W: The Planner, The Chosen (16 page)

That ended the conversation.  Just before she shut off her computer, Kris typed an email to Pat:  “Spoke with Eileen Bergman, unit 1023 at Division 2 regarding your decision per Casper. She says she is going to her Congressman and then the newspaper. Just wanted you to know.” When she had typed the last words, she turned off the computer and walked out of the office.

Going to the mall was almost like traveling back in time. It was air conditioned and full of people who seemed to have normal lives. She walked through various stores until she finally found items that she thought her parents would enjoy and could actually use. For Janine she picked out a new pair of rose pink silky pajamas and matching satin robe and a gift set of her favorite perfume which included not only the spray but also the body lotion and a scented talcum powder. For Jim she found cotton-blend shirts in the style that he always wore and a bottle of his favorite cologne.  She finished it off with a small gift card for each of them to their favorite department store. They could take the train up to the mall some Saturday and get any little items they might like to have. She waited to have her packages gift wrapped by the store clerk—Kris was all thumbs when it came to anything artistic, so she much preferred to have someone else do the wrapping. She left the mall with her bag of packages feeling pretty good about the weekend ahead.  By the time she got back to her unit, she had forgotten that Eileen ever existed.

She was very surprised, therefore, to receive a text message to her Smart Phone the next morning at 7:00. The message read, “Important email from Director Leonard Scott’s office in your email box.” Kris logged in from her laptop to read the message. “Please convey our apologies to Eileen Bergman with regard to our handling of Casper’s illness. I have authorized all medical care and treatment for Casper beginning immediately. W Division 2 will bear the costs of his surgery, radiation treatment, and any other expenses for his care.”

This time Kris really was shocked.  She had never seen Pat or Leonard Scott apologize for anything. Eileen’s threat had actually worked—who would have thought that was even possible? Kris called the main number for Division 2 and asked to be transferred to unit 1023.  A man’s voice answered the phone. “May I speak to Eileen, please? This is Kris Mitchell.”

“Hold on,” responded the man.

A few seconds later a familiar raspy voice spoke, “Hello.”

“Good morning, Eileen. I am sorry to call you so early, but I actually have some good news for you. I got an email this morning from the Regional Director’s office. He is reversing the Assistant Director’s decision and will authorize all of Casper’s medical care including surgery and radiation.  I wanted to call you as soon as I heard.”

“Okay, well, that was easy,” and for the first time Kris heard a raspy laugh. The voice on the other end of the line sounded so relieved and happy. 

“Yes, actually it was,” now Kris laughed too. “I think you got somebody’s attention.”

“So when can we start treatment?”

“The email said that the Director will be authorizing the treatment today, so I think you should call the vet today and see if he can go ahead and schedule the surgery.”

“That’s wonderful news.  Thank you for calling me.”

For the first time in a long time Kris was smiling when she went to work that morning.  She had seen so much anger and complaining since the day she had started that she had gotten used to dealing with it. Now, someone was actually happy for a change. She had almost forgotten how good it felt to be able to solve a problem for someone. Even though the rest of her day was filled with the usual complaints and whining, she reminded herself over and over that, at least, she had been able to help Eileen.

On Saturday she dressed up as much as she could for dinner with her parents. She wanted this night to be special for them.  Picking up her bag containing the gifts, she walked to the train platform and then boarded the commuter train to travel to her parents’ unit at W. They were expecting her, and they opened their gifts before going to dinner. Jim and Janine seemed pleased and genuinely appreciative, but there was a little underlying sadness. Maybe they were silently comparing this year to previous ones; if so, they didn’t say so.

At the restaurant the mood turned more festive. In happier days, the three of them had frequented this restaurant—before Karyn and her family had moved to Dallas they used to join Kris and Jim and Janine for dinner there, so the place was full of wonderful memories of great steaks and salads and huge baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and chives and flourless chocolate cake with just a hint of raspberry served with expertly-prepared coffee. Kris and her parents reminisced about those days, and for a few hours each of them felt as though they had turned the clock back to better days—before so many financial problems brought on crushing stress, before they each experienced the loss of everything they had worked for, before FMPD and W.  They sat talking for hours—each hoping to freeze that moment as long as possible before they returned to their present lives.

That night Kris dreamed that she was in Las Vegas on vacation with Ben.  In her dream her hair was long and dark, and she was wearing a periwinkle-blue fitted sheath dress that brought out the color in her eyes. Ben was playing roulette and winning—even in her dream Kris was surprised to see him having such good luck. He looked so handsome in his suit—and so happy. She was holding onto his arm—she could smell his cologne and hear his voice and his laughter.  It was such a wonderful dream that when she woke up, for just a moment, she imagined that she was back in her home waking up in her king-size bed and that she could roll over and feel Ben next to her.

But just at that moment she became more awake, and the reality of where she really was swallowed her beautiful dream with deep sadness. She had not thought about Ben in her waking hours for a long time now, but her dream was so vivid, and she remembered so much about him and about her previous life. For the rest of the day she was deeply depressed. She was still depressed when she walked down to the dining hall for dinner that evening.

“We missed you last night,” the server commented as she stood in line to be served. 

“I took my parents to dinner in town.”

“Really?” the woman in line behind her commented. Kris turned and recognized Eva Brinks, one of the federal lifers who had been transferred to FMPD. Within weeks of moving there, Kris had learned that while a few people in the FE community were new to federal employment, most were life-long civil servants who had applied with the new agency and been hired. She disliked this group of people intensely because they hated private enterprise and took every opportunity to tout their own belief that a life which involved working for and living under the thumb of government was the best life possible. Kris decided to ignore Eva, but Eva was not to be ignored. She had spent her whole life as a staff attorney with various federal agencies; now she was council for FMPD. Every unambitious cell in her body reeked of socialism and big government.

“Why did you do that? Don’t your parents live at W?  Why didn’t you just go over to W and eat with them?” Eva persisted.

“It was a special occasion, Eva. Father’s Day and my mother’s birthday and their wedding anniversary are all within days of each other. I wanted to do something they would enjoy.”

“Where did you go?”

“We went to their favorite steakhouse. We had dinner and relaxed. It was a lot of fun.”

“And they wouldn’t have had the same amount of fun eating in the community at the dining hall, around their friends? You had to take them out of the community for them to have fun?”

The depression that had engulfed Kris all day was morphing into anger. “No, they wouldn’t have, and yes I did.  As far as I know, they don’t have any friends. And, no, eating eco-friendly, badly-prepared slop does not compare with a great steak and baked potato and a delicious piece of cake. Anybody who thinks it does has never had a good meal.” The servers’ eyes grew wide, and Kris realized that she had offended the entire dining hall cooking staff who were within earshot of her, but she didn’t care. This was such a preposterous conversation. 

“If they don’t have any friends, they probably learned their social skills from their daughter,” Eva retorted. “But then you used to be a real estate agent, and—wasn’t your boyfriend a mortgage broker? So you never thought about the environment or the planet in your life—you only thought about how you were going to spend the money you made ripping people off by putting them in houses they couldn’t afford and loans they couldn’t pay back. I would think that after crashing the economy and causing all of this unemployment and the bailouts and finally ending up working for the government you would understand the damage that you caused. People like you want everything for themselves—you don’t want to share, you don’t want to take care of the environment. You don’t care who you hurt.”

By now Kris had finished going through the line to receive her meal, and she turned to face Eva squarely. “People like me? People like me kept the economy moving after 9/11. People like me got up every day and went to work sixty to seventy hours a week. Nobody gave us a paycheck; we made our own money and our own opportunities.  When we were through working, we enjoyed great restaurants and great vacations and nice homes and good cars because we had worked really hard to pay for those things after we paid all of our other bills. And let’s not forget that we also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so that people like you could sit in government offices and collect a check for doing absolutely nothing but sitting around trying to think of ways to take everything that we worked for.”

Eva looked shocked. She had made a lot of snide remarks about the real estate industry within earshot of Kris, but this was the first time that Kris had ever responded.  Kris kept going, “For your information, I never ripped anybody off, and neither did Ben. All of our clients came to us based solely on recommendations of prior happy customers, so we both worked really hard to have good reputations and to make sure that everyone we worked for was satisfied. I spent months showing people houses until they found the one that was right for them. And on the day that they closed and got the keys, they were so happy. I’ve had people say to me, ‘This is the happiest day of my life, other than my wedding day, or when my children were born,’ as they moved into their new home. And they kept my number for years and sent their friends and family members.

“I didn’t have to stop caring about people until I came to work here. Because, now, Eva, when I unlock the doors to the units and show people their new living quarters, they cry. They don’t cry from happiness—they cry because everything they have worked for is gone; every dream that they had for their lives is gone, and they have nothing to look forward to but this roasting-hot little cell for the rest of their lives.  And they cry, and they say to each other that they wish they had not lived to see their lives turn out this way.  This is the only job I have ever had where I leave people much worse off than I find them. But you couldn’t possibly understand that, because the only thing you have ever done is work to ruin people who were doing better than you, and that included just about everybody in the world.”

Eva stood staring without responding; in fact, as Kris looked around, she saw that the entire dining hall was staring at her—horrified. She had defended her former profession and insulted her current one in one breath, and they were appalled. Nobody else spoke to her as she finished her dinner. As word of her rant spread through the community over the next few days, virtually nobody spoke to her again.

By the middle of the following week, Peter had returned, and Kris was resuming her normal duties.  At the end of the day, she decided to email Eileen to check on Casper and see whether he had gotten through his surgery.  To her surprise, her email to Eileen’s unit at W.net was immediately returned “Undeliverable.” Kris tried to send it again from the sent box, with the same result.

Puzzled, she typed the unit number into the FMPD data base.  Maybe she had the number down wrong; she was so sure that it was 1023. The search returned, “Unit 1023—vacant, awaiting resident.  Prior residents: Eileen Bergman, female, date of birth August 12, 1947, 5 feet 2 inches, blue eyes; Elliot Bergman, male, date of birth October 22, 1946, 5 feet 11 inches, brown eyes, non-human resident, Canine English Sheep Dog Casper. Status: relocated.”

“So where did you go?” Kris asked as she stared at the computer. She typed “Bergman” into the search engine; several names came up but not Eileen’s.

Kris shut down the computer and walked out into the hall. Pat was leaving her office at the same time, and Kris stopped her.

“Remember that woman, Eileen, with the dog? I wanted to send her an email to check on her, and it bounced.  The system says that she has been relocated.  Do you know how I can locate her?”

“No idea. Why? What does it matter to you?” Pat barely looked at Kris as she responded.

“I just thought I would keep in touch with her and find out how the dog is doing. This was so important to her; I thought it might be nice to follow up.”

“So you’re looking for a pen pal? Try the Arizona Department of Corrections; I’m sure they can fix you right up.” Now Pat did look at her. “Look Kris, this doesn’t concern you. In order to get surgery for the dog, Eileen had to be transferred to a community near a veterinary surgeon. I don’t know where they went, but it doesn’t matter. Peter is back now, and he is handling Division 2. Your job is to handle Division 1, and, frankly, you are behind on your work there. I suggest you take care of your own responsibilities and forget about all of this other stuff.” Pat turned and walked out the double doors and down the hall, leaving Kris alone, confused, and very disturbed.