Wishful Thinking Read Online Free

and stiffen. Alicia, however, didn’t blink. She even looked somewhat smug. Which was alarming.
    “Jennifer,” Alicia said, offering her hand and smiling. “It’s good to see you again.”
    The three of them exchanged the necessary pleasantries and then sat down. Outside the window, the 110-story building that Bill’s company, Bill Truitt Enterprises, had completed just before his appointment as NYCHA’s head dominated the skyline. Bill had proudly pointed it out to Jennifer during their first meeting at his office, but despite the macho posturing (what better than a 110-story dick planted right outside the window to set the proper tone with new employees?), that meeting had been a good one. For a few weeks after his appointment, in fact, Jennifer had thought Bill Truitt was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Almost every day now, she tried to remind herself of this fact: that Bill Truitt—along with a portion of the $300 million of federal stimulus money the new mayor had used his business contacts to extract from a Republican-controlled Congress forNYCHA—was responsible for reviving the project dearest to her heart, one she’d invested so much in that it had almost been like a third baby: a new kind of community center she called It Takes a Village.
    The concept for It Takes a Village was simple. When she’d first begun working at NYCHA, Jennifer had observed (as many had before her) that one of the biggest problems low-income-housing residents had in getting ahead, or even just in managing their lives, was wasted time. There was no central place where they could get job training and pay the rent; pick up assistance checks and get child care; get matched with the best-suited nonprofit resources for their needs and meet with their social worker too. Everything was scattered, and everything took forever. From this problem the solution of It Takes a Village was born: a community center that would house under one roof outposts for all the agencies, services, and resources residents needed, government and nongovern-ment alike. After years of work, both designing the center and lining up the necessary support from private foundations and government agencies, Jennifer had finally completed a request for proposal for contractors to bid on building the flagship site. Just as the RFP was about to go out, however, the economy crashed. Jennifer still remembered standing in her office when the news of a citywide freeze on new projects came down, and the feeling of her heart breaking. The funding drought after that had been so severe that Jennifer had ceased to consider It Takes a Village a dream deferred. Instead it had been a dream DOA.
    That was, until Bill Truitt, builder of big things, came on board and Jennifer decided to take a chance and show him the old RFP. To her delight, he loved it. It Takes a Village, with its proposed partnerships between government agencies and private foundations, and its artist’s renderings of what thecenter might look like, combined his twin loves of building and social entrepreneurship. It would, he said, be his legacy. Bill’s ties to the mayor made securing a portion of the federal stimulus funds easy, though Bill had made it clear that would be the only easy thing about it. “This federal money shouldn’t be making anybody feel that things are going to get cushy now,” Bill had told her and Tim sternly, as if they were a couple of lazy babies. “The city is still broke, and all of us have to do more with less. That means longer hours, more efficiency, and more accountability in this office for your time. Having worked in the private sector, Jennifer, you know what I mean.”
    She did. But it was one thing to put in an eighty-hour workweek for a job that paid better than most; it was another to do it for a job that paid considerably less. The prospect of finally seeing the center built, after so many years of waiting, had kept her going thus far, but she still hadn’t