A woman from another floor heated soup. The microwave beeped like a small alarm. I did not jump. Not jumping felt like a victory I could not tell anyone about.
“You really should come by,” he said. “The boy would talk your ear off about soccer. The girl is in a phase where she hates everyone except the dog. You would fit right in. We do not bite.”
I smiled with the bottom half again. Fitting in was a kind of vanishing. Vanishing was tempting. Vanishing was also how you got asked more questions when you failed at it.
He crumpled the bag his lunch had come in and made a shot at the can. He missed. He laughed at himself the way men with kids learn to laugh at small failures. I picked up the bag and put it in the can because picking up is what a coworker does. My hands were steady. I hated that they were steady.
Afternoon crawled. The spreadsheet became a punishment I accepted. I forwarded things. I deleted things. I laughed once at my desk at nothing, a bark, and James’s head popped over the wall like a prairie animal.
“What?”
“Email,” I said. “Funny one.”
There was no email.
He waited, hoping to be included. I shook my head. He sank back. I sat with the bark still in my throat and understood that my body was going to keep leaking proof if I did not give it a job besides sitting.
I lasted until five by turning myself into a machine that clicked things. People stood and stretched and made the noises of leaving. Someone talked about a show. Someone talked about traffic. Someone asked if it was supposed to rain and nobody knew. I put my coat on even though it was too warm for a coat, because coats are doors you can close around yourself.
James walked out with me as far as the stairwell and then peeled off toward the other lot. “Drive safe,” he said, as if safety were a route you could choose. I said I would. The lie was small enough to be true.