Christopher has offered to pick me up at the train station this morning because the sharp wind knocked the temperature into the single digits. The train is falling farther and farther behind the schedule with each stop. I’ve updated him three times about the delays before my train finally arrives, five minutes after I’m supposed to be at the office.
I remove wipe the icicles off my moustache and remove my earphones as I enter his warm, brown car.

“What are you listening to?” he asks.

“A sports show,”

“I didn’t know you like sports?” he says.

“I… I really like this show.”

Christopher laughs and he asks me if there was a problem with the train.

“No one seemed very concerned,” I say. “I’m afraid that might be normal.”

He drives fast down small streets. We zip past the Fresh Anointing Faith Church, another turn, another turn, parking lot. I had no idea any of those streets existed.

There’s a long voicemail waiting for me from a client who said it was too complicated an issue for email. I have to listen to the message three times to match the names and assignments he is rattling off.

Retreat to the bathroom where I notice for the first time that there are ashtrays built into the toilet paper dispensers. I ask myself why I’m not at my desk and the only answer I come up with is that I’m waiting.

Our 10 AM meeting on IT access while traveling is rescheduled for the following week because email and internet have been crashed, rebooted and then crashed again since the end of the day yesterday. Seth slams his office door.

Lorrie and I go for lunch and vent. When we return, Kacy asks where I went for lunch.

“The deli on Park.”

“That’s where Lorrie went?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say, “We went together. Sorry.”

She tells me not to worry about it. But it’s all I think about until quitting time.

Harry wishes me a good weekend and I stop him before he leaves.

“How did that meeting with the Galits go?”

“What meeting?” he says.

“C’mon. The other day.”

“What do you want? They hit me a little.”

“For what?”

“You know. I got a big mouth and Christopher want me to get myself in line. That’s fair. It’s his company. But I’ll tell you something—”He raises his voice “Someone’s been talking. They knew about all sorts of shit I’ve said to people. It was stupid. It was my fault. But now I know I can’t trust anyone.”

“I think I know who it was,” I say. It was Lorrie. She hinted at a talk she had with Christopher a few weeks ago. “But I’m not certain. I don’t think I should…”

“I don’t want to know,” says Harry. “I’ve got a year left and I know what I need to do. Have a good weekend, kid.”

My father always told me to keep my head down. And I always put myself in the middle of it anyways.

Harry has been psyching himself up for his lunch with the Galits for a week now. He keeps walking by my cube and telling me they’re only interested in how he can help them and he’s going to remind them it’s a two-way street. He talks about retiring early and demanding extra vacation and he never entered a minute of time during his first year so he may not enter any during his last.

And so they all go to lunch.

Seth and Lorrie mutter to each other behind me and then invite me along for burritos.  He orders a bean and cheese, cuts it in half and then treats it like two bowls of dip for the chips in the red plastic containers they also use at hot dog joints. Lorrie orders chicken and smothers the top with hot sauce. Mine gives me heartburn as soon as I taste the chorizo.

We’re bitching about work. All of us. Equally. Then Lorrie turns to Seth and says, “Nick is always coming into my office to complain that you never answer his emails.” She laughs.

Seth looks at me. Then he laughs.

“Because,” I said, “Glynnis has you on such a tight leash.” I lost as soon as I opened my mouth.

Lorrie was needling Seth about the Galits and he was at the perfect level of annoyance – pissed but not yet defeated for the day – that he was cracking jokes, one after another. Glynnis’s pills, what I had to do to Christopher to get the job, hiding porn on Beebee’s computer. At some point we look at the clock and it has been too long.

The Galits and Harry are already back. I ask Harry how it went and he says, “Fine. Why wouldn’t it?” Later he comes to my desk and tells me that Galit Management is actually a very good place to work and that it’s not easy to be a manager. I wait for the punchline.

“What’s your problem?” asks Harry.

“Hung over,” I say. “I think.”

He took me to a restaurant that only serves patty melts and onion rings. Above the door it says: DO ONE THING AND DO IT WELL. Of course they do two things but the food is delicious so no one is going to complain.

“What were you drinking?”

“Just beer,” I say. “A little of this and a little of that. Didn’t have anything for dinner.” Truth is that my ‘no dinner’ included more food than it sounds.

“You don’t have a hangover. You’re just sick of this place.”

“I was whining to Lorrie and she said I was too old to go out drinking during the week.”

“Well… She knows drinking if she knows anything.”

He may be right about being sick of the place. I was bored and frustrated and hopeless yesterday. Maybe that’s why my stomach and head hurt today.

“Listen,” I say. “I’m telling Kacy that you and I are going for drinks tonight.”

“So? Is she coming with?”

Shake my head. “I’m trying to get out of the ride. There’s going to be a storm and I don’t know how long I can take it in her car.”

“Are we actually going for drinks?” he says.

“Whatever you want.”

Harry’s disappointed but he gets over it. He tells me about stealing some kid’s bamboo fishing pole when he was in scout camp and scaring up crayfish. That same summer a friend of his bought a car for a dollar and they stole a book on automotive engineering from the library. Got it running by August and drove it 340 miles home. He was offered $500 for it but refused. Then he starts about the sautéed vegetables his mother used to make: cabbage, spinach and green peppers sweated in a pan with olive oil and garlic. I can still taste them, he says.

It’s one o’clock and I become convinced we’re missing a staff meeting. Harry insists we have until 1:30 but I don’t believe him. I try to rush him out of the restaurant and just when I’m convinced he’s annoyed with me, he laughs, and says, “What the hell are you worried about? You hate the job anyways.”

He was right about the start time and we’re there early. We sit with two squirrelly health insurance reps, who spend a tremendous amount of time explaining that they don’t cover domestic partnerships unless the company pays an additional premium.

Finally, Harry says, “I’m pretty sure no one was asking.”

He’s good in small groups but when everyone else from the office piles in and the official presentation begins, he asks too many questions and he seems to understand every concept they bring up in a manner that perfectly opposes reality. He turns to me and to Shelby at his left to snipe about something and he keeps betraying that he’s not paying any attention. Maybe it’s nerves.

I catch myself embarrassed to be sitting next to him. And then ashamed.

In the final moments of this meeting that goes way too long, Christopher explains the change in coverage – a change which seems to change nothing according to the official Galit line – and makes air quotes gracefully and without remorse. The only thing more clichéd than air quotes is the disgust directed towards the people that make them. So I try to empathize and I ask myself what could drive a man to air quotes? I think about it too long and then I realize that there is nothing that I do both gracefully and without remorse.

“That nasty ass bitch look like a crack-head? Yeah, she don’t know the difference between triceps and biceps.”

They crack up. Physical therapy students, I think. Stabbing their plastic forks at their Styrofoam containers full of beef or chicken or egg foo young. Mixing the pork fried rice with the sauce. They just finished collectively realizing that DC wasn’t in Washington State, all while gesticulating awkwardly in their winter coats.

I’m wearing one too and so is the woman behind the counter. The small space heater in the restaurant is off and the door is propped open a few inches, presumably because the lock is stuck. The tabletops are cold to the touch and every last one of us looks miserable.

I realize that I am still the type of person who would eat lunch in a three-table carryout joint where I can see my breath with every bite. But it’s cheap and savory and I take another bite of the egg roll with hints of cinnamon mixed into the slaw.

§

When I returned from lunch there was talk that Dorthea had taken a fall. Shelby was offering her water as I walked past them and Dorthea refused. I imagine Dorthea didn’t want any more embarrassment so I spared her my attention.

Christopher copied me on an email to a vendor he was refusing to pay. He also copied two of my predecessors. I forwarded the email to Lorrie and we debated whether there was a polite way to point it out to Chris. But being polite took the joy out of it.

Kacy offers me another ride home. It’s bumper to bumper for almost an hour and I catch myself pumping the phantom brake. I forgot to grab a mint on the way out of the office, so I keep quiet, though my breath probably isn’t as bad as I imagine it, and I listen as she complains about sketchy neighborhoods, her cheap roommate and the clutch on her car.

§

I think back to the very first thing this morning. Some data entry work got out of control when most but not all of a number of directory updates I was supposed to key in were already showing up in the chart. I wanted to meet with Seth – I suspected the problem was the report he had created weeks ago – but successfully avoided me for hours. I cornered him in the hallway just before lunch, told him the problem and he smiled, said “Bad mojo?”

The payroll company is much less concerned than I am that my direct deposit never showed on Friday. Shelby handles it for me, pushes them to take care of it today, points out it was their poor data entry that caused the problem. It’s all taken care of by lunch and then she CC’s Glynnis on an email.

I spend a good deal of the afternoon writing emails to Glynnis or Christopher assuring them that I’m fine, I don’t need an advance, Shelby has the situation under control. Whenever I just let it drop, they manage to send another email. They’re trying to give me an advance yet I’m somehow pissed at them.

“I almost didn’t send it to her,” says Shelby. “What was I thinking?”

“I always do the same thing,” I say. “Why am I so mad about them trying to be nice?”

“Control,” she says. “We had it. And they took it away.”

In the bathroom I try to compose a haiku to write on the wall but can’t come up with an opening or closing line to fit the middle: “Shoot me with your money gun.”

I drop in on Harry for poetic assistance but Dorthea is in office crying into her hand. She manages to say, “I should have gotten used to it by now.”

Most of what she says I can’t make out and then: “The holidays.”

He must have asked her how she spent the long weekend.

I look briefly into his office. Harry’s mouth is shut. He looks up at her, quickly at me, and then back up. He meets her eyes and says, “I know.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Trying to compose myself.” With that she totally loses control.

I turn and stare at my monitor and panic. Keeping my back to both of them, I escape to the kitchen where I ask Kacy about her Thanksgiving. She says something about her boyfriend and a late flight. I’m not paying attention. She’s wearing a wide patent leather belt that doesn’t actually function as a belt. The end of her long story: she only got two hours sleep and Glynnis told her to leave at 2 PM.

I guess Glynnis doesn’t know Kacy was giving me a ride home. I tell myself she’s tired and the roads are icy and I’m better off. Still, my jealousy of Kacy’s early dismissal slowly overtakes my guilt from bolting on Harry and Dorthea.

I have invoices to ask Dorthea about and I stack them in tomorrow’s pile.

As Harry leaves for the day, he says, “See you tomorrow, hero.”

“You didn’t have a t-shirt with a cartoon cornucopia on it?” says Lorrie.

I’m standing at the front door of her mother’s house wearing a brown sweater with the collar of a bright orange collar peaking out. I carry a $12 bottle of wine, which I will moronically describe as “turkey wine” because the kid at the grocery store said it would pair well. Lorrie invited me at noon after she’d pieced together that I had no plans.

Very quickly I learn that Lorrie’s father, Larry, hates his son, Justin, who’s a freshman at a small engineering college and hasn’t matured past high school yet. Lorrie’s mother, Joyce, is protective of Justin, probably because everyone reacts so adversely to the kid, but she’s on her way to despising him too.

I tell Justin that both of my parents were engineers and he asks me if I’ve heard of a specific plane. I haven’t heard of any planes so I tell him “No” without paying any attention.

“That’s because it’s top secret.” He laughs.

And he asks me about another plane. I tell him no and he asks about yet another.

“Yes,” I say. “I think I have.” Now he has nothing to say because this plane is twice removed from the one he wanted to tell me about.

Joyce is a pleasant if over-eager host. She gives her toast before all of the aunts and uncles have sat down. They wait in the kitchen, facing Joyce’s back, not sure whether they should interrupt by taking their seats.

Lorrie, who takes a single sip of champagne during the toast, is more like her father. He snipes at Justin with one-word threats (“tuition” or “car”) when he wants to silence the kid. He makes lame jokes and Lorrie laughs before he gets to the punch line.

She takes a sliver of turkey and drenches it in gravy. There’s a small helping off stuffing and noodles on the plate and nothing else. The China looks bare. I tell her the spinach is great – made with jalapeño cheese – and she steps on my foot. Her mother turns red both times she burps.

Across the table, Justin wrestles every conversation away from those speaking. He drags the topic towards mechanics or artillery. He’s a militarist and his mother squirms whenever he raises the topic.

One of the uncles, a bigger guy with a sweet puffy face, a fatter Larry, can no longer hide his disdain for Justin. He steals every conversation back and he kid raises the stakes each time without fail.

So the puffy-faced uncle tells us about his mandatory enrollment in ROTC in college and how he so mangled a firearm while trying to assemble it that they hand to send the thing back to the artillery because it couldn’t be fixed on site.

“A little tip,” says Justin, trying not to laugh, “Next time you want the long cylindrical piece pointing away from you.” His timing is off but I get it and I give him a nod.

Joyce slams down her fork and says, “How do you even know this stuff?”

I spend too long trying to temper my email to Christopher about my discovery that we’ve been paying our fulfillment center $40 for s&h but only charging our clients about $8. Originally I copied Glynnis on the message but Lorrie says to leave her off, Christopher might want to keep it away from his wife.

Harry asks me out to lunch and tells me Shelby and Dorthea are coming along. We go to the Greek joint and everyone orders the lamb riblets on my recommendation. Harry’s pissed the soup is chickpea instead of fish stew. He orders a small Greek salad and fumes when they bring him too much.

Shelby tells us her son is going spend the long weekend hunting in Michigan with his father. “Glenn used to take me hunting too. But the kick on that shotgun… The first time I shot it I had a bruise on my cheek the next day and all I ever killed was a bird. We were hunting for deer but my mind was wandering, I don’t know, I just followed the bird out of the trees and pulled and it turned out I got it right in the head. I guess that’s considered really good.”

I want to ask when she divorced Glenn. Her son has six months of high school before he goes to college on an athletic college. Her age shows a little in her face and her dyed platinum blonde hair; otherwise you would guess she was in her twenties.

We get back from lunch late and Lorrie is waiting at my desk.

“Glynnis was trying on every woman’s coat in the office,” she says.

“What?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s high. An extra Prozac or two.”

“I’ve got to see this.”

She shakes her head. “Chris has her in their office. I think we might get out early today after all.”

“I’ve got a ride,” I said to Lorrie.

“I’m not driving you to the station?”

“Kacy’s going my way,” I said. “She taking me all the way into the city.”

“So you’re cheating on me?”

We smiled.

“Well, I’m glad for you,” said Lorrie.

“Maybe we’ll get drinks with Harry tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

§

Kacy and I sit across from each other in the conference room. Seth is standing at the front, training us on productivity software and explaining the time budgeting process. I ask what we do if we need to track a task that isn’t listed. He says to try to make it fit into one of the given tasks and when they reallocate time the following year, they will add the tasks missing the previous year. I want to ask how they’re going to know which tasks are missing if we’re just dumping our time into a pre-existing task that doesn’t fit. I keep quiet.

Kacy says, “If I understand what you’re saying…” And then she repeats the productivity management. It’s actually useful to have her here as a filter. Seth is on vacation tomorrow and mentally I suspect he’s been out the door for many years. I can ignore him and pay attention to whatever Kacy regurgitates.

Christopher walks into the room and Seth announces, “I was just telling Kacy and Nicholas that I remember many years ago when you explained to me this wasn’t simply timekeeping software but a way for us to understand the projects to which we’re assigned.”

“Yes?” says Christopher.

Seth wasn’t saying anything like this. Kacy and I look at each other. I’m searching for her indignation while trying to hide my own.

“It was very true,” says Seth. “These… years later.”

“Are you making sense of this?” says Christopher.

“Oh, yes,” Kacy answers quickly.

She’s about to go into repeat mode but Christopher cuts her off and tells us to “get back to it.”

§

Today we celebrate the birthdays of employees born in November, Harry and Shelby, but they’re both off. Harry conducting mystery business as usual and Shelby on vacation because her kid’s out this week for school. So we sing to no one in particular and when Christopher asks who’s going to lead, Lorrie says, “Isn’t it Nick’s turn?”

§

I wash my hands three times before five o’clock. The scent of vinegar has followed me around all day.

This ride from Kacy will get me home an hour earlier but I’m dreading it. She was kind enough to offer the ride so I’m not worried about her – though she asked if my neighborhood was “ghetto” – but I suspect I’ll say something stupid or incriminating out of boredom or the need to fill dead air.

We get in the car and she says, “What’s the deal with Glynnis?”

“I don’t know.” Panic. “Uh, tell me about your boyfriend?”