But he was already halfway down the basement stairs. At the time, she had tried to work up some fury about his walking out on their conversation, but she couldn’t manage it. That was the shot she had decided to take to bring them closer? Accusing him of sneaking a smoke in the yard? She didn’t blame him for being angry with her for that. She was furious with herself about it. She wasn’t two-full-weeks-of-silent-treatment furious, but then, she wasn’t a teenager whose life had been recently upended.
Now she watched from the living room window as he walked down the block, his pack slung over his right shoulder. Her head started to pound, and she headed for the coffeemaker. She pushed the button on the machine and reminded herself that it was Friday, at least. She had an annoying trip to make to her company’s downtown headquarters later, but after that, she would be able to relax. She was ahead on her work for the week, so she was planning to knock off the minute Jesse got home from school.
She wanted to fix things. Maybe they would walk down to the sandwich place for dinner. Catch a movie, even. Her first Global Insurance paycheck had hit her bank account the day before—finally, they could live a little. There had to be some new video game he was after, or maybe some new style of hoodie or jeans that everyone wore at school. They could stop for those things after the movie. Yes, it was bribery. Right now, she wasn’t above it.
Later, peering into her tiny closet, she averted her eyes from the main clothes rod on which her nicest suits and dresses hung—all too tight now, thanks to her post-divorce carb-fest. Hanging on a hook behind the door was the sole businesslike item she owned that still fit: a green dress she had purchased shortly after Jesse was born.
She still remembered the day she bought it. By the time she had loaded Jesse into his car seat, gotten them to the mall, and made her way to the dress department—finally, not the maternity department!—she calculated she had four minutes to shop before he woke and hollered for milk. She grabbed three dresses from the rack and settled on the first one she could fit into—a trendy-looking green scoop-necked item that she loved in the dressing room. When she got it home and under regular light, she discovered the color leaned toward neon, and on closer inspection, the scooped neck seemed to scoop slightly to one side. No matter, though—it didn’t have an elastic tummy, so to her, it was high fashion. She had worn it constantly.
Now she took the dress off its hook, slid it on, and regarded herself in the mirror, wrinkling her nose. She was amazed Kyle had let her out of the house in such an atrocious article of clothing all those years ago. She couldn’t believe she was about to let herself do it again today, and for the fourth time in as many weeks, no less, as she had now been to the Global Insurance office that many times, having started her job before they moved to the bungalow. Climbing into the decidedly not flashy, definitely not European, used car she had bought for $500 after she lost her fancy leased one, she told herself that on the upside, even if someone from her old life were to see her, they would never recognize her.
Downtown, she fought traffic to reach the loading bay at the back of the Global Insurance building, where two shipping department guys would remove the boxes of completed files she was returning and replace them with a new set while she performed her requisite check-in on the fortieth floor. In the elevator, she held her breath and pressed the number. In, out, fast, she whispered to herself—the mantra she had developed after her first miserable trip to the building. There were only a handful of work-at-home employees at Global Insurance. The rest of the company’s vast army of claims processors worked here, in the downtown headquarters, between floors thirty and forty. Markie had only seen the fortieth—the floor occupied by Claims Review and Appeals Processing—but her manager, Gregory, assured her the others were identical, each an enormous square space with a perimeter of offices and an interior filled with cubicles, cubicles, and more cubicles.
Markie had heard of “cube farms” before. The fortieth floor was more like a cube prairie. Across its great expanse, claims reviewers (this was Markie’s job—and it was a quiet one) were interspersed with appeals processors (involving telephone calls). This meant that in one cube, a person might be trying to read silently, while directly beside him someone else squawked loudly into her headset, explaining at several decibels greater than necessary why it was that although Global Insurance was most definitely “On Your Side!” and “Here for You!” it could not, sadly, pay that particular claim.
On her first trip to the office, standing on the perimeter of the cube prairie with Gregory and listening to the sound of shuffling paper and keyboards clicking and people coughing and sniffing and sighing and chairs moving and file drawers opening and closing, Markie had thought of the farmers in biblical stories watching as clouds of buzzing locusts swarmed toward them. This must be what it sounded like, she thought, the droning noise of impending doom. She had scratched her arms and checked the collar of her neon-green dress, shaking the fabric to set free the insects she was sure had crawled under the polyester and onto her skin.
Now, stepping out of the elevator, she tried not to look at the cube prairie as she racewalked down the long hallway and into the office of the wordless, humorless woman who collected everyone’s completed log sheets each week and handed them new ones. Markie didn’t know the woman’s name—the nameplate outside her door said only LOG SHEETS. On Markie’s first visit to headquarters, Gregory had pointed out the office and explained the log sheet–swapping process, but he claimed not to have time to make introductions. Markie suspected he might be afraid of the woman. If she thought less of him for it at the time, she didn’t the following week when she stood on the threshold of the woman’s office and offered a cheerful “Good morning!” only to be met with a pinched-face glare as the Log Sheet Lady growled, “I don’t do small talk.”
Markie set her sheaf of papers in the in-box on the corner of the Log Sheet Lady’s desk, then stood quietly, staring at her sandals. She almost committed the sin of letting out a sigh at the sight of her own chipped toenail polish, but she caught herself in time and waited soundlessly as the woman first checked carefully over the ten pages of completed columns of notes and figures, then made unintelligible marks in a small notebook before reluctantly handing over a new sheaf of blank sheets.