The waiter delivered our entrées. Roger made another lewd crack about the girl he’d brought home on Saturday night. I ate my lamb curry and let myself dissolve into the banter. Something about that time of year had been making me homesick. Fall had always meant a turnover in routine, a new year of school, the beginning of the hockey season. I missed it, even the miserable parts: muscles that screamed in pain, bruises blackening under pads, sticks slamming into legs. Maybe homesick wasn’t the right word. It was more like a part of me had been put away in a dusty old box, and I missed it. But moments like this were a relief. Another beer, and another. In those moments, I’d forget.
At McGuigan’s later that Monday night, I slipped out of our booth while Roger was in the middle of a story, and waited at the bar for Maria to look up.
“Hey,” she said, finally. She smiled. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Busy night?”
“You have no idea. Hang on a second.” She delivered a brimming tray of bourbons to a waiter, who carried it over to a table. Not our table, but it might as well have been. You could tell they were bankers from a mile away. Almost everyone in there was. Young guys in loosened ties, getting bombed with an end-of-the-world abandon.
“That’ll keep them busy for about five minutes,” she said. “The usual?”
After several weeks of going to McGuigan’s almost every night, I had befriended Maria. She felt like someone I’d known for a long time. In a strange way, even longer than Julia. Like someone from back home. I liked her company, especially when I’d had too much of my coworkers. One night she let me buy her a drink and told me her story. She was putting herself through law school at Fordham with loans and bartending wages. As a girl, she had dreamed of becoming a ballerina, of studying at Juilliard. Her teachers at home all said she had the talent, and she’d moved to the city for it. When I asked what happened, she shrugged. “Flat feet.” She was tall and gorgeous, had thought about modeling, she said, but realized that if her body could let her down once, it could do it twice.
“So why law school?”
“I want to be taken seriously, I guess. I find it interesting. Mostly I don’t want to end up like my mom.” She paused. “I sound like an asshole.”
“Not an asshole. I get it.”
“Well. You’re nice, Evan. You’re not like those other guys, you know?”
Guilt twinged in my chest occasionally during those hours we spent talking, sometimes till the end of her shift. Hours I should have been spending with Julia. I worried Julia could smell the bar on me when I got home, stale beer and smoky whiskey clinging to my shirt before I stuffed it into the laundry pile. I found myself daydreaming about Maria. It reminded me of high school—a girl waiting by your locker after the last bell. Consistent pleasures: the same familiar face, day in and day out.
Maria drew a Guinness for me. “What’s going on tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“You guys are all worked up. All of you.”
“Oh. It’s the market. This could be the end for a lot of companies.”
“Okay, but you’ll be fine, though.”
“But that’s the thing. Nobody knows. There’s never been anything like this. Nobody knows what could happen to Spire.”
“Well, I don’t mean Spire. I mean you. Say you get fired, go bankrupt, whatever. You aren’t going to have a problem getting a job. I mean, look at you.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Not like that.” She laughed. “I mean you’re smart, you’re polite, you look like a guy anyone could trust. You fit right in. Guys like you don’t stay unemployed for long.”
Someone was waving her down. She rested her hand on mine before she walked away. Maria was good at her job. “Don’t worry too much about it, Evan. You’re just one of those people. It’s all going to work out, you know?”
“Evan. Come on in.”
This was the following evening, Tuesday night. It was the first time Michael’s door had been open and unguarded in almost two days.
“Is this an okay time?” Michael was typing fast, glancing over his shoulder at a chart, ignoring the blinking messages on his phone. His office looked like a war zone.
“Fine, fine. I sent Wanda home. What do you have there?”
“The WestCorp models. They’re almost finished, but I need to check an assumption with you before running it.”
“What is it?”
I took a deep breath. “The exports to the Chinese market. I wasn’t sure what tariffs they’re subject to and how much that’s going to affect us. I’ve done some research, and there’s a lot of variation in the taxes on lumber exported to China, so I thought I’d go with a rough average, something like—”
“Zero.”
“Pardon?”
“Your number is zero. The WestCorp exports won’t be subject to any tariffs or taxes. Is that all?”
“Well—yes. Yeah, that’s it.”
“Good.” Michael turned back to his computer. I started toward the door, but I couldn’t help myself. It had been puzzling me for so long. And it still didn’t quite make sense.
“Michael, just want to be sure—no tariffs or taxes at all for these exports, none? It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of—”
He spun in his chair and stared at me, anger flaring in his eyes. “No,” he said sharply. “No tariffs. None. Put that in the model and run it. E-mail me the numbers when you have them. Then go home.”