Holland
By five-fifty the lobby has that end-of-week hush I’ve learned to love—the printers done chattering, the phone bored with its own ring, the ficus holding on to two heroic leaves like it’s daring me to water it. I count the drawer, log the day’s rentals, flip the laminated card to CLOSED and straighten it as if the angle of a sign could keep the world behaved.
Keys slide into the little metal box Banks insists on calling “the vault” (it is decidedly not a vault), contracts go into the blue folder, the pen cup gets arranged in Todd’s preferred—deranged—rainbow order. I stand a second with my palms on the counter, listening: shop noises, distant laughter, the soft thud of someone closing a tool chest. Normal. I like that word now. It doesn’t mean boring anymore; it means mine.
The
