The Return of Jonah Gray (4 page)

ON FRIDAY MORNING, I MET WITH MY SUPERVISOR
, Fred Collins, to discuss the phone calls I'd continued to receive. By then, there had been six. Three livid, two indignant and one whiny. All referring to the poor man I'd wronged. All refusing to provide additional details—except to note that he was a much better person than I was.

“So you're looking for your better half,” Fred said, smiling.

“It's not funny,” I protested.

Fred seemed as flummoxed as I, though he took pains to assure me that the calls wouldn't be recorded as complaints in my employee file. “And none of them have made reference to a name or a town? Maybe an address?” he asked.

“None. Believe me, I've tried to ask. They always end up hanging up on me.”

“So how can you be sure they're calling about the same taxpayer?”

I thought about that. Auditing was based on facts, probabilities and calculations. This was just something I felt, something I was nearly sure of, but without the proof.

“I'm not,” I ventured, “but it sounds like it. It's always the same tone. How he's so generous and that he's had such a hard year. They say that he'd never do this to me. Only, I don't know what I've done.”

“Put it aside if you can. How's everything else?” Fred asked. “In your work? In your life?”

I didn't want to get into it, especially not with my boss. “Fine,” I said.

“You've been here what, ten, twelve years now?”

“Six, actually.”

“Only six?” Fred sounded surprised. “Doesn't it seem like longer?”

When I first joined the IRS, I hadn't planned to travel the career track. It's funny what you can wind up doing if you show an aptitude. If I'd been able to choose my talents, I'd probably have chosen something physical. I'd have been a gold medalist on the uneven bars. I'd have sailed solo down the Pacific coast at age twelve. But kids tend to develop talents noticed and nurtured by their parents. Given that my father was an accountant, it was my knack for numbers that was coddled, and it was just as well—I was too tall for a serious career in gymnastics and the Catalina was long gone. Now, at thirty-one, that knack for numbers had elevated me into the position of senior auditor. Plunk into the middle lane of the career track.

Still, I found myself irked that Fred thought I'd been there for so much longer. Did I have the callous look of a lifer?

“Are you saying that I've been here too long, or that I mesh well with our corporate culture?” I asked.

He laughed. “What do you think?”

Suddenly, I wondered if he had spotted my ungainly stack of unfinished audits. But Fred was the one who seemed distracted just then. He was gazing at the framed photograph of his wife that he kept atop his desk.

“I should probably be getting back to my cubicle,” I said. A show of work ethic couldn't hurt, especially if he'd sensed my ennui.

“Did I ever tell you how I met Marcy?” he asked, half to me, half to the photograph. Fred Collins was a gentle man and well-meaning, but his stories tended to drone. So I lied and told him that he already had.

“Anyway, I shouldn't take up any more of your time,” I said, excusing myself.

I was headed back to my cubicle when I turned a corner and almost barreled into Ricardo.

“Just the lady I wanted to see,” Ricardo said.

Beside him stood a tall man I didn't recognize. He appeared even taller in contrast to Ricardo, who was a slight Filipino, no more than five-two.

“Remember how I told you I made an offer for the archives position?” Ricardo asked.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Of course you do. Well, this is the guy. Jeff Hill, meet Sasha Gardner. Sasha is one of our senior auditors. That means that she rules this roost.”

“It's nice to meet you,” Jeff Hill said. I looked up and found myself staring into a pair of doleful brown eyes. Indeed, I would have thought him disappointed to be meeting me, had he not extended his hand.

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. He was so tall and thin, he reminded me of a normally proportioned person who'd been stretched out. The same mass over an elongated frame. As we shook hands, I felt the tendons and ligaments running beneath his skin.

“Sasha's a lovely name,” Jeff Hill said, keeping hold of my hand for a moment longer than was comfortable. “You must be very skilled at your job to be a senior auditor at such a young age.”

“I like him, Ricardo,” I said. “He's clearly brilliant.” I smiled at Jeff Hill.

“Sasha's one of my favorite people here,” Ricardo said. “She knows everything about everything. If you ever have a question, just head for her cube.”

“He's exaggerating,” I told Jeff.

“She's also about the prettiest auditor you're going to find. You should see some of the people we've hired in the past,” Ricardo went on. “Men and women. And their fashion sense, heaven help us all. It's got to be the least stylish profession on record. No offense.”

“I'm not an auditor,” Jeff said, shrugging.

I watched Ricardo give Jeff a quick once-over, his eyes pulling to a stop on the new hire's outdated loafers. The expression on Ricardo's face was a mix of sour disgust and pity. “Right,” he said. “Archivist. Totally different.”

I didn't think Jeff deserved quite so much sarcasm, at least not on his first day of work. Maybe fashion wasn't high on his list of priorities, but it would have been hypocritical of me to take issue with that.

“It was nice to meet you,” I said. “I guess I'll see you around.”

“You will,” Jeff replied.

 

Indeed, he stopped by my cubicle not two hours later.

“Don't tell me Ricardo sent you in here with a question,” I said. “I'm so tired of him placing bets on me.”

“Ricardo didn't send me. I came up here on my own,” Jeff said, then he took an audible sniff. “Your cubicle smells cleaner than the other ones on this floor.” He looked around. “It
is
cleaner.”

“I try to keep things neat,” I said.

Jeff shook his head. “I don't mean neat. That's the tallest pile of file folders I've seen today,” he said, pointing to the stack of unfinished returns. “But cleaner. It smells lemony in here. Like a polish.”

I tried to act nonchalant. The fact was, maybe two days earlier, in a fit of procrastination, I had decided to reorder my shelf of tax statute books. In doing so, I realized how dusty they had become—and my filing cabinets and the tops of my bookshelves, too. Then I had made the mistake of taking a close look at the walls of my cubicle and found a host of strange stains—there and on the carpet—and ultimately, I had cornered a guy from the night cleaning crew and convinced him to lend me some carpet cleaner and an industrial wet-vac. The lemony furniture polish was my own, from home.

It had taken two days of working surreptitiously, but the fact was my cubicle
was
cleaner than the others on my floor. While I appreciated that Jeff had noticed—and right away—the history of the cleanliness was not something I wanted to explain. It would have been hard to explain it to anyone without sounding, well, obsessive.

“I think the lemon smell might be wafting over from that cubicle,” I said, my voice low. I pointed to the wall I shared with Cliff.

Jeff Hill nodded. “Listen, Ricardo and I are going to lunch today, over to a place he suggested. Mexicali's? And I thought, if you had no other plans, you might join us.”

“I do love their enchiladas,” I said, although I'd heard that Mexicali's had once been closed by the health department, and I said a little prayer each time I ate there. “What time are you going?”

“What time do you want to go?” he asked.

“I don't know. What time did Ricardo say?”

“Uh, one?”

“One works. I've got an errand I need to run first. I'll meet you there?”

“But you're coming, right? I can put you down as an affirmative?”

“I'll be there.”

“Is that a definite affirmative?”

“A definite affirmative?” I asked.

“Some people say they'll show up and then don't. This is California. People can be flaky.”

“You're asking whether I would knowingly misrepresent myself?”

“Some people do.”

“Of course they do. My career is based on that assumption. But I said I'd be there, so I'll be there.”

I thought I saw him smile a little, just a glimmer, before he went all serious again. “Then I'll see you at one.” He nodded and turned on his heel. He was so tall, I could see his head bobbing above the cubicles as he made his way back down the hallway.

“Odd,” I found myself muttering, but I was also wondering what might get him to smile more.

 

I had a hard time finding parking, so it was five past one by the time I rushed into Mexicali's. I looked around for Jeff and listened for Ricardo's laugh (he had a whoop that could cut through a football game). But I didn't see either of them.

I turned to the hostess. “I'm looking for a party of two that came in maybe five minutes ago?” I told her.

“Sasha?”

I spun around to see Jeff.

“See, I told you I'd be here. Am I early?” I asked. Even as I checked my watch, I knew that I wasn't. I know that some people set their watches five or ten minutes ahead, in order to think that they're late and then supposedly arrive on time. The only time I ever tried to fool myself like that, I remembered that I'd set my watch ahead, automatically did the math and still arrived when I was going to arrive. All I had done was add extra equations to my day, and I got more than enough subtraction practice on the job. I didn't like to be late, but I always knew when I was and when I wasn't.

“Five minutes falls just inside my margin of error for punctuality,” Jeff said. “I hope you're hungry.”

“Should we wait for Ricardo?” I asked.

“No need. He had to cancel at the last minute.”

“So no definite affirmative from him.” I'd never known Ricardo to be too busy for lunch.

“Shall we sit?” Jeff asked.

I nodded. So it would be just the two of us, me and a somber near-stranger. “So, tell me something,” I said as we sat. I figured I might as well find out about the guy.

“Like what?”

“How you ended up at the IRS. Where are you from?”

With that, Jeff told me that he was originally from Fresno and that the rest of his family still lived there. He said that if he hadn't become an archivist, he would have gone into entomology.

“Insects are fascinating. So highly detailed. Such precise movements,” he said.

He explained that he had moved to the Bay area four years before and that he lived in a big apartment complex down in Fremont. As he spoke, he adjusted the placement of his water glass, arranging it in the precise center of his napkin. He did the same with a second napkin and a bottle of picante sauce. Then he picked up the saltshaker.

He caught me watching. “You're wondering what I'm doing,” he said.

“Sort of,” I admitted. Actually, I had been wondering whether he'd been aware of his actions. Apparently, he had been.

“I've got a touch of OCD,” he said. “Obsessive-compulsive—”

“Disorder,” I said, nodding. “I see.”

“It's not anything dangerous,” he said.

“I didn't think it was.”

“It's better than being a slob,” he said. “It doesn't intrude on my life.”

“I'm not bothered by it. Really.”

“I like to keep track of where things are. And I like precision,” he continued, “in almost everything.”

“I imagine that's a useful trait in your line of work.”

“Where is precision not useful? You need it in your job, too,” he said. “But yes, in archiving, it's absolutely essential.”

Jeff's entire body seemed to lift up when he spoke of archiving. He was a big fan of the database system the IRS used. It was the same one he'd worked on in his prior position, in the archives of the Oakland Police Department. He spoke of an archival conference he made a point of attending each January.

“A lot of archivists have real wild sides to them. Every January, a lot of us attend this conference and those guys, they go a little crazy.”

“And you?”

“Do I go a little crazy?”

“Do you have a wild side?”

He paused for a moment. “Not really, no,” he said. “I used to want one, but now, well, I think I get more sleep this way. Do you?”

I thought about it. I thought about the big plans I'd once had and the house and job that kept me company these days. “Not lately,” I had to admit.