The Return Of Jonah Gray. Heather Cochran
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I watched Ricardo give Jeff a quick once-over, his eyes pulling to a stop on the new hire’s outdated loafers.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.