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time to talk about the dog I had when I was ten, the one that looked just like the puppy
in the framed photo on her desk, or that she and my sister had the same first name,
or how much I liked her calendar of frightened cats hanging from twisted tree limbs.
At lunch, Tammy found me alone in their cafeteria and slipped me a sheet with the
credentials it had taken her less than two minutes to finally create.
The three husky dudes in Montgomery, Alabama drove me past an Applebee’s,
two Mexican restaurants and a Cracker Barrel to bring me to a tiny barbecue joint fifteen miles from their office. Checkered tablecloths and no menu. “You have to be from
around here,” one of them, Brett, said.
“We’ll order for you,” his buddy assured me.
They’re young, I told myself, sipping tea that was too sweet with too much ice
chipped too small. But the truth was they weren’t any younger than I was except that
no one had ever called me young because maybe I never was and sometimes that scared
me. When Brett walked me through his job, he kept looking up apologetically, explaining, “This is the way we’ve always done it. If you were here every day, you’d understand
it’s the only way you can do it.”
A woman from a company I had never even bothered to locate on a map kept
me on the phone for an hour late one Friday afternoon assuring me our responsibilities
didn’t need to overlap. She employed words like ‘complementary’ and ‘synergistic’ and
‘harmonious’ to illustrate her point, and was sure to make me aware of how much it
cost to have one kid in hockey and the other in ballet. I swallowed the five o’clock beer I
had snapped open at four-thirty and hummed affirmation.
“But I’ve always wanted to do this kind of work, ever since college,” she said.
“You, too, I bet. Right?”
“Actually,” I told her, spinning the sweating bottle so I could read the label.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to make things. You know, with my hands.” I opened my
palm and spread my fingers, gazing at them as if they didn’t work right.
There was a long moment of awkward silence. Then she said ‘synergy’ again >