That would’ve been rude. More like splashing on aftershave. “Zack? You in there?” It didn’t help me. I still had zero recall.  

“I’m sorry,” I finally answered her. “How exactly do I know you?”  

“We worked together for, like, what? Fifteen years? And you don’t remember me? I still remember that assistant you had, Tessa, wasn’t it?” Reaching into her purse, she pulled out and lit a cigarette. “I remember there was a time when you could smoke inside. Remember that, Zack?” I didn’t know anyone in California still smoked, much less actual cigarettes. She did her best to blow the smoke away from me.   

I hadn’t worked with Tessa for ten years, so I postulated that she and I had known each other when I was in my early thirties. Based on that, I gauged her to be a bit younger than me, but I think I was generous, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Her hair was long, stringy, with gray streaks. If she worked at the agency when I did, that would’ve been in the mid-nineties. It helped that Tessa was the only Tessa I worked with. It was an unusual name, so she stuck out in my mind. That, and she wasn’t very bright. A bit of an airhead, if you ask me. Some of our team thought it would be funny to convince her that she needed to change the air in the tires of her Honda Prelude. The car itself had less than one hundred miles on the odometer. I never figured out how she got that car, considering it was new that year. There was speculation from some of my coworkers, but nothing could or would be confirmed. Last I heard, Tessa was working as a Sephora print-ad model. But that was more than a few years ago.  

“Yeah,” I said. “I worked with Tessa. What’s your name?”

“Linda.” She took another drag. “But that’s not how you’d remember me.”

I kept trying to recall who this woman was, still to no avail. Nothing was bringing her name to mind. Her look continued to throw me off.

“I was there when Bruce embarrassed himself and his girlfriend by table dancing until the table could no longer support his girth. He and Em crashed to the floor, spilling half-drunk wine coolers and beer bottles everywhere!”

That Christmas party was in 1997, so Tessa started working there a few years before that. I shook my head. “I still don’t remember you. Sorry.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Zacky,” she tossed the cigarette on the ground, crushing it out with her heel. “I really ought to quit. The doctor says these are the one good thing I’m doing to keep me alive. Can you believe he once told me that if I quit, chances were good that I’d die? Unbelievable!”

Zacky. Zacky. Wait a minute. Only one person, one woman, would dare call me that to my face. I fired her for her insubordinate attitude. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a hard worker; she was. Her attitude and ability to undermine me during client meetings ultimately finished her stint at the firm. The firm I now owned outright, having bought it from the original owner roughly fifteen years ago. “Katerina? Katerina Pavich?”

She smiled. “So, you DO remember me?”