give you a raise and begin paying for your medical insurance. I’d like to do that now.”
“Sure,” Zack says. He undoes his apron and sets it on the counter, locks the register, and turns off the light inside the pastry display. I grab a copy of the New York Times and sit down in one of the overstuffed chairs and pretend to drink my
coffee while Zack turns off the machines. “Do you want me to keep the interior lights on?” he asks. I look up but don’t see him, so he must be in the back.
“Please,” I say.
“What about the CD?”
“Yes, please. I’d be happy to hear the Rolling Stones rarities,” I say. “Or Lucinda Williams. Either one would be fine.”
Zack doesn’t reply, but a few moments later I hear the opening strains of Lucinda Williams singing about changing the locks on her front door. I try to get invested in a front page story about the president ordering the torture of some prisoners, but it’s impossible. I know that I’ve offended Zack, and it makes me heartsick in a way I haven’t felt since . . . well . . . since the last time I felt heartsick. Almost two months now.
“All right,” Zack says. He’s standing by the front door dressed in his non-work clothes: jeans, a T-shirt fashioned with an iron-on of Clifford the Big Red Dog, an LA Dodgers baseball cap. “Good-bye.”
“You have a great day,” I say, and just when I’m about to add his name to the salutation, it completely escapes my memory. So instead I say, “bud.”
When Zack doesn’t show back up after seven hours, I decide to slip into his casita to see if he’s sick or if he’s fallen in the shower or if he’s hanging by a noose made of dental floss. But all I find is his tightly made bed. He didn’t even bother to leave a note with a forwarding address. Just like that, he is gone forever.
You never get used to people disappearing. It’s not the lack of closure precisely, but the sense that perhaps you’ve played a role you weren’t aware of initially. With Joanne and
the kids, the signs were there: the packing; the airline tickets to Hawaii, Australia, and Burma purchased on my credit card; the strange way Joanne kept telling me to stay the fuck away from her or she’d call the police; the way she called the police; the way she and her three kids (I’m almost certain there were three of them now—I’ve counted the bedrooms and it makes sense) were here one night and then that next morning they weren’t. I remember waking up and feeling like the house was listing to one side and that the living room was about to crack in half. Something had to be done, obviously.
I spread out on Zack’s bed and close my eyes. I imagine I am Zack. I imagine that woman I saw in my garden this morning, the woman with the sunburst on her back, is above me and that she is leaning down and whispering into my ear. I want to imagine she is Joanne, but I can’t conjure her face, can’t smell her skin, can’t quite tell myself what it is I’m doing at all, if any of this is happening. Because if you think about it, it’s all a little preposterous that I’ve turned my house into a Starbucks, but the facts of life are that we only get to live for a small amount of time—I mean really live , not that diaper period on both ends of the spectrum, or the acne era, or any time when life gets broken up by making photocopies, or sitting in meetings, or listening to music in elevators, or shopping for groceries, or waiting for that certain someone special. How much real time is that? Maybe 1,095 days. Maybe. And anyway, this living I’m doing inside the house now feels moored and solid.
Tomorrow, I decide, I will put an ad in the paper for a new employee. Or wife.
Part of being a good boss, I’ve learned reading the Starbucks franchise handbook, is an ability to perform all of the remedial tasks you expect of your underlings. Corporately it’s referred to as the reverse plane-crash theory. I prefer to think that it’s
“Sure,” Zack says. He undoes his apron and sets it on the counter, locks the register, and turns off the light inside the pastry display. I grab a copy of the New York Times and sit down in one of the overstuffed chairs and pretend to drink my
coffee while Zack turns off the machines. “Do you want me to keep the interior lights on?” he asks. I look up but don’t see him, so he must be in the back.
“Please,” I say.
“What about the CD?”
“Yes, please. I’d be happy to hear the Rolling Stones rarities,” I say. “Or Lucinda Williams. Either one would be fine.”
Zack doesn’t reply, but a few moments later I hear the opening strains of Lucinda Williams singing about changing the locks on her front door. I try to get invested in a front page story about the president ordering the torture of some prisoners, but it’s impossible. I know that I’ve offended Zack, and it makes me heartsick in a way I haven’t felt since . . . well . . . since the last time I felt heartsick. Almost two months now.
“All right,” Zack says. He’s standing by the front door dressed in his non-work clothes: jeans, a T-shirt fashioned with an iron-on of Clifford the Big Red Dog, an LA Dodgers baseball cap. “Good-bye.”
“You have a great day,” I say, and just when I’m about to add his name to the salutation, it completely escapes my memory. So instead I say, “bud.”
When Zack doesn’t show back up after seven hours, I decide to slip into his casita to see if he’s sick or if he’s fallen in the shower or if he’s hanging by a noose made of dental floss. But all I find is his tightly made bed. He didn’t even bother to leave a note with a forwarding address. Just like that, he is gone forever.
You never get used to people disappearing. It’s not the lack of closure precisely, but the sense that perhaps you’ve played a role you weren’t aware of initially. With Joanne and
the kids, the signs were there: the packing; the airline tickets to Hawaii, Australia, and Burma purchased on my credit card; the strange way Joanne kept telling me to stay the fuck away from her or she’d call the police; the way she called the police; the way she and her three kids (I’m almost certain there were three of them now—I’ve counted the bedrooms and it makes sense) were here one night and then that next morning they weren’t. I remember waking up and feeling like the house was listing to one side and that the living room was about to crack in half. Something had to be done, obviously.
I spread out on Zack’s bed and close my eyes. I imagine I am Zack. I imagine that woman I saw in my garden this morning, the woman with the sunburst on her back, is above me and that she is leaning down and whispering into my ear. I want to imagine she is Joanne, but I can’t conjure her face, can’t smell her skin, can’t quite tell myself what it is I’m doing at all, if any of this is happening. Because if you think about it, it’s all a little preposterous that I’ve turned my house into a Starbucks, but the facts of life are that we only get to live for a small amount of time—I mean really live , not that diaper period on both ends of the spectrum, or the acne era, or any time when life gets broken up by making photocopies, or sitting in meetings, or listening to music in elevators, or shopping for groceries, or waiting for that certain someone special. How much real time is that? Maybe 1,095 days. Maybe. And anyway, this living I’m doing inside the house now feels moored and solid.
Tomorrow, I decide, I will put an ad in the paper for a new employee. Or wife.
Part of being a good boss, I’ve learned reading the Starbucks franchise handbook, is an ability to perform all of the remedial tasks you expect of your underlings. Corporately it’s referred to as the reverse plane-crash theory. I prefer to think that it’s
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