Two Points

Chapter 4: The Word He Never Dared Use

Tuesday I got in before seven.

The building was still half dark. I rode up alone, sat down at my desk, and put the Copley packet on the blotter. I'd read it three times already — every line of the co-op terms, every line of the placement schedule, the campus map I'd never once needed because I'd applied from a hospital corridor. I read it a fourth time anyway. Not for information. I wanted the words in my mouth before anybody else in that room had them.

At 8:45 Ward came in.

He'd done something to his hair: dark, wet, flat to the skull. He was wearing the jacket he saved for client visits, the one with the good lining. He came down the aisle with his chin already up, a man walking into his own party.

"Sutt. You're in early." He stopped at my desk and looked at the packet. "Couldn't sleep? Big day."

"I wanted to go over the numbers again."

"Numbers." He said it like a word in a language he didn't speak. "You know the difference between you and me? I've been in rooms with these people. You haven't. Not a Copley kid. That's not an insult, that's just — it's just true." He tapped the corner of the packet with one finger. "So today you watch. You see how it's done."

"I know how it's done," I said.

He laughed. One of the guys behind me laughed too, right on time, the way they always did. Ward straightened his cuff and walked on toward his office. The door clicked shut.

At 8:55 Ms. Delgado's e-mail came through. *Guests on site. Main lobby, now.*

The elevator down was full. Ward stood at the front facing the doors, checking his hair in the steel. Rita was on his right with her phone out. Walter was at the back, next to me, holding his tea. Nobody spoke.

Ward turned his head without turning around. "Sutt. When we get down there, stand at the back of the group. Don't say anything to anybody. These are serious people and I'm not explaining you to them."

"All right," I said.

The lobby doors opened onto glass and cold air. A black car pulled up at the curb and a man got out of the back seat, and I knew the way he stood before I knew anything else — the same way he'd stood at the front of a lecture hall with a piece of chalk in his hand.

Ward was already moving. He reached the door before the man's second foot was on the pavement.

"Dr. Halloway. Welcome. Perry Ward, regional manager. It's a real pleasure."

"Mr. Ward." Halloway shook his hand. Silver-rimmed glasses, a coat the color of wet slate, maybe sixty, maybe less. His eyes came up over Ward's shoulder and moved across the group behind him.

They stopped on me. One second, no more. Then they went on as if they hadn't.

"—we've been looking forward to this for weeks," Ward was saying, walking him in. "I'll take you through our operation personally. Our people have put together a full presentation on the co-op side, the whole pipeline. I think you'll be impressed—"

"That's very kind," Halloway said.

They moved past me toward the elevator bank. Ward talked the whole way. Halloway nodded at the right moments and said almost nothing, and his eyes kept going back out across the lobby, over the tops of our heads, the way a man looks for the shortest way through a crowded room.

The conference room was the one on the fourth floor, the one with the long table and the window that looked out at the parking structure. I took a seat at the far end, near the wall, the way I'd been told. The packet lay in front of me. Walter sat two chairs down. Rita took the seat on Ward's left, which put her where she could see his face, which put her where she could feed him a line if he needed one.

I looked at the empty chair across from me. Then I looked out the window and waited.

——

Mr. Kim from the executive floor opened it. He stood at the head of the table with a folder he didn't need to open and gave the speech about how proud the company was, how important the partnership was, the four or five sentences you put in front of a real conversation.

"Before we get to the schedule," he said, "I want to name our liaison on this. Somebody will be working directly with Dr. Halloway's office for the duration of the placement program, and we've assigned that internally."

Ward's shoulders came back. Rita's pen stopped on her pad.

"Sutt," Mr. Kim said, looking down the table at me, "you'll be our liaison on the Copley project."

The room didn't do anything. Air conditioner running, a phone out on a desk in the hall buzzing against a hard surface and stopping, and that was all.

Ward's head turned. He looked at me, then at Mr. Kim, then at me again, and his mouth was still open around whatever he'd been about to say before Mr. Kim had started talking.

I stood up.

"Dr. Halloway," I said.

Halloway took his glasses off, folded them, and looked at me, and for the first time since he'd gotten out of the car, he smiled.

"Sutt." He said it the way you say a name that's been sitting on a form in a drawer for years. "It's been a while."

Ward found his voice. "Dr. Halloway — you know her?"

"I taught her," Halloway said. He put his glasses back on. "Two years of it. She was in my automation sequence and she finished first in her year, which I'll tell you now because she never once said it while she was there." He turned his head toward Mr. Kim. "I don't expect she's said it here either."

Nobody at the table moved. Rita had gone the exact color of bad milk. Somewhere past the window a truck backed up and beeped once and stopped, and that sound was the loudest thing in the building.

Mr. Kim looked at me with his eyebrows up. "She didn't. When we hired her, she — well." He laughed once, short. "That's not on the form."

"No," Halloway said. "She doesn't put it on forms."

Then he looked straight down the table at Perry Ward.

"Mr. Ward. You've had her on your team. How's she been?"

Ward opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He opened it again, got half a syllable, swallowed it. His hand came off the table and went back down.

"She's — she's — she's been fine. Good. She works hard."

"I'm glad to hear it," Halloway said. Perfectly pleasant. "Copley kids hold up. They tend to do that wherever we put them."

That sentence went around the table like a plate of something nobody wanted to touch. Ward's face went red and then something past red, and he pulled his chair back about an inch, and he didn't look at me, and he didn't look at Halloway, and he didn't look at anybody.

Mr. Kim said, "Well — Sutt, why don't you come around to this side. You can walk Dr. Halloway through where we are."

——

I moved my chair.

I sat down across from Ward, close enough to see his hands flat on the table, pressing hard enough to bleach the knuckles. I opened the packet. Schedule first, then staffing, then the two decisions that still needed the alumni office, and for each one I said what the options cost in days and in money and I didn't dress any of it up. When Halloway asked about the campus end — which buildings the placements would sit in, whether our people would be cleared for lab access, how the fall cohorts would line up — I had the answers. Not because I'd studied for a test. Because I'd lived on that campus for four years and I'd read this packet until it was true.

It took about twenty minutes.

Halloway started the applause. He put his palms together at the end of my last sentence, before anybody else, the way he used to when a student worked something out at the board alone and got to the end of it without help. Mr. Kim came in after him. Around the table people did what people do when somebody else has already decided how a meeting is going. Ward's hands came up off the table and made it as high as his tie and came back down.

"Copley would be lucky to have you back," Halloway said.

"Seconded," Mr. Kim said.

——

At the break they put out coffee and a tray of the dry cookies that taste like cardboard in a nicer building. I was standing by the window with my cup when Halloway came up beside me.

He didn't do small talk. He never did.

"I heard you'd hit some weather here," he said, low.

I looked at him. "Who told you that?"

"Walter called the alumni office." He drank his coffee. "Two weeks ago. Took him three calls to get to me. Wouldn't leave a message with anybody else, wouldn't say much — just that there was a young woman out of our school working in this company, and he thought somebody should know if she ever needed a word put in." He glanced at me. "He didn't ask me for anything. That's the part I noticed."

I didn't say anything.

"He told me he wasn't going to talk to you about it," Halloway said. "He was pretty firm on that. So I won't either." He set his cup down on the sill. "You landed somewhere with one good man in it. Don't make him carry it alone."

He went back to the table. I stood by the window a minute longer with the coffee going cold in my hand and the parking structure filling the whole view, level after level of the same gray, and I looked across to the other end of the room where Walter was drinking his tea, and he looked back at me, and he tipped his cup at me about a quarter inch, and then he looked away.

I finished my coffee. I went back to my seat.

——

Ward caught me in the corridor after. Not in the room — out in the hall, once Mr. Kim had walked Halloway down to the elevators and the rest of us were drifting back toward our desks. I was carrying the packet. Ward came out of the conference room behind me and stopped walking and just stood there, hands at his sides, in the path everybody had to take to get back to the floor. He'd been there long enough that two people had already gone around him without looking up from their phones.

"Sutt."

I stopped.

"Why didn't you say something?"

"Say what?"

"That you went to —" He moved one hand, as if he could wave the word in through the air. "That you're—"

"I told you where I went to school," I said. "You asked me once. I answered. Then you spent the year not believing the answer." I kept my voice where I keep it when I mean it. "I wasn't going to say it louder for you."

He moved his mouth around a couple of shapes. Nothing that came out of it was a word.

I walked on. Behind me he stayed in the middle of the corridor where people were passing on both sides of him, going somewhere else, and none of them stopped, and none of them looked at him, and he didn't follow me.

Up at the elevators Halloway was finishing up with Mr. Kim.

"Take good care of that one," Halloway said. "She's one of ours, and she doesn't like to be told so."

"We absolutely will," Mr. Kim said.

The doors closed on both of them. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Halloway's name on the screen, and below it one line.

*You should come by when you're home. The department's changed but the coffee's still terrible.*

I typed one letter back and put the phone away.