“I love you Shirley, I truly, truly do. Betsy never meant anything. I think it was like I needed to feel free even though I don’t want to be free. I want you and only you.” I thought quietly for a moment and realized if I said that to Shirley she’d be out the door in a minute. But I knew I had to say something before Betsy did or Shirley would find out in some way.

As I sat at my desk with my finished sock designs and waited for Ellen to arrive to give me my final approval (hopefully), my mind continued to swirl with possible conversations, all of which ended with Shirley leaving. She’s definitely not a push over. Then all of a sudden I thought of something drastic: what if I proposed marriage?

Just then Ellen came grinning and rambling about some million dollar order. “Something of mine?” I asked.

“No sweetie, a knock off of an Anne Klien II shirt. I can’t tell you what it means that synthetics are back in style, but it means a fortune for cheapo clothes, that’s what. You have no idea how impossible it is to get silk shirts made for under twenty.” She threw her bag on her desk and without a breath picked up the handle of her phone and dialed. “Hello, yeah, Harold please...hey honey...I got it, they bought it....yeah K-MART...I love you too and I’ll see you tonight.” She hung up, clapped her hands and rubbed them, and marched to my to the edge of my desk, “What’cha you got for me, I feel lucky. I know it’s something good.”

I pushed over my one page and on it was a giant sock. “This is all I got. I’ve all my faith in this one sock.”

She stared at the thin black and grey pin strip and at the top of the sock was a another thin white line around the leg. “The cool thing is,” I continued, “is that it’s a full knee sock. The elastic is strong enough to keep up the sock even though it comes over the knee. And I think what will happen is if you push the top down so it crosses the knee in the middle, it’ll look really cool. You wear them with skirts.”

“All right, take it down to Eileen. See if you can explain it to her and have her make up a few mock pairs.”

She was talking so fast that I couldn’t tell if she really liked it or not. I picked up the drawing and began to leave, but got up the courage to turn and ask, “So do you like?”

“Not sure yet, we got to see it first.”

“All right, well I’m gonna head out after I drop this off with Eileen.”

“Oh no.”

“It’s five o’clock.”

“If Eileen’s going to stay late to make it, you’re going to need to stay late to see it.”

“Eileen gets overtime.”

“Now I see what went wrong with your other jobs.”

That shut me up.

“Listen Fran, don’t you get it? Don’t you know how much money you can make here? Believe me, you’ll thank me. Just get her to make the sock and we’ll decided tonight if we’ll make ten thousand of your socks, with your name on them.”

“What name?”

“Your label.”

“Well, we never really discussed that. I don’t have one.”

“You better draw one up, the sooner the better.”

Later that night and fourteen sock samples later, we finally picked one to make twenty pairs of and sample them with a few stores. Driving home I thought of Shirley and I tried to think of how I was going to bring up Betsy, but then I realized I was just too damn tired.