Upon entering Judith’s office, Ava avoided eye contact with Jaime and took a seat beside him. “Hi.”
“Welcome,” Judith said. She sat at her usual place behind her desk, but Ava was surprised to see that she wasn’t alone. Two identical, gangly teenage girls sat on either side of her with their arms crossed, staring at the desk in front of them. Judith peeled an orange and handed a wedge to each of them. “Now,” she began. “I don’t believe either of you has met my daughters, Ari and Kendra. I’m aware it may seem inappropriate that they’re here. However—”
“It’s not a problem,” Jaime said. “Honestly, the more eyes on this, the better. And it’s nice to meet you both.” He gave a perfunctory smile and opened a video on his laptop. “This is what I wanted you to see,” he said, pressing Play.
It was black-and-white footage taken with a fish-eye lens showing a long corridor with a view of STÄDA’s Floor 12 workspace. Employees sat at their desks with their heads bowed, mid-meditation. After a few seconds Mat walked quickly around the corner, looking over his shoulder before returning to his office.
“It’s footage from the northeast hallway, from one of the cameras that wasn’t tampered with during the Vision Tower printout fiasco. If you keep watching, you’ll see Judith rush out with the printouts. Mat was the last one there, just a few seconds before!”
“Well, this is exciting,” one of the twins said.
“Mat didn’t do it,” Ava said.
“What do you mean?” Jaime said, gesturing at his laptop. “There’s only one way to look at this—”
“He was with me.”
“But you were doing the officewide meditation!”
“No,” Ava said, “I wasn’t. Mat and I were together. In the printer room.” She stared at Judith’s desk.
“Spicy,” Judith’s other daughter said.
“But you aren’t in the footage! It’s only him.”
“I walked the other way to avoid Judith.”
Both twins stifled a laugh. Jaime pressed his lips together.
“Jaime, you’re wrong,” Ava said. “Please just let this crusade go. May we go?” she asked, looking at Judith.
Judith sighed. “Jaime, as I attempted to say before, Ava is correct. Mathew isn’t responsible for the blueprint prank.”
“Judith,” Jaime pleaded, “I know you know Mat Putnam is bad news. How can you give him the benefit of the doubt here?”
“My opinion of that man is inconsequential, as he is no longer a STÄDA employee.”
“But—”
“But in this case I know that Mathew is not to blame.”
Judith reached into her desk drawer and pulled out the stack of blueprints Ava had seen months before. She pulled off the sticky note with a string of numbers and stuck it to her desk, facing them.
“The day of the incident, I asked our IT team to look at the printer logs. They were able to identify the device that printed the blueprints. I was thrilled. So you can only imagine my shock when I searched our inventory spreadsheet and found that the computer was assigned to me.”
“I don’t understand,” Jaime said. “Do you think one of them got hold of your computer?”
“I think that’s exactly what happened. Only in this case, it was two of them.” She looked to her left and right, at her daughters. “Girls,” she said.
The girl to Judith’s left spoke up. “I did it.”
“Ari!” the girl to Judith’s right retorted. “We did it.”
“They’d asked to attend the Self-Care Fair,” Judith said, “so I brought them to work with me that day. I suppose that was naive of me. I knew they were sympathetic to those . . .” she searched for the right word, “anarchists, but I didn’t know they were Trojan horses. God knows why.”
“Our message could not be more clear,” Kendra said. “The capitalism cultivated at giant companies like this one is a cancer destroying our communities. Specifically, STÄDA’s hideous new skyscraper has displaced the longstanding community garden that provides food sovereignty to the Red Hook area.”
“Well, this giant evil corporation is the reason your father and I can afford to send you to college next year. Look around. Do you like your life? You’d rather risk your future than say thank you.”
“Why would we say thank you when we are not being treated with respect?” Ari said.
“Enough,” Judith said sternly. “It’s easy to be principled when you don’t have a career to protect. Now,” she said to Jaime, her voice low, “as I hope you can see, I’m in a difficult position. I’ve tried reasoning with them, but they won’t stop. This morning I learned that they slipped out of their bedrooms at the crack of dawn to join their . . . peers in an effort to reprogram the Vision Tower’s steam cloud to say something rude. Fortunately, my office has windows looking in every direction, and I happened to spot them.”
“The word greed is not rude,” Kendra said. “It’s just true.”
“Why are you telling us all this?” Ava asked.
“Because,” Judith said, pinching the bridge of her nose, “they can’t get caught. They make it difficult to protect them, but I’m their mother. Can you imagine their faces plastered in the lobby?” She shuddered.
“Yes!” Ari said. “Better there than on STÄDA’s executive ‘About’ page.”
“Jaime,” Judith continued, “I owe you an apology. I tried to cut Mathew’s useless internship program entirely so you could rejoin an Engineering team, but the board blocked me. It’s been too good for optics. I kept you in this position because I’d rather have you holding the pitchfork than Malcolm P. Wade, who would make an example of these two.”
“What does the P stand for?” Ari said.
“It stands for be quiet before you get yourselves into more trouble,” Judith said. Her phone chimed. “Girls, your father is downstairs. Don’t take any detours. There will be some sort of punishment awaiting you at home.”
“Exciting!” Kendra said.
Judith closed her eyes and breathed deeply as they left. “Now,” she said. “I’d like to think I can trust you both to be discreet while I handle this matter privately.”
Jaime slumped in his chair. “I get it,” he said. “I won’t say anything.”
“Ava?”
“What?” She was lost in a fantasy about which piece of information Mat would find more entertaining: that Jaime thought he was leading a radical movement or that Judith’s daughters were the real culprits.
“Can I count on your discretion?” Judith said.
“Who would I even report this to?” Ava said. “Helen Gross? You have no idea what I’d give to never interact with her again. With all due respect,” she added hastily. “I know you helped hire her.”
“Thank you,” Judith said. She seemed relieved. “And please, keep me out of your investigations. The less I know, the better.”
“Ava, I might have been wrong this time, but there’s something about Mat that just doesn’t add up,” Jaime said, hurrying after her into an elevator. “You have to trust me.”
“Give it a rest,” Ava said, pushing the button for Floor 12.
“Ava,” Jaime said, “please.”
“Please what?”
“Just wait. I’ll come up with something else that proves I’m right about him.”
But she didn’t want to wait. And when, later that day, she saw another email from Jaime (subject line: MAT DITCHED HIS DOG!), she opened it and responded: I know, Jaime.
How had Jaime even found that out? He was desperate. She moved it to her trash folder, where it joined his other alarmist emails, which linked to articles about the dangers of MDF, the hidden toxins in STÄDA’s coffee filters, the unexpected germiness of the Sweet Kitchen, and the importance of laptop privacy screens.
38
After Mat’s carbonara came osso buco, and after that it was Norwegian lobster. As the weeks wore on, his dishes became more complicated, each seeming to require more technique and research. How about a litt
le coq au vin tonight? he texted Ava one afternoon. And another night: Two words. Boeuf bourguignon . . . questions?
Each new dish Mat tried apparently required multiple single-purpose kitchen tools, which were so narrow in function that they were practically obsolete. These were the sorts of tools that went against STÄDA’s ethos of functionality. The air fryer, the bell pepper seeds remover, the pasta maker, the potato ricer, and the bread crumb toaster crowded Ava’s cabinets, making it difficult for her to find the perfectly arranged STÄDA standbys that had served her for years.
“I am loving my cooking tools!” Mat said one evening, ripping open a package of new and obscure utensils that Ava had carried up from the lobby. Ava glanced at the box. The Chef’s Kiss. She’d seen their subway ads, which appeared to target men interested in impressing women with extravagant meals. She watched as he pulled out a bulky and intricate plastic egg-cracker. She tried to keep her facial expression neutral.
She reminded herself that the years of living alone had made her overly sensitive to changes in routine. She could rally around Mat’s new hobby, which was one of the only things outside of Good Guys meetings that had been giving him energy these past few weeks. She felt cared for, and a sweet part of his newfound love of cooking was that he was doing it for her.
Mat’s satisfaction in turning out a meal was fleeting, though, and he inevitably disappeared after dinner, while Ava scrubbed grease and melted cheese from baking pans, rescued her Eternal Cast-Iron Pan from a soapy sink and worked at it with a square of chain mail, or scraped miscellaneous gunk off his various implements. Something in his eyes had dulled. He had less to say. He seemed saddened by Ava’s work anecdotes, and she found herself making self-deprecating jokes to undermine her own sense of purpose. It was like living with a slowly deflating balloon.
She spent her energy at work worrying about Mat, wondering how she could help him out of his rut. In the afternoons she went to Floor 2 so she could look out the window that faced the bustling shipping warehouse. She was also avoiding Jaime. For every small grievance she had about Mat—the overrun kitchen or his late nights at Good Guys meetings—she could hear Jaime’s voice: Scammer! She felt like she was under Jaime’s microscope, where a millimeter away from “happy” equaled a hundred miles.
Sofia found her down there one afternoon.
“Are you looking for me?” Ava said.
“Not really,” Sofia said. “Marketing does occasionally have business on the Test Floor, you know.”
“Oh,” Ava said skeptically. “Really?”
“Yes,” Sofia said, “really. If something takes six hours to build, we’re not going to market it to single moms.”
“Nothing at STÄDA takes six hours to build,” Ava said, affronted.
“You’re missing my point,” Sofia said. “What I’m telling you is, it’s all connected. Anyway. How are you, Ava?”
“How am I? You mean, outside of work?”
“Yeah,” Sofia said. “Jaime is on the verge of a nervous breakdown over whatever’s going on with you and Mat. Then again, he recently had a nervous breakdown over the flouride in his toothpaste.”
“Well . . . Can I ask you a question, just between us?” Ava said. “Maybe your perspective would be helpful.”
Sofia smiled. “Talk to me.”
“Things with Mat have been sort of flat lately. It’s like he’s not himself. It’s like we’re not ourselves.”
“How long have you been dating again?” Sofia asked.
“If you count the time we were apart, the better part of a year.”
“Things slow down,” Sofia said frankly. “We fall in love with the best version of someone and we break up with the worst. It’s a slow decline, and it either plateaus at a tolerable level and you stay together fifty years or you leave. Is he treating you well?”
“Yes,” Ava admitted. “He’s making these elaborate meals—”
“Wait, he’s cooking for you?”
“Yeah.”
“Ava, marry this man. My husband is on his phone from the second he gets home to the second he goes to sleep. The only variation is that sometimes he’ll ask for sex.” She shook her head at Ava. “He cooks!”
Ava considered the absurdity of her own discontentedness. Sofia was right. Mat treated her well. She was lucky. The more she tried to locate the root of the problem, the more abstract her unhappiness became.
“I thought you hated my relationship with Mat,” Ava said. “You were always . . .”
“Always what?” Sofia’s stare was piercing.
“You always seemed annoyed. Or, I don’t know, don’t take this the wrong way . . . jealous?”
“Jealous? Of what?”
“Our relationship.”
Sofia tilted her head back and laughed. “Ava,” she said. “No. I wasn’t jealous. I was infuriated.”
“Infuriated by what?”
“I should have been tapped for his job. Do you know how good I am at my job?”
“Really good,” Ava said truthfully.
“Yes,” Sofia agreed. “I’m really good. I have multiple degrees. I’ve been at STÄDA for years. I’m older than Mat Putnam by at least five years. He was underqualified. That hire was insulting.”
“Oh,” Ava said. “I hadn’t even considered that.”
“Look, I’m not saying he’s a bad boyfriend. He sounds, frankly, amazing. But he had no business here at STÄDA, at least not as my manager. That was straight-up offensive. And don’t even get me started on Helen Gross.” She looked at her Precise Wristwatch. “Shit, I gotta get out of here. My intern spelled chaise wrong on our last storyboard. You wouldn’t believe . . .” She looked at her phone and made her way toward the elevators. “Good luck, Ava,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s a keeper, at least at home.”
Ava played the conversation over in her head, rearranging her feelings. Maybe Mat had been underqualified at STÄDA, but that meant nothing about how he was as a boyfriend. She liked the thought; it felt true, or close enough to true.
From a Floor 2 window overlooking the Vision Tower construction site, she watched as a site engineer conferred with a worker. There was something appealing about the site engineer, who pulled off her hardhat and stretched her neck. Ava had been watching the woman passively for weeks. She worked with riveting efficiency. Ava focused on her hands, on how she used them emphatically to direct her crew of workers or the many construction vehicles circling the half-built Vision Tower. Her hair was military-short, and she wore well-fitting crew shirts in primary colors that popped against her black work pants and dark skin. Several times Ava had reassured Mat that she didn’t miss being with women, but she would be lying if she said that watching this woman made her feel nothing. She attempted to steer her thoughts away from the woman’s hands and toward something more neutral, like the brand of her crew shirt, but her willpower was short-lived. An uninvited thought of the woman pushing her against the side of her Sprinter briefly overtook her until her phone vibrated against her thigh.
24-hour. Dry-brined. Air-chilled. Whole. Roasted. Chicken.
Ava quickly sent back a salivating face and the running woman emoji. Home soon. Just finishing up.
Awesome. I have the Guys tonight, so early din!
Ava glanced once more out the window. The woman in the crew shirt hopped into a sprinter van and drove to the far end of the lot, out of sight. Ava felt a twinge of loneliness, watching her disappear out of frame. The feeling made her miss Jaime. She drafted a text to him: Can we be friends with Vision Tower site engineer? But she deleted it. She didn’t want to test his resolve.
39
Ava could smell dinner all the way from the end of the hallway leading to her apartment that evening. Shallots, thyme, lemon, chicken fat. It smelled incredible. She opened the door to find Mat pacing the kitchen with her Inquisitive Tongs in one hand and his phone in the other. Brutus circled her, thwacking his tail against her shins.
“I know! Yes—exactly,
man, exactly,” Mat said. “This is what I’m saying. Millennials are ruining marketing. I mean, the subway ads alone are just . . . ridiculous.”
Ava was captivated by Mat’s end of the conversation, and especially his spark. She caught his eye and cocked her head, gesturing at the products around the apartment that Mat had bought from millennial subway marketers. Mat smiled and shrugged. She was comforted by his charm, even if it occasionally carried him small distances from the truth. This was the Mat Putnam she recognized.
He stood behind Ava with an arm around her waist. “Uh-huh. Yeah, yes. I’d love to come in to talk more about it, just drop me a line. No rush at all. Okay. Yep. For sure, man. Ciao.”
He hung up the phone and kissed her neck.
“Hi, incorrigible boyfriend,” she said. “Who was that?”
“That was Praxis. They make those e-readers everyone has. I got a call earlier today from a buddy of mine who says they’re looking for a new CMO!”
“This is huge!” Ava patted his chest. She was relieved for herself and for Mat. She held his face in her hands and kissed him. His lips were oily and salty. “So what does this mean?”
“Well,” Mat said, “they’re taking it slow because they’re really invested in finding a good fit, but they’re talking about bringing me in next month, or whenever they’re ready to start seriously pursuing candidates. So I’m just going to sit tight. That is, if you can tolerate these home-cooked meals for another couple of weeks.”
Ava felt silly for having doubted his ability to pull himself back to work. She felt lighter. “That’s amazing. And look at this!” She gestured to the kitchen table, where a beautiful browned chicken was waiting. She could easily ignore the tilting stack of greasy pans, pots, plates, and cutting boards, knives, ladles, and other unidentifiable Chef’s Kiss utensils scattered across the countertop.
“I can’t wait to take this news to the Guys tonight,” he said, carving into the thigh of the chicken. “Tonight’s my night to share!”
The Very Nice Box Page 23