Two Points

Chapter 2: Seven Orders, Zero Complaints

A month is nothing. A month is four paychecks if you count the advance, the same break room, the same microwave smell, the same three people crowding the coffee machine at 9:15 like it's a religion. Three months is different. Three months and you start to notice stairs you didn't notice before. Three months and your badge has a worn edge on the plastic corner, and you know which elevator sticks on the fourth floor.

I heard Rita's voice before I came around the corner. Not what she said — the volume. That's how you tell when somebody's telling a story they want overheard.

"—heard the intake form thing, right? The *tech* thing."

Somebody laughed, low.

"She wrote it in her own hand. On the form. Like, why would you put that."

"Maybe she thought it was cute."

"Maybe she thinks working here is a favor somebody did her." Rita, warming up. "I mean, seriously. What else would you call it. Somebody met somebody, and now she's got a badge and a chair and a W-2."

"She looks like a girl who walked in off the street," somebody said, and Rita said *thank you*, like the joke had been hers.

I stood in the doorway with my mug in my hand. The break room door wasn't shut all the way. The door never shuts all the way. I'd learned that in week one.

I pushed it open.

Rita's face did a thing — fast, a quarter second, and then back to being a face that had been telling a good story about a bad person. She lifted her mug in toast.

"Oh — hey, Sutt. Water's fine, the filter got changed this morning."

I walked to the dispenser and set my mug under it and watched it fill.

When I turned around I looked at Rita, and only Rita.

"Rita, I came in through the regular application process. If you have a question about how I got hired, you can ask HR." I picked up my mug. "They have a whole file. You want me to pull it for you?"

Rita's mug stayed halfway to her mouth. She'd been about to make a face to whoever was standing next to her, and now she couldn't, because I was still standing there and she hadn't come up with a face that worked.

Somebody said, "Whoa," under his breath, in the tone you use when you're trying to sand the corner off the last thirty seconds.

I walked out. Behind me, Rita found her voice at a lower volume.

"Did you hear her?"

The elevator ride up wasn't long enough for anything I felt to finish happening, so I just stood there and let it not finish.

Monday was the sales meeting. Conference room B, glass on three sides, everyone seated. I took the chair by the door because I always took the chair by the door.

Perry Ward stood at the whiteboard with the marker cap between his teeth and the month's numbers up in his block handwriting. He'd put his own name at the top of the board, *W. WARD* — he did that every week.

"Sutt. How many accounts did you close last month."

"Seven," I said. "All shipped on schedule. No complaints filed."

He looked at the board. He looked at the room. He wrote *7* on the board with a little circle around it.

"Seven. That's a lot for a new hire." He capped the marker. "They teach you that at your school?"

One second. That's all it was. One second, and the room had already decided, and once it was decided people couldn't help but let the air out their noses. A guy in the back, one of the sales guys, made a choking sound trying to keep it in, which was worse.

"Kidding," Perry said, and held both hands up. He was smiling. "Sutt, relax. Sit down."

I didn't sit.

"Mr. Ward — which of my orders was late?"

His smile stayed up. It just didn't move after that.

"Which client complained about me?"

The smile was still there. Behind it the room had gotten very quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear someone's pen click in the row over.

"Which report did I miss a deadline on?"

Perry Ward looked at me for a second too long. Long enough that somebody near the front shifted in their chair. Then he laughed — a short one, almost real, the laugh of a man deciding something was funny because the alternative was worse.

"It's a joke. You can't take a joke?"

"It's a fair question," I said.

"He's just busting chops." Rita, from the left side, half out of her seat like she was going to pat the air in front of me. "Sutt. Come on. He's been good to you."

"Fine," I said, and sat.

Nobody looked at me for the next ten minutes. That's better than being looked at. I took my notebook out and I wrote the date and I did not write another word all meeting.

That was the week the volume went up.

Break room, Tuesday. Perry came in behind me and talked to the sales guy over my head, loudly, like I wasn't standing between them. "Hey — how about these kids. No manners anymore. Shipped me a degree and forgot the rest of the order."

I didn't turn and he didn't need me to.

Wednesday in the lunch line. He was behind me, and he was stuck behind me, because that's the line. "You know what's wrong with this generation? They send in the most impressive-sounding application in the world and then find out you still have to work. Even the corner-store crowd. Even *that*."

I took two steps forward. The counter moved. He said the rest of it to somebody who hadn't asked.

Thursday morning he sent something to the whole department. He didn't use names. He didn't need to use names.

*People have been asking me about standards on this team. Let me be clear: HR will hire who HR hires, I don't run that. But I've got accounts to hold and clients to face, and I need people who take it seriously. If you came in the side door, you don't get to act like you came in the front. Here's the thing about a corner-store hire: there's always a day when the work comes up and you either turn in the goods or you don't. You don't get to talk your way past that. I've seen it go the other way, and I don't need to be the one who finds out the hard way.*

He wrote it in short paragraphs. He wrote it at 11:40, which is a time of morning when you have nothing else to do.

Nine replies. *Noted.* *Agreed.* *Couldn't have said it better.* The best one was from a guy in another department who didn't work with me: *Sad what gets hired these days.* Under that: eleven thumbs.

I looked at the screen. My father used to say this thing when I came home angry about somebody in middle school, some kid, some teacher, doesn't matter.

*Sutt, the ones with something to lose don't pick fights. They go do the thing better than you and let the scoreboard talk.*

The hospital bed had stopped being a hospital bed by then. It was just a bed with rails and a machine that made a sound when he shifted. He was so thin that when he turned his hand over on the sheet, the tendon moved under the skin first, and then the bones, and then the hand. He held it up.

"Sutt. You get out there and somebody gives you grief — " he was smiling, working up to the joke, the way he always worked up to it — "you tell them your old man's Roy Havelock. Tell them he's got a union card at home that says Class A, tell them he lifted a thousand tons of steel off that floor with his own two hands and never dropped a piece on anybody. Tell them he's a regular guy, and if they don't like you, it's because they can't stand the sight of a woman swinging the same hammer they do — "

He stopped. He was working on a fist, and the fingers wouldn't go.

"— son of a gun," he said. "Hand's gone. Make up the rest. You're better at it than I am."

I laughed. That was what he wanted.

I picked up my phone and I typed something out and I looked at it and I deleted it. I did that twice. There's no reason to type if you're going to delete it. The reason is that you want to see how it looks, and then you don't want it anywhere.

Instead I took a screenshot. The whole post, with the timestamps on the replies, so nobody could say it was a different day. I held the phone with both hands. Then I turned it face down on the desk and I put a pen on top of it so I'd have to move the pen to move it.

Later that week, elevator. Two people I didn't know. Ward's voice cut through the lobby noise, aimed at me over the heads of the crowd.

"Corner-store. Make sure you have your materials organized for Tuesday. And when the grown-ups are talking, you sit and you listen."

I said, "Yes, Mr. Ward." I held up my phone. Screen toward him. Red bar, numbers running.

"Also, you're on record," I said. "That last one especially."

He stared at the red bar for one beat. Then the doors closed on the lobby and I had the car to myself, and the numbers went down one at a time.

At 5:10 Perry Ward put his head out his office door.

"Sutt. In here."

He closed the door behind me. That wasn't new; his door was always closed. What was new was that he came around the desk and leaned on the front of it, so we were at the same height, except he was two feet closer and there wasn't a desk between us.

"Listen. I don't know what kind of office you think this is." He said it kindly. That was the trick of him. "You have a bad attitude. You know that, right? I want you to hear it from someone who actually likes you."

"I hear you."

"You don't hear me. Because if you heard me you'd think about where you'd be without this job." He tilted his head. "How many places take a — how many places take where you went to school and hand it a desk and a check?"

"Millions," I said. "Probably."

His face did something, and then he decided to keep going, and that's when I realized how much he wanted this to work and how badly he was going to take it when it didn't.

"I'm offering you a hand," he said. "This whole thing comes out of me being a human being. What do you say we get out of the office. Grab a bite, just you and me, let's clear the air. Somewhere nice. No agenda. You can put the whole attitude thing on the table and I'll listen like a friend."

He said *just you and me* the way you say the name of a card you're holding. When he said the word *nice* he ran his tongue over his lower lip and then his mouth stayed a little open.

I didn't move. I didn't flinch, and I didn't step back.

"No," I said. "I have plans tonight."

"Plans." Flat.

"I have plans."

"Sutt. You know how many people in this company would like to get dinner with me?" He was coming off the desk now and his voice had lost the soft part. "How many people would say thank you? You understand what I'm doing for you, or do you not understand the kind of favor —"

"Dinner's not on the table," I said. "Offer it to one of them."

I opened the door and walked out. I heard him hit the desk with the flat of his hand, and then the plastic sound of a cup going over, and a pen or something rolling and stopping.

I heard the water before I saw it. He'd had a mug on the desk and it was on the floor now and it had gotten the papers too.

I sat down at my desk and opened my bag and started putting things in it. There was a small oak stand for keys on the corner of the desk and my keys were on it, the way I put them every morning. Old supplies, one folder, the mug I never used.

I looked up without meaning to and the guy who sat to my left was looking at me.

His name was Walter. He was a gray-at-the-temples man with a knit tie, and as far as I knew he had been in the building for forty years, or it just seemed that way. I'd never heard him say more than one sentence in a row to anybody.

He said, "You all right?"

"Yeah," I said.

He looked at his monitor. His screen didn't change. I don't know that for a fact. What I saw from my chair was a man who spent the day reading spreadsheets going back to a screen that wasn't doing anything.

That was the last thing he said to me for a while.

I zipped the bag and put it on my shoulder and walked past Perry's office with the water still spreading under his desk. He was standing in the doorway watching me and I gave him nothing to watch.

Three floors down the elevator stopped on 2, and two people got on, and I heard them before I turned around: "—she's so fake, I swear."

Rita. And it was my day for it, so it was Rita.

By the time they walked in, I'd already turned back around.

I stood against the back wall of the car and let the numbers be the only thing I was counting.

That was the night I understood I was tired of them. Not hurt. Not even angry. Tired, like when you've been holding something heavy in the wrong hand and somebody finally tells you you can switch.

The doors opened on the lobby. I walked across the marble and out past the fountain, and the wind was doing what it does in October.

Tuesday. Tomorrow. My school's alumni association was coming to this building to sign a partnership agreement — three lines from the front office, an attachment, a name list, the email dated four days ago and read on my lunch break the day it landed. Somebody at the front of that meeting was going to be the director of the alumni association. He had a name he'd answer to, and he would recognize me, and I was not going to say the first word.

Perry Ward would be there. He'd seen the same email. He'd seen the list, because the list went to everyone, and that afternoon he'd stood in the lobby and told me to sit down and let the grown-ups run the meeting.

I said good night to the guard. The guard said good night to me. I walked down to the train and I got on and I put my forehead on the window and I watched the dark part of the tunnel go by.

I did not feel sorry for him. Not one bit.

I took out my phone. The screenshot was still there. Thursday at 11:40. I scrolled through it once, slowly, all the way down to the *agreed* and the *noted* and the *couldn't have said it better*, and the eleven thumbs under *sad what gets hired these days*.

The recording from the lobby was still on the same phone. So was the one from the sales meeting, timed and dated, sitting in a folder with three months' worth of screenshots in it.

I put the phone back in my pocket and leaned my head on the window, and the train went under the river, and I let the side of my mouth pull up against the glass where nobody on the train could see it.

I'd like to say I slept well. I didn't sleep at all. The alarm went off at 6:10. I put on the good suit.