James was already standing when I sat down, which is how James occupies air. Fourteen years in the same job. Kids. A comb he joked about before anyone else could. He held his coffee like a microphone.
The office smelled like carpet glue and somebody’s oranges. Phones rang in a pattern that meant nothing. My monitor showed a spreadsheet I had seen so many times it had become a landscape. Fluorescent light made everyone look slightly ill, which was a kindness. I could hide in the general illness.
“How was the weekend?”
The question arrived exactly when I had known it would, which did not make it easier. I had practiced in the bathroom glass. Practice is not the same as a mouth that works.
“Same old,” I said. “Car in the shop. Hung out.”
“We grilled. The boy dumped a whole thing of ketchup on himself. Classic.” James laughed from the belly, a man whose weekends produced evidence. He leaned on my cubicle wall the way a real estate agent leans on a listing. “You should come by sometime. We have a chair.”
A chair. Space. A paper plate with my name not on it yet. I nodded as if nodding were a plan. All I could see, for a sick second, was James’s blood on the wall, and then I caught it, shoved it down, smiled with the bottom half of my face.
“Maybe,” I said.
He talked soccer. He talked a leaky faucet. He talked fourteen years as if loyalty were a personality. I made the sounds you make. Inside, Mira’s eyes kept opening on a ceiling. Inside, a barn kept leaning. Inside, a phone in a drawer kept being a phone even while it was off.
The morning was a machine. Emails. A meeting that could have been a sentence. Someone talked about a printer. Someone talked about a birthday in the break room on Thursday. I wrote Thursday on a pad and underlined it as if underlining made me a member of the species. A woman from accounting asked if I had a form and I found the form because finding forms is what I am for. James brought me a muffin I did not ask for. Blueberry, the kind with sugar on top that gets on your shirt and announces you ate joy.