Читать книгу: «The Return Of Jonah Gray»
The Return of Jonah Gray
Heather Cochran
To David and our new tax deduction
Thanks are due to everyone who lent support and guidance throughout this effort—my parents for their consistent support and interest; my first-draft readers and thoughtful critics, David Allen, Zoë Cochran and Todd Laugen; all those who assisted with my research, including folks at the IRS and Dr. Bob Laugen; my wonderful and challenging editors, Farrin Jacobs and Selina McLemore, and my steadfast agent, Katherine Faussett.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter One
I MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE DISAPPOINTED HAD IT NOT been so predictable. Martina and I were at the Escape Room, the dive bar where we’d meet after work, maybe one day in five. Martina would have gone there five in five, but she’d always been drawn to dark places and men of a certain unwashed quality. Me, I found significance in the fact that the bar was equidistant from my work and my house. Not precisely equidistant—wouldn’t that have been a fantastic coincidence though?—but within a tenth of a mile, assuming my measurements were correct. Having been an accounting major, I was trained to interpret the world through double-entry ledgers, where a debit on one side balances a credit on the other. At the bottom of the columns, if you add and subtract correctly, the totals match up. So I took symmetry as an encouraging sign, whether in a financial statement or bar location.
I was sipping my beer and leafing through the book I’d brought with me when Martina rushed back from the bathroom and practically leaped onto the bar stool beside mine.
“Sasha, I want you to meet someone,” she said.
“Well, I want you to meet someone, too,” I told her. “I want us both to meet men who are generous and kind and delight in who we are. I swear, my mother wants me to settle for any guy who will have me. But I’m not going to settle. So I’m thirty-one. That’s not old. Who says that’s old?”
“My God, would you please stop talking,” Martina said. “Sometimes, I don’t get the way you’re wired. I meant, I want you to meet someone specific. His name is Kevin.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked around. I didn’t see whom she was referring to. “And Kevin is?”
“In the bathroom. I just met him in line. He was asking me about you. He’ll be out in just a minute.”
“He was asking about me? And you’re giving me a minute warning?” I asked. She knew I needed more time than that. “You know I need more time than that. You know I like to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” Martina asked. “The most we’re talking about is bar chatter.”
“Prepared for everything. What to ask. What I want to know. What I’ll say. What he’ll say back, then how I’ll respond to what he says back.”
“How are you not exhausted all the time? Just relax. Give the guy a chance. I promise you, he’s not the usual Escape Room fare.”
“So now there’s something wrong with the usual Escape Room fare?” I asked. “What, he’s some freak? Some anomaly?”
Martina shook her head. I followed her gaze to the man at the far end of the bar, the one whose cheek rested against a coaster, his hand upending a bowl of popcorn. Martina looked from him, back to me, smiling as if she’d won something. “How long do you figure it would take you to prep for him?” As she looked past me, her eyes went wide. “Okay, there he is. There’s Kevin,” she whispered, vacating her bar stool. “Make eye contact. Be nice. And what is that book? Principles of Accounting? Jeez, Sasha, it’s as if you were trying to make things harder for yourself.”
I looked up to see the Escape Room anomaly. The first thing I noticed was his smile. He had a nice one. More than that, he had the friendly face of a boy who might mow your lawn or hang a set of shelves for you. In short, the kind of guy who showed up at a dive like the Escape Room maybe one day in a hundred, and usually by mistake. He was a statistical outlier, and a cute one at that.
He looked at me. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
He pointed to the stool that Martina had just left. “Mind if I sit?” He held his hand out. “Kevin Carson.”
I shook his hand. “Sasha Gardner.”
“Does that mean that you garden?”
“No, I’m afraid it doesn’t.”
He smiled. “I always thought Sasha was a boy’s name.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. Most people I met didn’t understand my name’s origin. “In the States it’s either,” I informed him. “But you’re also right, since it’s the diminutive of Alexander in most of the former Soviet bloc. Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova. Almost all the Sashas there are male.”
“Moldova?” Kevin repeated.
I wondered if I had mumbled. Maybe it was just loud in the bar. “Moldova,” I said, louder and hopefully more clearly. “You know, in there between Romania and the Ukraine. The capital is Chisinau?”
“Chisinau?” he asked, stumbling over the pronunciation. “That’s a city or something?”
“Well, some people call it Kishinev, but you’ve got to figure that’s just a dialect difference. Besides, I’m not one for splitting hairs.” A minute in, and I was already lying to the guy, for I split hairs on a regular basis.
“I was just going to ask what you were drinking or start with the weather or something.”
I felt my cheeks flush. Why was I always assuming that people would be as interested as I was in lesser known facts and smaller topics, things that I found fascinating?
I thought quickly. “Maybe I’m Moldovan,” I said.
“But you don’t have an accent.”
“Or maybe Moldovan-American.”
Kevin nodded. “I guess I should have thought of that. I forget that everyone’s not a mutt like me. So who’s from Moldova? Your parents? Your grandparents?”
I didn’t want to lie to him again. “The truth is, I’m not the slightest bit Moldovan. That I know of, at least.”
He laughed. “Maybe we should start over,” he said. “Read any good books lately?”
Martina had shoved my dog-eared copy of Principles of Accounting into my purse, but I could still see it peeking out. “I did have a great-grandmother from Romania. Family legend has it that we’re all part gypsy.” As I said it, I picked up my purse as surreptitiously as I could and stowed it at my feet.
“Now you’re just pulling my leg.”
“It’s true,” I said. I could almost feel the words forming, the story of my great-grandmother as told through the generations. How she’d long sworn that we had nomadic blood. But I caught myself just in time. I realized that I wanted Kevin to stay and that a long-winded and unprompted account of my family history was an unlikely aphrodisiac. Besides, my father’s Anglo genes had washed out my mother’s gypsy swarthiness along with whatever remained of the ancestral wanderlust. I’d lived in California for twenty-six of my thirty-one years at that point, and with light brown hair and blue eyes, I didn’t look like any gypsy.
“Can you tell my fortune?” Kevin asked.
“Well, I could, but I’m off the clock,” I said. “I do see an intriguing stranger in your future.”
“I see one in my present,” he said.
Oh, he was good.
We talked for the next ten minutes, throughout which I managed to keep the conversation relatively light and avoid referring to any Eastern Bloc countries. He was funny, relatively new to the East Bay, and worked as a building contractor, renovations mostly. Martina, meanwhile, had taken the bar stool on my other side and struck up a conversation with the man next to her.
“I understand you’ve already met my meddling friend,” I said, elbowing Martina. She looked over and smiled at Kevin.
“In line,” he said. “Cheers on your promotion, by the way. Marketing crackers, did you say? Got any samples on you? These pretzels are stale.”
“Premium packaged edibles,” Martina said, nodding. “It goes way beyond crackers, my dear. And I don’t. I’m waiting for my next assignment. Oh, this is Carl. Carl, this is Sasha. That’s Kevin.”
“Hey,” Carl said, with a wan nod. He seemed uninterested in any detour in his conversation with Martina. He fidgeted with his key ring. From where I sat, I could see that it sported a Porsche trademark.
“So your friend pitches food. I build things. What do you do?” Kevin finally asked me.
“Besides hang around with barflies?”
“Those weird facts in your head didn’t get there by accident. And it’s a pretty head, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“You know, I got it on special over at the dollar store.”
I meant it as a joke, but he frowned a little, as if trying to gauge whether I was serious. “You’re a little kooky, aren’t you?” he finally asked.
It had taken him all of fourteen minutes to notice. Martina would probably count that as a record.
“I don’t mean that as a bad thing,” he added quickly. “But seriously, where do you work?”
I felt my heart rate rise a little. I wasn’t ready. “You know, the usual. In a building. Inside a cubicle. Behind a desk.”
“So where’s the desk?”
“Not far. Approximately 2.56 miles from here,” I said. “You could walk it, if you needed to. I mean, I didn’t. I drove.”
“2.56 miles, huh?”
“Give or take. I had my reasons for measuring it,” I added, when I saw his frown return. I wanted the smile back.
“And what do you do there, besides sit and look cute?”
“That’s about it,” I told him. “Looking cute accounts for ninety percent of my billable hours. It’s a huge growth industry.”
“No, really.” He was waiting, and at some point, I would have to answer him.
“Truthfully, I work for the government. I’m a civil servant,” I finally said.
Sometimes that would be enough. Some guys would have stopped pressing for details and let me relax. But not Kevin. He was determined. He was focused. In other circumstances, those traits would have been appealing.
“Better than being an uncivil servant,” he said.
“Only when cornered,” I said. “Then I scratch and hiss.”
He laughed. “So who do you civilly serve?” he asked. “We do a lot of government work. Maybe I’ll come visit you. Do you have a card?”
Martina must have overheard him. Suddenly, she was at my elbow. “So, Sasha, Carl was just showing me his shoes. Show Sasha your shoes,” Martina ordered, pulling us both into their conversation.
Carl held out his leg. The black leather of his loafers was shiny and even, as if he’d taken them from the box that morning.
“They’re Prada,” Martina said. “This season.”
“Wow,” I said, though I didn’t trust a man who wore triple-digit shoes. I preferred Kevin’s dusty work boots.
Carl’s shrug belied how much he cared. “You gotta dress the part,” he sniffed.
“And your part is?” I asked.
“I work over at Morgan Chase,” he said.
I knew the investment bank, so I nodded. “What do you do there?”
He paused, narrowing his eyes ever so slightly. “Well, I’m temping right now.”
“Martina, maybe you can tell me where your friend works,” Kevin said. “She’s being evasive.”
“Evasive, huh? Isn’t that ironic.” Martina laughed.
“How do you mean?” Kevin asked.
“Sasha just likes to control the flow of information. She likes knowing what’s going to happen,” Martina said. “She’s not the most madcap person. She prefers to be prepared.”
“What, are you a Boy Scout leader or something?” Kevin asked, quite seriously.
“What? No.”
“Isn’t that their motto?”
“Be Prepared?” I asked. “Well, sure. It’s the motto for both the Boy and Girl Scouts and the scout movement in general, which was founded, as you may know, by Robert Baden-Powell, who was known as B.P., bringing us full circle to Be Prepared. But no, I’ve never been a Scout. And Martina, I’ll have you know that I’m just as madcap as anyone else in this place.”
“You’re right. That was incredibly madcap.” Martina rolled her eyes.
Carl pulled out his wallet with a flourish. “I’ll get the next round,” he announced, as if to force the conversation back in his direction. He handed his credit card to the bartender.
As he passed it over, I noticed that it was an Elm Street Optimus card. I knew the brand. Not from personal use, but I knew of it. It was one of those secured credit cards, typically given to folks with major blemishes on their credit reports. From that single glance, I knew that Carl was paying upwards of twenty-five percent interest, probably a penalty for previous financial misdeeds.
I smiled, and not because he had bad credit. I smiled because, at that moment, I probably knew more about Carl-the-temp’s real life than anyone else at the Escape Room. If they were the right details, all you needed were a few.
“Thanks, man,” Kevin said to Carl. “I’ll take another beer.”
“I meant that I’d buy for the ladies,” Carl said.
I watched Kevin’s sweet smile fade.
“Temp work not paying like it used to?” I asked Carl.
Martina put a hand on my arm, but I was irked. He could cover his fancy shoes but not a simple happy-hour beer?
“It’s not like it’s a long-term gig,” Carl said.
Martina turned to me. “Play nice,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. I looked at Carl. “I wouldn’t think a guy in your financial situation would spend like that on shoes.”
Carl stopped smiling. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“No? How’s this? You’re an over-extender. You’re all plans, always with a scheme, but you’re not much for actual work. You drive a fancy car, but I bet you’re behind on your payments. You seek out women with good incomes, because your own money never comes in fast enough. You want everything before you’ve earned it. You saw the Prada shoes, so you got them. You saw Martina sit down and you figured for the cost of a few cheap drinks, maybe you’d get lucky. Besides, if you stay over at her place, the repo man won’t be able to find your beat-up old Porsche. And you’ll give Martina your work number, because you don’t expect to finish out the week there. Then you’ll start the cycle all over again. Another temp job, another bar, another girl.”
Carl had waved to the bartender before I finished speaking. “Give me my card back,” he said, his features furrowed all together.
“Is any of that true?” Martina asked. She unfolded a napkin that had been written over. “Is this your work number?”
“It’s not fucking true,” Carl snapped, right before he got up and stalked out of the bar.
Martina turned back to me. She didn’t look upset. In fact, she was sort of smiling. “It’s not like I was going to end up with a guy who spends more on shoes than I do,” she said.
“That’s what I figured. He wasn’t your type.”
“But sometimes it’s better to wait for the whole story. You’ll never know everything. You can’t.”
“I’ve heard Carl’s story more times than I can count,” I said. “I know it backwards and forwards.”
“You really ripped that guy a new one,” Kevin said. “How did you know all that?” Even before I turned to look at him, I knew that his smile was gone and it wasn’t coming back. Kooky was bad enough, but now I had scared him.
“Go ahead,” Martina said. “Why not?”
I pulled out my business card and handed it to Kevin. He looked at it, then dropped it onto the bar, as if it had burned his fingers.
Sasha Gardner
Senior Auditor
Internal Revenue Service
“I guess you see all types,” he finally said.
“All types,” I agreed.
Soon after, Kevin excused himself to go feed his parking meter. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t return. Then again, I was rarely surprised anymore. It was my job to notice details, see patterns of behavior, and infer attitudes, motives, tendencies and likely actions. Once you’ve learned to do that, you start to realize how predictable most people are. There’s actually a degree of comfort in that.
“Two guys scared off in record time,” Martina said. “That was fast, even for you.”
“I didn’t scare them off,” I said.
“Right. It must have been me,” Martina said. “Didn’t that Kevin have a nice smile?”
“Contractor,” I explained. “They get audited an average of three times throughout their careers. A lot of cash expenses. I knew as soon as he told me.”
Martina shook her head. She reached into my purse and pulled out my accounting book. She placed it on the bar between us. “Guys skip the brainy girls.”
“That’s not always true.”
“Okay. Guys skip girls who can assess penalties with interest.”
I conceded the point.
“And he was cute,” she went on. “If you’d just said that you work at the Gap, you’d be on your way to a first date right now.”
“I don’t work at the Gap,” I reminded her. “That’s the problem. That’s always the problem.”
Chapter Two
SO PEOPLE SOMETIMES TRIED TO AVOID ME. SURE, I might have wished it were different, but I was an excellent auditor. Not everyone could do my job. Not everyone could build lives atop quantitative foundations or look beyond numbers to the events and decisions that put them there. The best auditors love to unravel the story that lurks in the data, to see hidden meanings and solve the puzzle. They have an eye for detail and great powers of concentration.
At least, they should, and I always had. Only, sometime earlier that month, I had started to drift. I couldn’t trace it to a single event or day. I’d only realized it once inertia had taken hold—like a cold you think you can keep from catching, or maybe it’s just allergies, and then one day you wake up clogged and froggy and foggy. Looking back, it felt gradual. I was late for work a few times one week, and again the next. I noticed that the muscles in my thighs were a little sore from bending at the knees to sneak by my colleagues’ cubicles. My calves felt stronger from taking the stairs more often to avoid running into my boss in the elevator. And then there was that feeling, more and more frequent, of having barely dodged a pothole or avoided a stray banana peel.
Luckily, I’d been at my job long enough to know the minimum amount of work I could do without raising concern. I hadn’t even noticed the extent of my distraction until the day that my friend Ricardo, our office’s hiring manager, found me in the supply closet.
“Are you okay?” he asked, after knocking on the door.
“Sure. Why?” I asked back, looking up from a box of pens.
“Uh, because you’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Oh please.”
“You have. I saw you go in and thought I’d wait, but you never came out. I thought maybe you were having a tryst.” He looked around the closet to see whether anyone else was hiding amid the office supplies. “What have you been doing?”
“Thinking, I guess.” I hadn’t realized it had been twenty minutes.
“Thinking? In here? About what?”
I decided to be honest about where my mind had been. “Legal pads are yellow, right? And the original highlighters were yellow, too.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So wouldn’t they have been useless on a legal pad? I think maybe that’s why highlighters ended up branching out into blue and green and pink, while legal pads remain yellow.”
“There are white legal pads,” Ricardo said. “I’ve seen them in all different colors.”
“Sure, but when you think ‘legal pad,’ you think ‘yellow,’ don’t you?”
“Honey, unless I’m bedding a handsome lawyer, I don’t think about legal pads.”
“And then there are these ledger books, which are always light green. My theory is that they’re green because they’re reminiscent of the dollar bill, since they’re intended to hold financial data. But that begs the question of whether ledger pads are also green in England. Because the British pound isn’t green, and that might imply a totally different color origin.”
“I don’t get it,” Ricardo said.
“You asked what I was thinking about.”
“I mean, why are you worrying about this? You’ve been in here for twenty minutes contemplating the history of office supplies? It’s August, sweetie. Every other auditor is complaining about the workload. I assume you’re snowed under, too. Is everything okay? You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“You think I’m not getting my work done?” I asked, careful to sound indignant.
“I’m just pointing out that maybe your investigative energy could be put to better use than in here.”
I made a show of taking a box of pens before returning to my cubicle. What he didn’t say—maybe he didn’t know—was that I wasn’t getting my work done. I hadn’t been for weeks.
Before that August, I’d taken pride in my ability to plow through, audit after audit, without a drop in focus. But the morning after Kevin’s unceremonious leave-taking from the Escape Room, I’d begun to review a return, only to find myself eavesdropping on Cliff, the auditor who sat on the far side of my cubicle wall. Later that afternoon, I had spent twenty minutes trying to deduce which grocery chain would be carrying the best peaches—based on proximity of the largest stores to local trucking routes. Moments after, I’d found myself wondering why horses and cats and dogs have hair but rabbits have fur. Ricardo was right; I was in trouble.
In my double-wide cubicle at our Oakland district office, I stood up, jogged in place, did a few jumping jacks, then sat back down. I stared hard at the paperwork on my desk, hoping that the brief burp of exercise had forced blood into my brain. Ricardo had a point: the auditing season was in full swing. Stacks of folders had massed on my worktable, each file representing a return awaiting my analysis. I had to buckle down. I had to find some momentum or fake as much. I was a senior auditor, not a veterinarian, nor a fruit wholesaler, nor an office-supply historian. I was supposed to be setting an example.
Then the phone rang, and I imagined that it might be Kevin, feeling guilt over his graceless getaway from the aptly named Escape Room. Maybe he had memorized my phone number and was calling to apologize. Maybe he’d called the IRS switchboard and asked for an auditor named Sasha. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Near the edge, maybe, but not beyond it.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered, glad for the excuse to close the file in front of me.
“So S is for Sasha then,” a man said. It wasn’t Kevin.
“In my case, yes.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by the comment. “May I help you?”
“You’re not even a man,” he said. It sounded like an insult.
“That’s true,” I agreed. “Though, as you probably know, Sasha is a male name in parts of Eastern Europe. How can I help you, sir?” I always tried to be polite at work. During any audit, and in the necessary correspondence before and after, I strove to remain detached but formal. I called people sir and ma’am and addressed them by their salutation and last name, assuming I knew it. There were strict codes of behavior to be followed when interacting with the public, and I took a certain pride in adhering to them. People will grasp at any excuse to hate the IRS, and one of my jobs was to keep them empty-handed.
“My name’s Gordon, and I’m calling to tell you to stop what you’re doing. Just stop it! Cease and desist!”
I glanced at the pad of paper on my desk. Earlier, I’d been doodling. Pictures of sailboats and rough waters. Pictures of trees, uprooted, leaves piling and swirling around them. “What I’m doing?” I repeated.
“Pestering an honest, upstanding, hardworking man,” the man named Gordon said.
“Do I know you?” I asked. “Was I pestering you?”
Gordon harrumphed into the phone. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to get your mitts on all of us. Well, you won’t. Not if I can help it,” he said.
“But—” I tried to cut in.
“You make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?
“Sir—” I tried again.
“All you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.
I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.
“That is not a happy face.”
At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.
“I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”
“We have a question,” Susan said.
“Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.
“Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”
“Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”
“Paper?” Susan asked.
“Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.
“And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.
I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”
Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.
“Fine. You win,” she said.
“Win what?” I asked.
“I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”
“Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”
“I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.
“Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Ricardo started to laugh.
I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.
“Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”
“Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.
I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.
I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.
“I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.
“Resident warehouse,” I muttered.
“You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.
“Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.
But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered.
“Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you have some nerve.”
“Do you?” I’d never considered myself particularly brave.
She didn’t answer. She just kept barreling on. “You’re harassing one of the best people I’ve ever known. If you’d only take the time to know him, to talk to him, you’d see.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked, understanding at once the sort of nerve she’d meant. My cheeks started burning. “Who is this?”
“But no, you have to drop your poison into his life. Now, I don’t know what sort of a family you were raised in, Ms. Gardner, but I hope you take a good look at how you’re spending your time on God’s green earth and move on to better things. He’s had a hard enough year. Look at all he gave up. And for what? To have you bothering him? How about planting some happiness for a change and letting go that misery you sow?”
“Who are you?” I asked again. “How did you get my name? Do you know Gordon?”
“I’m a concerned citizen who felt an obligation to tell you that you work for the worst branch of our government.”
“The IRS isn’t its own branch,” I said. “We’re a part of the Treasury which is a part of…” She had hung up. “Never mind.”
I replaced the handset. In my previous six years at the service, I hadn’t received even one complaint. Now two in one afternoon? I looked around my office for clues. I listened for Cliff’s voice, wondering whether he was receiving the same phone-line vitriol. How could I defend myself when I didn’t know what I’d done, or to whom I’d done it? Who was this “he” that both callers had referred to?
I was so flustered that when my phone rang again, I barked into it. “I know—I’m awful. There, I beat you to it, didn’t I? Surprised?”
“Uh, this is Jody in reception. Your three o’clock appointment is here.”
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