I mean, don’t get me wrong. If you offered me paid vacation to just stay home with my baby, learn how to bake sourdough, and clean the patio furniture, I’d jump. But like, for a day. Then I would pay you to watch my baby, bake me bread, and please, please let me go back to Fine Family Realty.

I guess it’s because I’m successful there? A rising star, as Mr. Fine put it last week. Or am I successful because I love it? Chicken, egg, and all that jazz.

Right now though, I need to actually make chicken or no one is going to be eating supper tonight. I dip and bread and fry schnitzel, ignoring my aching ankles; Mordy and Mali wander in with a bucket of Magna-Tiles. Rikki toddles behind them, dragging her blanket through the puddle of apple juice Mordy’s juice box leaked on the floor.

I take a deep breath, remind myself that Joyce is coming tomorrow, and manage to just smile at them all. They happen to be impossibly cute.

I feel blessed. Blessed, and crowded. Very, very crowded. I’m the sort of girl who needs her space and my family of soon-to-be six in a two-bedroom apartment, with its living/dining room and tiny kitchen is not the most conducive living arrangement.

And that’s why I really, really need the Berman deal to work out. Like really. We need to move. Yesterday. Happy wife, happy life, right?

But this could be it. The Bermans, bless their wealthy souls, are looking into buying a waterfront property listed at $2.5m. Ah, the beauty of commissions.

The oil bubbles while I murmur heartfelt tefillos: Please, Hashem, let them take it. Please, please, please.

For a moment I daydream about my own dream home, a spacious five-bedroom, open-floor plan with skylights that I’ve had my eye on. Chana almost sold it a month ago, but the offer fell through, and I was secretly relieved. I can see our life there so clearly, in bright, gorgeous technicolor.

The phone pings again. I come back to earth, dry my hands hurriedly, and swipe open.

Rachelli, you got this. Coordinate with Miriam as team manager please.

Oh no. Oh no no no. Not Miriam.

Oh Hashem, please not Miriam.

You see, the thing about being a real estate agent, I’ve found, is that you’re basically a shadchan, right? You’re matching a family with their future home. You’re building possibilities, making dreams come true.

And a shadchan… needs to possess a certain panache. A likeability, a social aptness. Which, I’m told (cue the modest blush), I have in abundance.

Miriam, on the other hand, does not. Nor does she seem to care.

Blunt as a butter knife was how Jeffrey from accounting put it. I obviously didn’t answer him, but I do agree. Miriam is a tough cookie. She speaks her mind in a way that has me both squirming and jealous, and she’s assertive to a fault. All the things I’m not. She’s a good friend, and I genuinely appreciate her qualities, but I do not do not do not want to be teamed with her for the biggest deal of my career.

Chana must sense my dismay because my phone pings. You and Miriam combined create the perfect closer: You bring your sparkle, Miriam will get the signature.

Now why does that make me madder than I’ve been in a long time?

Yehudah looks mildly horrified at my shallowness when I vent over dinner. But maybe it’s because I’m practically shouting over the sounds of Mordy and Mali’s bickering and baby Rikki’s babbling.

Suddenly, I’m fed up. I screech my chair back; everyone freezes.

“It’s too LOUD,” I say, and stalk off 20 feet to sulk on the couch.

My head is pounding, my feet are hurting, and my million-dollar deal has to be closed along with Miriam. I know the Bermans. They want to be schmoozed, to be wined and dined and cajoled and convinced. Miriam is not going to do any of that.

Yehudah comes in and hands me a glass of orange juice. I look inside the cup, like it holds the answers to my conundrum.

“Drink it,” Yehudah advises.

I drink, feeling like Alice down the rabbit hole.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says.

Yehudah winces. “Maybe you can speak to Chana? Tell her, l’toeles, that you’d rather have a different team manager at the closing, for personal reasons?”

I think about it. I’m not exactly the assertive, speak-up type, but I’m honestly panicking right now. And the fact that Yehudah is suggesting this says something.

Mali starts wailing in that high pitched four-year-old “the world is ending” way, and I actually feel my nerves fraying.

“I got it,” Yehudah says, waving me back to the couch.

He’s a good man.

Miriam waves at me as soon as I push open the door to Fine Family Realty. It’s a great office, with herringbone floors and turquoise suede poufs in the lobby. I wish I could sink onto one, but I square my shoulders, straighten my black swing dress that needs to last me another six weeks, and wave back, feeling like a traitor.

Am I the worst person in the world?

I watch Miriam ignore the Nespresso machine and pour herself a cup of coffee out of a thermos. I make a split-second decision: I’m going to try to talk to her myself.

Nespresso, extra foam, in hand, I settle at my desk across from hers. She’s tapping away at her phone, grimacing in a way I know means one of her kids is struggling with something.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

She looks at me, then looks around to make sure no one else can hear.

“It’s Shmuli. He wants to buy an electric bike, can you believe that? Like I need another thing to worry about.”

I shudder, imagining Mordy racing around at 40 miles an hour. Hashem yeracheim.

“Ohhhh boy, that must be a fun conversation.”

She sighs and pushes her snood back. “Exhilarating. Anyway, Rachelli, this Berman deal. I’ll believe it when I see it, right? Too good to be true, no?”

I shrug, slightly miffed. “I like to think that good things can be true.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course you do.”

Well, that was rude. “Listen, Miriam…”

She turns back to me. “Mm-hmm?”

“When we meet the Bermans for lunch at one thirty, do you want to borrow a sheitel? I have like two I don’t wear and we’re the same colo—”

I stop, because Miriam’s cracking up. “What? Why on earth?”

Why can I suddenly not think of all the reasons? “Uh, just, you know…” I trail off lamely.

She raises her eyebrows, suddenly not amused. “They don’t have to like our headwear, Rachelli. They just have to like our facts and figures, which incidentally, I know cold.”

I nod. “True, true.”

And then I head off to find Chana.

AT eleven thirty, Miriam corners me at the water cooler.

“I can’t believe you,” she says. There’s a bright pink spot on each cheek.

“What happened?” I ask weakly. Because I know what happened. Chana has already chatted me to tell me that Liba would be joining me as team manager, and Miriam would be put on the closing of the Green Meadows 54 and up cottages. Which is an amazing commission. And Liba, our local fashion icon, would be the perfect buffer for the Bermans.

“Like you don’t know,” Miriam hisses.

“I heard you got switched to Green Meadows,” I say.

Miriam just looks at me. “That was low,” she says. “That was really low.” And she walks off, shoulders bent.

Can I blame the fact that I’m expecting for the tears filling my eyes?

And suddenly I wonder what I could have done differently. Because nothing is worth the feeling of shame and regret flooding my entire being.

All I can think is: Should I have done anything differently?

Causing another person a loss with his words is a form of lashon hara, but it is permitted for a toeles. It’s important in business — as in every area of life — not to hurt anyone. In this case Rachelli hurt Miriam by letting her know that she thought she was a bad shidduch for this particular client. Certainly the point of a business isn’t to give agents the chance to meet with a client you are fairly certain they will lose, even if that makes the agent feel bad. And if Rachelli really believed that Miriam would have lost the deal, then Miriam didn’t lose anything monetary by being switched.

With hindsight, could she have done anything differently? Should she have done anything differently?

Rachelli could have tried to explain to Miriam that she thought she needed to behave differently with these clients, but it’s doubtful that Miriam would have agreed with her, so that wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Maybe the half-hearted attempt to convince Miriam to wear her sheitel ended up causing more harm than good. The real issue wasn’t Miriam’s appearance, but her way of interacting with these clients. By offering Miram a sheitel — a Band-Aid solution at best, as it wouldn’t have changed Miriam’s “bedside manner” — Rachelli showed Miriam that she didn’t trust her to win the client, but for the wrong reasons. Perhaps if she hadn’t said anything and gone straight to Chana, Miriam would have assumed the switch had nothing to do with Rachelli and not taken it personally.

Rachelli should have first called her sister and then her husband. Then she should have stared into space for a bit. And then she should have gone and spoken to  Chana and asked for advice. It’s the manager’s responsibility to train and educate team leaders — and to deal with these kinds of situations. Then after speaking to Chana, Rachelli should have taken a deep breath, said a perek of Tehillim, and moved on. Where Rachelli went wrong was in her attempt to deal with it on her own. Sticky situations like this often work better through a third party.

Part of me wants to say that Rachelli should have let go and give it to G-d, not meddled and let it play out, but upon further retrospection, I feel that would not have been the proper resolution. Ultimately, if Rachelli felt that Miriam was not the right partner for her in this deal, commission notwithstanding, it should be her right to assert that. This isn’t playground politics, this is work, and people are entitled to preferences. However, I think Rachelli made a grave error in the way she went about this. Her initial hesitation to meddle was, in my opinion, selfish. She didn’t want to rock the boat, couldn’t decide what to do, and waited until it was too late to interfere. She should not have allowed herself the almost selfish luxury of time to let this play out, she should have asserted her hesitations immediately to her superiors — before Miriam was made aware or involved in this transaction. Because she delayed that uncomfortable moment, she caused Miriam tremendous pain. And that, in my opinion, was wrong. Had she swallowed her discomfort and called Chana back immediately and asked for another partner, explaining that she didn’t think Miriam was the right fit, Miriam could have been spared. It was Rachelli’s indecision about the matter that caused it to become messy and ugly. I don’t think what she did was wrong, I think her waiting to do it was wrong.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 840)