What Doesn't Kill You Read Online Free PDF

tell? I lived with my parents in a semi-attached house in Brooklyn. I didn’t make anything interesting or dream anything big. Not much to find exciting, especially for somebody like Olivia. Besides, I could hear my mom. “Don’t tell everybody your business, ’cause then it’s theirs.” And she was my boss. Or at least she ran the place. Dad always said people can supervise you on the job, but don’t let anybody boss you.
    Anyway, around five minutes to three Olivia jumps up and says she has to get Hillary from school. I get my stuff together too and she says, “You don’t have to leave now, do you?” like she’d lose it if I did. I assumed she’d want me to go. Daddy wouldn’t have let the mayor stay in our house with nobody home. She said she’d be right back, and I didn’t budge fromthe chair. Now that I know Olivia, I’m sure the thought that I might take something never occurred to her.
    Hillary, who looked about nine, wore a blue pleated skirt and cable-knit sweater—pretty much the opposite of her mother’s getup. But they both had dark curly hair and talked faster than the speed of sound. It was Hillary who told me her father lived in London and that she missed him a lot. That’s when Olivia went to get oatmeal cookies, but not before I saw a look that said she missed him too. Later, she told me she and Eliot Markson were divorced, but she kept his name—because it was Hillary’s, and because it sounded better than Schaeffer on fine botanicals.
    By the time we labeled the last jar it was after nine o’clock. Olivia took me down on the freight elevator and showed me how to operate it, which improved the job 100 percent. Then she hailed a taxi, gave me cab fare home to Canarsie, since it was so late, and said she’d see me tomorrow.
    I could tell the driver was pissed—probably never been to my neighborhood. He rattled over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the blur of city lights made me giddy, or maybe I was just excited after day one with Olivia. I looked forward to day two way more than I did to Intro to Economics.
    When I told my father about my job experience, he chuckled. “Sounds like a Looney Tuney to me. Let’s see if the check clears.” It did. And a few months later, when a local weekly named Markson & Daughter’s Almond Ginger Crème as one of its skin-care must-haves, it mentioned the special touch added by the handwritten labels. I started Olivia’s book of press clippings with that article. I still have a copy too. And when the time came to switch to printed labels, we had the type specially designed to look like I wrote it.
    Working for Olivia was never exactly a regular job, especially in the early days. She needed me to reassure her for the whole week before she took samples to the “Open See” at Bendel’s, which was pretty funny since I couldn’t have sold ice to a bunch of strangers, even in August. When she came back with an order, I was so psyched. She taught me about eucalyptus, rosemary, lemongrass, and that nasturtium flowers add color and spice to salad. I taught her principles of accounting. She never exactly got it. I kept her organized and on schedule, purchased the practical things like a typewriter, staplers and eventually our first computer—which neither of us knew how to use. When I made a suggestion, she listened, like I had some sense. I was starting to believe I did. Olivia had better instincts about marketing and sales than my professors. And I was pretty good at accounts receivable—people should pay what they owe. How else was I supposed to get a check? We made a good team.
    In a way I was sad when the business got big enough for Olivia to move into a floor-through on Riverside Drive and make the loft her business address. I was in my last semester, and she said she wanted to keep the company small—exclusive but homegrown, she said. Still, she