White Man's Problems by Kevin Morris

stole all the world’s music. And the parents of every fourth grader did not know what to do in the face of their kid’s desire to join Facebook. He longed for a day when Boeing meant jobs and it was weird for Seattle to even have a football team.
    Mulligan took the iPad and his BlackBerry and went across the lawn, past the pool, to his home office in the guesthouse, where he turned on his desktop. It did not boot up correctly, which he theorized was related to Bella’s going on illegal music sites. He had sixteen new e-mails on his BlackBerry but none on his iPad. Fourteen of the sixteen e-mails were from the bank’s analyst in New York. Each had important attachments—complicated accounting spreadsheets on special proprietary enterprise software—that were impossible to view on the BlackBerry. That meant, with the iPad not updating due to the Wi-Fi connection issue and the desktop not working at all, Mulligan found himself with three devices turned on and no spreadsheets. He picked up the phone, which was cordless, to dial the bank’s twenty-four-hour IT service. After three rings, a two-tone noise preceded a recording: To complete this call , you must first dial nine…Please hang up and dial again . He felt sweat over his brow. The voice was not telling him that what he had wrong was the usual unknowable difference between dialing one before the area code or not dialing one before the area code. No, he had forgotten to dial nine—nine!—before the number, something which struck him as insane, since it was a call from home ,and, for the entirety of his professional life, dialing nine had been the exclusive province of the business phone, something you did from the office . Dialing nine was something that never— never —applied to the home phone. What meant anything if that was not the way it was anymore? The interlaced fingers met forehead once more.
    He heard the doorbell—another interruption. It was Sondra, the housekeeper. She was more like an assistant housekeeper who worked on the weekends because Mariana was off. Sondra was illegal, but Mariana had convinced him to hire her on the altogether fair but altogether unspoken premise that Mariana was getting too old to clean the entire house every day. He was (truly) happy to do it, and it made each of the three women—Rita, Bella, and Mariana—happy, which made his life easier. Plus, Sondra was a devout, demure, diminutive, and decorous girl who was thrilled to get four hundred bucks a week, which he paid via personal check because he never had enough cash, even though it was certain to fuck him up one day taxwise. The moral, ethical, and legal ramifications of failing to withhold from someone who was illegal but had a Social Security number and a California driver’s license was one of the few mental wormholes of his quotidian life Mulligan had left unexplored. He didn’t know what she did about health insurance.
    Sondra spoke no English, so he used what Spanish he had garnered from trips to Cabo San Lucas and UEFA Cup games on Univision. This meant he knew only the elementals—for example, that limpio meant clean.
    â€œOh, Sondra, por favor, necesito limpio ,” he said, making a wax-on motion with his hands. “Rita said for me to ask you if you could ‘please limpio ’?”
    Sondra nodded vigorously and said, “ Sí, disculpa, pero limpia que? Afuera? ”
    He realized she was asking him just exactly what she should clean. Giving in to his inability to communicate in words, Mulligan pointed to the pool chairs. She told him, also in gestures, that first she would walk Henry. He nodded. Before he turned away, she said, “ También, señor, necesito ir a comprar las cosas por casa ,” and pantomimed pushing a shopping cart. He remembered that Mariana had delegated the weekly grocery run to Sondra on top of the other grunt work. Mulligan momentarily marveled that