He rubbed his fleshy hands together. “And today is perfect timing, because we’re having our weekly team lunch! Nothing fancy, mind you. I just like to have all of my direct and dotted-line reports together in the conference room one lunch hour a week so we can network, you know? Share a meal, share ideas. It’s a blast!
“We all bring our own lunches, and I have everyone walk around the room, find someone they don’t know very well, and broker a trade. You know, my pickle for your pudding cup, half my bologna for half your turkey and Swiss. Like back in grade school! Great intermingling exercise! Really lets you get to know your coworkers more intimately.
“As we eat, we go around the room and introduce the person we traded with—you sit with whoever you traded with, that’s one of the rules—and say a few things about them. Super-short notice for you today, I know. But you could run down and get something from the cafeteria on the thirtieth floor. Or—hey! This is good! You could show up with no food at all and see how you do trading conversation for grub! Talk about a good way to get to know people!”
He rubbed his hands again and looked at her expectantly, his wide smile suggesting this was her cue to jump up and shout, “Hooray!”
Markie’s throat closed, and she felt a trickle of sweat run down from her hairline, behind her ear. She tasted metal in the back of her mouth, and she feared opening it in case her breakfast, rather than words, came out.
Oblivious, Gregory turned toward his office and motioned for her to follow. “Let’s get hold of them down in the loading bay before it’s too late!”
She considered faking a cardiac arrest to delay him long enough that the boxes would be loaded by the time he reached his phone. That would take more energy than she had, though, now that all the blood had drained from her head, and she worried that any sudden movement might cause her to faint, so she settled on clearing her throat and squeaking out some words.
“The thing is, Gregory, I didn’t factor in the cost of driving downtown, parking, lunches, a work wardrobe, and all of that when I took this job. I don’t know if I can swing it financially, you know? The location change? So I think I’m best to just stay where I am.”
She took a step backward toward the exit door.
“But your numbers . . .”
“I’ll get them up.” She took another step back.
“Because the others”—he pointed to the cube farm—“they drive here, too, you know, and park, and . . .”
“Right,” she said, shuffling farther backward, “but they took a job that requires that.”
There wasn’t a great deal of strength in her argument, but she seemed to have flustered Gregory enough by not matching his excitement that he was unable to list for her all the reasons why her resistance was futile, starting with her Global Insurance offer letter, which expressly gave him the right to demand she report to work at headquarters if that’s what he decided, in his sole discretion, was best for the team and the company.
“I really think my current work situation provides an environment tailor-made to maximize my performance,” she said, hoping it sounded enough like Global Insurance speak. “And . . . uh, efficiency, um, exponents.” She took another few small steps backward. “And I really want to get my numbers up. Way up. Higher than they were. For the team. For you. So I think leveraging my, uh . . .” She moved her hand in the air as if the rest of her sentence were obvious—and laced with corporate lingo.
Gregory sighed. “I guess we can give it another try,” he said. “Tell you what. I have an all-day meeting next Friday, but let’s meet the Friday after that. We’ll look at your numbers. If it looks like your performance is being optimized again, then great. If not, well, you remember what the terms of employment are.”
He gave her a look that said he might have been momentarily flustered a minute ago, but he had not forgotten who held the power. If he wanted her downtown, in the midst of the insect buzz of the cube prairie, trading pickles for pudding cups, there was nothing she could do about it.
“I’ll keep six forty-two open for you,” he said. “Just in case.”
He turned to locate her potential future cube, then scanned the prairie rows until his eyes rested on his own office door. He smiled. She panicked.
“Unless something comes up closer to me.” He pointed to a cube so close to his door that she imagined the person sitting there could smell his breath.
“I’d love to have you right there so I could see you at the start and end of my Pep Walks! Maybe take you along with me, even with your, you know . . .” He pointed to her crutches. “Could get you acclimated in no time, plugged in with all your colleagues. Say, maybe we could even set up a little memory game, see if you can learn a new row of names every day!”
He turned to her, beaming with excitement, and Markie hastily rearranged her face so she no longer looked like an audience member at a horror movie.
“But first, I’ll give it those two weeks,” he said. “Sound good?”
She nodded, told him thanks, and spun toward the exit, forcing herself not to risk reinjuring her ankle by running. When she finally burst through the doors and into the elevator bank, she felt like she had emerged into fresh air and sunshine after two weeks trapped in a root cellar, trying to survive a swarm of locusts.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was time to get a status report from Jesse about how his Levin repayment plan was going. He had been keeping a tally in his room, and for the first few weeks, he reported his totals to Markie with great pride every Sunday before walking the week’s wages up to the pharmacy and handing it to Mr. Levin. But he had gotten out of the reporting habit (though he had never skipped a Sunday’s restitution trip to the pharmacy), and she couldn’t recall the last figure he’d reported.
With any luck, he was close enough that with a small contribution from her, he could pay Mr. Levin in full that afternoon and retire from Mrs. Saint’s employ, effective immediately. That would free him up to spend his afternoons tiring out the dog, allowing Markie to rehabilitate her numbers and avoid choosing between location 642 in the cube prairie and unemployment.
“Close to three hundred,” Jesse said, flopping onto the family room floor a few hours later, Angel on top of him.
The corners of her mouth drooped. He wasn’t even halfway there.
“What’s wrong?” he said, reading her body language. “Did Mr. Levin say something to you? Or to Frédéric, or Mrs. Saint? Does he think I’m too slow?”
He looked so concerned, this boy who was trying so hard to right his wrongs, that she felt guilty for having asked about it. “Nothing’s wrong,” she lied. “I just . . . my ankle’s bothering me.”
“You want me to get your pain meds?” he asked. She shook her head no, and he told her to let him know if she changed her mind. “Hey,” he said, switching gears, “can you get full-size Hershey bars for Halloween?”
“You mean to hand out? At the door?”
He laughed. “Why do you sound so horrified? You are planning to hand out candy, right? We do it every year.”
They used to do it every year, but she considered it very much a “Before” activity, and this was “After.” The idea of spending an entire evening opening the front door to all their neighbors and their children, most of whom she had managed to avoid meeting, did not fit with her “After” strategy—not nearly as well as turning off the outdoor lights and watching TV in her darkened bedroom.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m on to you with the full-size Hershey bars. Do not bribe that girl with candy to finish her homework.” Avoidance, deflection. One didn’t stay married to Kyle Bryant for twenty years without learning a few tricks.
“Not as a bribe,” he said. “She’s planning to go trick-or-treating with Frédéric, because her mom’s, I don’t know, working or going out or something. I just thought it would be cool if she could get her favorite thing from our place.”
“That’s nice of you,” she said. “Hey, maybe when you’ve paid
back Mr. Levin and you’re done working for Mrs. Saint, you and Lola should celebrate the end of tutoring with a Hershey bar party.”
“Right,” he said, but he didn’t say it convincingly, and he hesitated first.
Not five minutes after Jesse left to take Angel and Lola for their afternoon walk, there was a knock at the back door. Markie, working in the dining room, leaned back in her chair to get a view of the door and spotted the Frenchwoman standing on the other side. Surveying the files spread on the table before her, she sighed. She had less than an hour before the four-legged distraction returned home, and she couldn’t afford to waste a moment of it.
“I have a favor,” Mrs. Saint said when Markie opened the door. “And considering you, it is a big one. Maybe not so big for Chessie, though. So I am hoping.”
“What favor?”
“Frédéric was going to take Lola around for Halloween. Tricking and treating, you know. But I have some appointments at the hospital on Monday. And now they tell me to plan to stay overnight—”
“Oh no!” Markie said. “I hope it’s nothing serious!”
Mrs. Saint clucked and tapped her chest with two fingers. “Once you get past sixty, it seems they want you to think everything is serious. But it will all be fine. And I keep telling Frédéric there is no need for him to stay over, too.”
“In the hospital?”
“He insists to wait there. It is ridiculous. This I have told him many times. But on some things, he cannot be swayed.”
What things? Markie wanted to ask. Surely there couldn’t be more than one or two subjects on which Frédéric had the final say between them. “Is he even allowed to stay the night?” she asked instead.
“He will stay,” Mrs. Saint said, and Markie, knowing it was as much of an answer as she was going to get, didn’t push. “So,” the old woman continued, “someone needs to take Lola out with her costume. And I thought Chessie.”
Markie considered this. Technically, Jesse was supposed to be grounded if he wasn’t working, and she wasn’t inclined to make an exception. On the other hand, trick-or-treating with a second grader was hardly a night out. Plus, it was for a good cause. Two good causes: she would make him take Angel along.
“I can ask him,” she said. “If he’s willing to do it, it’s fine with me. Or you can ask, when they get back with the dog.”
“He will say yes,” Mrs. Saint said. “I know this. He is very good with her. He will want to help.”
She gave a brief, tight smile, and Markie couldn’t decide if she should be angry or proud. Was the old woman being smug because she believed Jesse would do whatever she asked of him, or was she simply expressing that he was a kind-enough boy that he would want to help Lola?
“He’s a good kid,” Markie said, deciding to go with the latter interpretation. She eased the door an inch toward closed. “So if that’s everything . . .”
“But she will need to stay at your house after, you see,” Mrs. Saint said, ignoring the moving door. “This is the favor from you. Patty can get her only late. One in the morning. Two, even. When Frédéric takes her, she stays overnight at my house. Which you can. Or if you would rather, her mother can come to gather her when she is finished.”
“Finished what?” Markie asked casually, hoping to catch her off guard.
But Mrs. Saint only smiled in a “Nice try” way and said nothing.
Markie felt the familiar sensation of heat in her cheeks. She hadn’t liked secrecy when she was married to Kyle, and she didn’t like it now. “Can’t Patty cancel her plans, just for one night? It’s Halloween! What could she possibly have lined up that can’t be rescheduled for the sake of her daughter?”
Mrs. Saint flattened her lips into a line. “I couldn’t say.”
Markie rested her head on the open door and exhaled slowly. She wanted to point out the unreasonableness of the woman refusing to share information about Patty even when she was standing in Markie’s doorway, asking for her help with Patty’s daughter. Pointing out the lack of fairness in the situation wouldn’t make a difference, though.
“What about Carol?”
“Och, no!” Mrs. Saint said. “Not on Halloween!”
Markie didn’t wait for elaboration. She knew it wasn’t coming. “Ronda?” she asked. “Bruce?”
Her neighbor smiled patiently, waiting for Markie to reach the obvious conclusion, which she did, that neither of them could handle something like this. A moment passed, and Mrs. Saint continued to smile, and to wait, while Markie worked out in her head a list of reasons why she couldn’t agree to what the woman was asking. Letting Jesse take the girl out for an hour or two to collect candy was fine, but having her back to the house until one or two in the morning? That crossed a deep, thick line of intimacy, and while that line might be blurred to the point of erasure on the other side of the fence, it was still as solid as ever on Markie’s side.
Markie struggled to think of a version of “I don’t want to get involved” that wouldn’t make her look like a selfish jerk. She could think of nothing, and Mrs. Saint smiled on, waiting for the answer she wanted, the answer she knew she was going to get. Of course Markie would do it. She had no choice. She was an eight-year-old child’s only chance at being able to celebrate Halloween. The Frenchwoman had her, and she knew it.
“Fine,” Markie said. “She can come here after. But Patty needs to come get her as early as possible. Lola can start out sleeping in the guest room. I hate to make a little girl get up in the middle of the night on a school night, but she hardly knows me. She’s never been in the house, even. And then there’s the dog, and I . . .”
Mrs. Saint clapped her hands twice, interrupting Markie’s rambling. She had found Lola a trick-or-treat partner and a place to stay until her mother was “finished.” The other details didn’t matter to her.
“Merci! C’est formidable!”
She turned to leave but swung back around a moment later, a finger in the air. “We will skip homework on Monday and have this instead for Chessie’s job. Lola will eat dinner early. Chessie could join her if he likes—”
“He’ll eat here,” Markie said.
She had been firm about this with Jesse. The odd underbaked cookie or burned cupcake at Mrs. Saint’s kitchen table was fine, but she drew the line at his staying to join the others in a bowl of soup or a plate of spaghetti in her formal dining room. In her view, snacks made him nothing more than the neighbor kid who was helping out for a little while. Dinner made him a Defective.
“Ronda will help her into her costume,” Mrs. Saint continued. “Chessie will get her by five fifteen. He must have her home by seven fifteen. She will tell you she has no bedtime, but you are to make her go by eight. I have a toothbrush and pajamas for her. I will bring over. Also a timer for her tooth brushing, so she will do it long enough. Otherwise, all that candy . . .” She shuddered.
Markie let an exasperated breath escape. She was the one who had signed on as Lola’s keeper, she was the one who would actually be there, and it was her house, yet the bossy old woman was barking out orders as though their roles were reversed!
“I’m sure we’ll figure it all out,” she said. “I’ve managed to get my own child through a dozen Halloweens, and he’s still with us, as are all his teeth.”
“And you will insist on a bath before bed,” Mrs. Saint went on. “Her mother does not require it often enough, and—”
“A bath?” Markie laughed, throwing her head back dramatically to emphasize the lunacy of the suggestion. “I’ve met the child once! And Jesse certainly won’t be—”
Mrs. Saint chuckled softly as though Markie were a whining child not to be taken seriously, and Markie was tempted to take the woman out at the knees with a crutch.
“She’s been taking baths on her own for years,” Mrs. Saint said. “But she will do it if only it is insisted. So you must point her the way and tell her to go.”
The hell I will! Markie wanted to scream.
The old woman
turned to leave a second time, and again she turned back, her finger aloft.
What now? Markie thought. An approved list of bedtime stories, in French?
“But you must listen for the water filling,” Mrs. Saint said. “Or she might only sit in the bathroom for ten minutes. Tell her you will be gathering the wet towel after, and that will be the trick. You can also say you will help her comb out her tangles. She will not let you, but it will remind her you will be noticing if her hair is wet.”
Markie tried to distract herself from her irritation by taking note of the fact that, clearly, Lola must have spent a certain number of nights at the neighbor’s house. Normally, this sort of information caused her to stop everything as she tried (despite countless promises to herself that she would not do this) to piece it into the mysterious puzzle of life on the other side of the fence. But her annoyance drowned out her curiosity—Mrs. Saint could hint that Lola was her secret granddaughter, for all Markie cared, and it still wouldn’t smooth the creases she could feel on her forehead or stop her teeth from grinding.
For the third time, the old woman turned for home, and this time Markie wasn’t going to be there to hear what she came up with next. She took a big step backward, away from the door, and balancing her weight on her crutches, she used her uninjured leg to push the door shut. The force of her kick almost knocked her backward, and although she recovered her balance, she decided that a fall onto the hardwoods would have been a fair price to pay to hear the satisfying wham! the door made when it closed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Markie set a bowl of candy in the tiny foyer and turned on the outdoor lights while Jesse went next door to collect Lola. The lights and candy were solely for Lola’s benefit, as was the jack-o’-lantern outside the front door. One of Jesse’s “jobs” on Sunday was helping Lola carve pumpkins for Mrs. Saint’s house, and Ronda had bought enough for them to make one for the bungalow. Once the kids had set off around the corner to trick-or-treat, Markie planned to shut off the lights and hide in her room until a few minutes before their return. She would dump half the candy in the bathroom garbage to make it look like she had given it away.
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