“Suspect!” Rachel exclaimed. “That sounds like there was a crime or something!”
“Whatever the word is,” he said dismissively as he returned to the breakfast bar and fell onto a stool. “What I am trying to say is that bureaucracy can get so huge that there’s nothing personal in a job anymore. They might as well line up a bunch of robots!” His face was beginning to turn curiously red.
“I didn’t know you were having such a rough time at work.”
“That’s because I didn’t want to bring you down,” he said miserably, then exhaled a long and weary sigh again. “But you sort of forced my hand. God, I feel like a beer. You wanna go get a beer?”
Hello? Had he heard anything she’d said? “I can’t, Myron. I’m really broke.”
Myron smiled then. “It’s on me,” he said, and stood, shoving his hands into his jeans. “Let’s go down to Fratangelo’s and see what’s going on.”
What she really wanted to know was why the forklift accident had anything to do with the money he owed her, but before she could ask, Myron asked, “What’s that?”
She glanced down at the paper she was still clutching. “Oh! I went to the employment agency today. It’s a job referral.”
“A job. Really?” he said, his face brightening. “So you’ll get yourself a job! There you go—problem solved.”
“It was just a temp agency—part-time work.”
Myron shrugged. “It’ll at least give you grocery money.”
Yeah, and if he’d repay the loan she’d made him, she could pay her utility bill. Which reminded her . . . “By the way, Myron—do you have my cell?” she asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said, and laughed sheepishly. “I meant to bring that back. I don’t know where my head’s been! I’ll bring it back, I promise,” he said, and walked to the door. “Hurry up, will you? After what I’ve been through today, I could really use that beer.”
Fratangelo’s, near the Brown campus at the edge of the Blackstone neighborhood where Rachel lived, was a place Myron had always liked because of the cheap happy hour and even cheaper eats. Tonight, as usual, it was packed with an odd mix of the hip young urban crowd and the graduate student–professor crowd.
They had a seat at the bar and Myron ordered a couple of beers. He then proceeded the regular rant of his tenure problem—same song, louder refrain. “I just need time to research the theory I’m working on,” he explained for at least the thousandth, millionth time.
Rachel absently nodded—she had learned a long time ago it was best just to zone when Myron went down the gotta-get-tenure path. He rarely heard anything she said, and if he did, it typically made him mad. So as he continued to drone on about it, she let her gaze wander the crowded bar, and saw Dave Stolanski, a permanent fixture at Fratangelo’s. Dave had been in school almost as long as she had, which wasn’t a particularly comforting thought. Rachel frowned at her beer, then at Dave—but noticed someone behind him who looked an awful lot like Flynn.
She froze, the beer halfway to her mouth, squinting across the smoke-filled room.
“What are you looking at?” Myron asked, shifting his gaze in the direction she was looking. “Oh,” he said, seeing Dave Stolanski. “Don’t get your heart set on him, Rach. The guy’s a loser. He’s been in the program five years now and still hasn’t made any progress toward finishing his doctorate.”
Rachel gave him a withering look, but Myron took a swig of his beer, completely oblivious. “I’ve been in that long, too,” she reminded him. “Does that make me a loser?”
Startled by the question, Myron quickly shook his head and tried to laugh it off. “No, of course not. It’s different with you.” He laughed again, only a little higher.
“How so?”
“Because!” he insisted nervously. “At least you’re at dissertation, right? Dave’s not even at dissertation,” he scoffed, waving a hand at Dave, who was intently studying something atop the bar. Myron took another long swig of beer, then held up two fingers to the barkeep to signal another round. “Listen, don’t misunderstand. It took me a couple of years to get my dissertation out of the way, too. And you know, back then, I was the bomb. The profs loved me! They thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and my work on pre-Revolutionary American history?” He paused to sigh loudly and shake his head. “Golden.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, put down her beer. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”