“One more ounce of caffeine, and I’ll be swinging from this acoustical fake ceiling.”
“A walk, then?”
His face is too close, his smile too decent. He stiffens and removes both.
“Den.”
“I know. Just trust me on this one.” He opens the office door, and somehow, we’re moving down the polished floor to the stairs. He goes first, and I follow, watching his khaki back as his scuffed shoes take the stairs ahead of me.
The front office is relatively quiet. Since management installed an automated teller in the lunch room, employees no longer line up in the front lobby to get cash at the classified counter.
One of the classified reps, a pretty, prematurely silver-haired woman, gives me one of her brilliant smiles as we pass. I know that she’s heard about my cousin’s death. I try to smile back.
A security guard barely looks up as Den and I head through the gate and out the front door.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I say. “I ought to have waited Until I thought it out a little better.”
He frowns and tells me what I need to hear. “You did exactly what you should have done. You know that.”
Yes, I do.
In spite of the hundreds of employees who occupy this building, there is a feeling of family at the newspaper. The kindof family whose members donate their sick time to a circulation department employee when her husband is dying of cancer. The kind of family that adopts a school in an at-risk district, and backs up the commitment with both hands-on time reading to kids, and with money. The kind of family that, in this age of corporate cutbacks, has an annual holiday lunch for employees and retirees so crowded it has to be served in two shifts—that produces its own corny talent show, on company time, to raise money for United Way.
Often dysfunctional, always connected, this family of almost eight hundred who work here share more than a job.
I know that’s why I came back here, to Hamilton, to the paper. Because going through the motions in this building of otherwise-occupied co-workers is somehow more healing than spending time with my aunt or Pete, whose hell of tears and guilt is as fierce as mine. And, yes, because being here—pretending that I’m still part of this buzz of motion and commotion—telling myself that I matter, is a little bit better than being alone.
A joit of cold air hits as we walk out onto the steps, and I realize I am not dressed for the weather. I also realize my face must be flushed with heat.
“I’m still so pissed, Den.”
“I know.” He walks down the steps beside me. “After what happened, my divorce, some other stuff, I saw the company shrink.”
I feel the guilt warming my face. I did the same thing when I heard about his promotion—on the day after my first and only night in his bed. “You, too?”
“Yeah. I didn’t get much out of the visits except this. She told me anger was a secondary emotion. You hit your thumb with a hammer, you get angry, but the primary emotion is pain. A car almost runs you off the road—”
“The primary emotion is fear,” I recite. “We got the same shrink, Den. Why didn’t you ever tell me you went?”
His face goes a shade deeper as we hit the asphalt and walk out, past the plant.
“Because now I’m your supervisor, I guess.”
He says it in a factual voice, almost cold, but not quite. Bottom line, he’s my supervisor. Bottom line, he chose it over me. Okay, I can live with that. I’ve lived with worse.
I spot his Volvo out in BFE, short for Bum Fuck Egypt, as the back parking lot beyond the plant is known to employees whose schedules prevent them from getting one of the primo places close to the building or along the curb.
“A secondary emotion.” He gives me the look of one who has just gift wrapped a present and wants you to admire it. I’m not in the mood. Nor am I sure I’m in the mood for the coffee we’ll soon be sharing.
“Secondary?”
“Yeah.”
The Volvo waits just steps away. I look at him, look at it, then back at him once more.
“Where are we going?”
“Coffee. Some decent stuff, better than they have in the caf.”
