“Uh, yes,” I repeated. I picked up my stuff and did that.
“This is cute,” Victoria said. She pointed at the swirl design on my cooler bag.
“Thank you.” To prove that I wasn’t a gatekeeper (like she’d thought I was about my hair stylist), I told her where I’d gotten it and she checked her phone to look at the other designs.
“I need a new one because my stupid brother lost mine,” she explained, and we all said that was too bad. “He took it to a concert on Saturday to keep his beer cold and he got drunk and came home without it.” She sighed. “How was your weekend?” she asked me.
“Fun,” I answered, echoing what they always said. “I worked on my friend’s car. He needed some help with one of his floor panels and he’s not very experienced with MIG welding.”
They stared at me. “And you are?” Kiya asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “My dad was a welder and I learned from him.”
“That’s cool,” Taylor said. “That means melting metal, right?”
I opened my mouth to explain the types of welding before I decided that the best answer was shorter. “Yes,” I told her. “We worked out and made dinner, too.”
“I need to go to the gym,” Victoria said sadly. “We’ll be on the beach soon.”
That statement seemed premature to me. May was a slightly warmer month here, but nowhere near bathing suit weather. I still had on a sweater.
“Where are you from?” Kiya asked me.
“I moved around a lot. What about you guys?”
They talked about themselves and some of the information I already knew from eavesdropping, but I nodded and listened, very interested. Kiya told me about missing her family, who all lived in a suburb north of Detroit. Victoria was from here but Taylor was from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They laughed when she imitated the accent there, and I smiled and didn’t say that they all talked pretty much the same. To my ears, the difference was minimal but it wasn’t a bad thing.
“Oh, shit! Look at the time,” Kiya said suddenly, and then we all had to rush back to work.
Actually, I didn’t have to do that, but I went with them out of the lunchroom at a very quick pace and returned to the Office of Special Projects. I did, in fact, have a special project to workon. I had learned the day before that the roof repairs had been approved for the Woodsmen practice facility. It had taken weeks to hear back and the actual work wouldn’t start until after the Woodsmen players were done using the building for their summer preseason training, so that they wouldn’t get disrupted in any way. I had met with a pest control specialist, a plumber, and an electrical contractor out there, too, and I had even more ideas, things about landscaping and drainage (for the front of the building but also the back, where the field was located).
But the special project that I was currently working on was specific to the Junior Woodsmen, not the building as a whole. I reviewed the forms that I’d printed out, making sure that I had completed everything correctly—although I was depending on the fact that my boss wouldn’t look too closely at what I’d typed there.
They were ready to go, so I was ready to commit fraud. I went to his door, which was closed even though the two of us were the only people here and I never bothered him. Since we never accomplished anything, what would we have had to talk about?
But now, I had something to say. “Mr. Gowan?” I called as I knocked.
“Come,” he answered. I had never liked that response.
“I have a few forms for you,” I said. “Things to sign. You know how I’ve been driving out to the practice facility a lot.”
“Oh, right.” He was looking at his computer as he answered me and in the reflection in the glass behind him, I could also see the video he had paused. The frozen image was a topless womanholding up her breasts for the camera, her very large breasts. How dumb was he to watch porn at work? I did admire the crystal-clear picture, though. He had a different monitor from every other one that I’d seen in this building, larger and with better resolution.
As I’d expected, he didn’t look at my forms as he scrawled his name on them with the pen I’d also provided. He ignored emails and couldn’t be trusted to sign electronically, so paper was always the way to go.
The thing was, my fuel reimbursement was only one of the requests that he’d just approved. I’d been tricky and it seemed like it had worked: the Junior Woodsmen would now get a new refrigerator along with several other big-ticket items. “Thank you,” I said briskly, and turned to go.
“Cate.”
Oh, no. Had he actually read the documents? “Yes?” I asked.
Mr. Gowan stared out the window, his hands interlaced beneath his chin. He released his two index fingers and tapped them together. “I have a question for you.”
Judas Priest. “Yes?” I repeated.
“Do you think that I need drapes in here?”
“Drapes?”
