But then a funny thing happened—Sam Tulley started to grow on Pauline. His affect was so buoyant and his chatter was so … well, so charming, that after a while she got tired of cultivating her annoyance. He was a pleasant enough fellow, really. Handsome, to be honest; she had to agree with Rosa on this point—that sweepy bit of hair that kept falling over his eyes, those bright green eyes. Who had green eyes like that? She’d never seen anything like it. Be nice to him, Pauline. Be nice.
Now Tulley was reviewing yet another set of work logs from a chair pulled up to the front of Pauline’s desk. He’d been at it since just after nine and had kept going through the sandwiches they’d brought in for lunch, yammering a blue streak all the way.
“City that never sleeps,” he was saying. He was telling her about his time in New York. “Center of everything.”
“So, you liked it there?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Nothing like it in the world. Don’t you think?”
“I’ve only been there once,” she said. “I didn’t exactly fall in love with it.”
“Seriously? I would have stayed there forever, but it was just too expensive. After college, I went back to Ann Arbor for a while, but I started to want to live somewhere warmer. My college roommate’s dad is a partner at Knowles & Frusciante. That’s how I ended up here in Jacksonville.”
She tried to imagine Sam Tulley in college, and she realized he probably didn’t look much different back then from the way he did right now: tanned, clothes a bit rumpled, hair disheveled and longish in a way only a young man can pull off. Older men with long hair may think they’re looking rakish or jaunty, but God—nine times out of ten, didn’t they just look like vagrants? Johnny nowadays kept his hair short. She glanced at a photo on her desk: she and Johnny beaming and a little buzzed in a Glasgow pub. Years ago, before things got so bad with Corran. Who took that picture? Sharon, maybe? Toole? The barmaid? Johnny’s hair was thick and dark and curled gently over the fold of his collar. It had gone a bit grayer since then. She wondered how long it had been since she had thought about Johnny’s hair.
“How old are you?” she said to Tulley, and then was immediately embarrassed. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
He smiled. “I’m thirty-one,” he said. “I know I look younger. I get that all the time. Believe me, I’ve been fighting it my whole career.”
“You shouldn’t fight it. Do you know how hard some people work to look younger? Do you know how much money they spend on it?” Do you know how much money I spend on it? she wanted to ask. She stopped herself. What was she doing? She sounded like an idiot. Shut up, Pauline. Shut up.
He looked at her and paused before speaking. “Well, you don’t need to do that,” he said.
“Ha!” she said.
He closed one work log and opened another. He coughed.
“Yeah,” he said. “So. You know what they say about New York. It’s a place for the very rich or the very young. I was one of those things when I lived there. That’s probably why I liked it.”
Pauline was neither of those things now, and hadn’t been for quite a while. Maybe that’s why she failed at New York. That’s how she looked at it—she failed at it. She simply could not manage the Big Apple. She’d tried it, and she’d failed at it in spectacular fashion. (Failure! Thanks, Laudonnière!) The one and only time she had been there was five years ago, the summer she turned forty-five, and she must have been dealing with some sort of midlife bug up her backside, because when Johnny started making plans for a trip to Scotland, she announced that she wasn’t going to Glasgow, that she was going to New York City. For a week. Alone.
“You go on over to Scotland,” she said. “Spend time with Corran. You don’t need me hanging around every minute.”
“Why New York?” he asked. “What’s up there?”
“Johnny,” she said, a little condescendingly, “what isn’t up there?” In truth, Pauline had no idea what was or was not in New York City, other than what she’d read in books and seen in movies. But that had been enough to convince her that she was missing some large and important thing in the world, something intangible and electric and a little bit dangerous that she’d never find in Jacksonville or Watchers Island or inside the walls of the everlasting ice factory. But she had a feeling she’d find it in New York City. And she was going to go have a look. Plus, she’d done some research and discovered there was an industrial marketing conference happening in the city the same week. “Marketing Performance Now!” it was called. Bold City’s marketing could certainly use a boost. And if she made it a business trip, she could write it off on the taxes. She’d never traveled alone. A wick of daring ignited, and she let it burn.
She found a listing on HomeAway from a woman who was going to be gone the same days the marketing conference was held. The woman was offering an affordable rate on a very upscale Brooklyn apartment in exchange for keeping company with her two cats, who “would need someone to talk to.” Pauline thought the woman sounded batty, but it sounded like a sweet deal. She booked the apartment and went to T.J.Maxx, where she bought a Jackie Kennedy gray suit and a pair of knockoff Ferragamos to wear to the conference. At the last minute, she threw in a gigantic orange tote to make the outfit. Pop of color! So what if it was $69.99 and not even real leather? Just—just—so what?
In New York, she landed at LaGuardia and took a cab directly to the Brooklyn apartment, which was indeed very nice and very clean, thank God. There were two cats to greet her: a fat black pudding named Percy and a string bean of a Siamese named Vera that Pauline soon learned was sociopathic in a way only a cat can be. While Percy was content to sleep nearly constantly, to the extent that Pauline once went over and nudged him to make sure he was still alive, Vera was as strung out as a crack addict, and equally criminal. The first day, after Vera had executed three different aerial assaults from the backs of the living room chairs that left Pauline with raised pink welts across her shoulders, she learned to hug the walls when walking through the apartment. Vera stole a hoop earring off the nightstand, gazed at Pauline for a beat, and then batted it casually into the air-conditioning vent before Pauline could save it. Vera ate every packet of Splenda from a brand-new box Pauline had picked up at the corner store and then barfed yellow paper all over the apartment for two days. She even got hold of the new orange tote bag and chewed right through the handle, rendering it completely unusable. Pauline had an urge to phone up General San Jose, who was vacationing at Pet Paradise on Watchers Island, and tell him what was going on. “Sweetheart,” she’d say. “You were right. It is an inferior species.”
But Vera was hardly the worst of it, as Pauline found out as soon as she ventured out into the streets the next day. Pauline was a square peg in New York City. She did everything wrong. She was intimidated by the crowds on the streets, shocked by the poverty of some of the people camped around the subway stops. The first day, she lost five dollars to a guy in a coffee shop who approached holding a five-dollar bill and asked her if she could break it; after she’d fished the five singles out of her purse and handed them to him, he walked away without handing her the fiver in return, and her face burned with anger and embarrassment. Then she didn’t know how to use the MetroCard in the subway, and she made a dummy of herself by running the card through a jammed turnstile reader over and over, trying to get the damn thing to work, before an aggressively kind old man shouted at her that she was draining all the funds from the card—Jesus! he said. Don’t give the goddamned MTA all your money!—and directed her to the ticket booth to straighten it out. That done, she waited forty minutes for the B train from Brooklyn to Midtown before realizing that she could have ridden any of the dozen Q trains that she’d watched pass. When she finally got on the right train, she missed her stop in Midtown and had to walk twelve blocks back down Fifth Avenue in high heels that rubbed blisters on her toes and wreaked havoc with the plantar fasciitis she’d been trying to manage since starting to run.
&nbs
p; The marketing conference was even worse. She was the only person wearing a suit. All the other attendees were decked out in the trimmest jeans she’d ever seen, paired with skintight shirts in various shades of black and ironic faux-nerd glasses. Most of the women had edgy pixie haircuts, waifish physiques, and skin so white it was nearly translucent. The men were marginally androgynous—metrosexually impeccable young fellows with supple leather man-bags and smartphones suggestively peeking from tight back pockets. Every single person carried either a Starbucks cup or a bottle of something labeled “Organic Water.” (Organic water?) Pauline had the feeling she was the only person in the entire conference center over the age of forty. They all talked about things she’d never heard of: deliverables and messaging. Target markets and netiquette. Paradigm shifts, core competencies, learnings—learnings? What the hell were learnings? She pictured herself back home in a meeting with Claire and Roy, trying to implement some of the tactics being expounded at Marketing Performance Now! She amused herself for a little while, mentally writing the screenplay:
INT: Bold City Ice Plant. Conference room. Day.
Pauline: Okay, great meeting, team. So, what are our next-step deliverables here?
Roy: Same as always. We haven’t changed our delivery routes (looks at Claire). Have we?
Pauline: Claire, what learnings can we take away from this SWOT analysis? What core competencies should we focus on?
Roy: Claire, you gonna finish that bagel? (reaches toward bagel)
Pauline: I mean, we need to close the loop, team. We’ve got an event horizon coming up. We might need to consider some knowledge process outsourcing.
Claire: It’s raisin, Roy. You don’t like raisin. (slaps Roy’s hand)
Pauline (with note of frustration): Team! Our sustainability is at stake here!
Claire: Pauline, what in the name of sweet little baby Jesus are you smoking?
Roy: I like raisin. Sometimes.
When the conference presenters got to talking about how important it is for marketers to develop a “BHAG”—a Big! Hairy! Audacious! Goal!—Pauline stood up. The hipster project manager she was sitting next to didn’t want to adjust himself to let her out of the row of seats.
“Would you move your big hairy ass, please?” she said. She watched his mouth fall open, and then she pushed past him and clicked in her stupid fake Ferragamos out to the lobby. The next day, she was relieved to fly home to the happy little ten-gate Jacksonville Airport, overjoyed to glide the Prius unchallenged onto the wide lanes of I-95 south, thrilled to smell the burned coffee drifting upriver as she crossed the Dames Point Bridge. Big sky! And heat! And palm trees! She nearly wept with the joy of familiarity. Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen! Pauline MacKinnon in New York City … fail!
“I’d like to go back sometime,” Sam Tulley was saying now. He closed a fat binder of work logs and opened another. “To New York. Maybe when I’m rich. Maybe when I win the lottery.”
“Sounds about right,” Pauline said.
“Question,” Tulley said. He was tapping his pencil on the edge of her desk. “I’m thinking about your theory—about the tank tampering. What about your security cameras?”
“We already checked. There was nothing recorded.”
Tulley frowned.
“And what about the gates?”
“They’re closed and locked every night.”
He stared at her, still frowning.
“What?” she said.
“Mrs. MacKinnon … let me be candid with you here. I keep looking for something I can bring back to Knowles. I’m not finding much.”
“Yes, I know that,” she said. That’s why we hired you suits! she wanted to scream. Come up with something! Get us out of this! “I guess we were hoping you’d come up with a strategy. Look—here’s what my husband and I think happened: Someone came into the yard and tried to tap into the tank to get ammonia. They screwed up the pressure in the tank, and it blew.”
“How can we prove someone entered the yard?”
“Can’t we claim, like, circumstantial evidence or something? There are drug deals happening all over this neighborhood. In fact, my husband thinks it’s related to a meth operation. Can’t we get JSO more involved in this?”
“I don’t know how much that’s going to help. We have no evidence of outside tampering. Meanwhile, OSHA is pointing at gaps in your maintenance logs. We need to be ready to defend against that.”
Pauline shook her head. “Clerical oversight,” she said. “We do all our maintenance like clockwork.”
“We can’t prove that. OSHA wants evidence. They’re not in the business of taking people’s word on things. I mean, I’m doing everything I can to help you. I want to help you. It’s just …” He threw up his hands hopelessly and let his voice trail off. He raised his eyebrows and gazed at her.
Call it a sixth sense. Call it woman’s intuition. Pauline could tell when a man found her attractive. A slight softness in voice register. An intensity around the eyes. Side glances and double takes. Once she walked into a room late during a quarterly meeting with a bunch of distributors and the guy who was talking stumbled in his speech when she crossed his line of vision to find her seat. It was subtle, almost imperceptible. She sat down and looked up at him. He caught her eye and then looked back at his notes to remember what he was saying. She could do that. She knew she could do that. Although lately those moments of recognition, those surprising but not unwelcome realizations that she had attracted a man’s desire, had felt fewer and farther between. But she was having one now.
“We need a convincing piece of new evidence that helps make the argument that there was tampering,” Tulley was saying. “Otherwise, path of failure is still on you. You won’t win the appeal.”
Path of failure. Now, that had a ring to it, didn’t it? Pauline wondered if Rohan Bergonia had ever considered that for a slogan for “Get Runspired.” Tulley handed the work logs back to her, and when he did, the tips of his fingers brushed her wrist.
“But now listen,” he said then. He must have seen the despair in her face. “We’ll keep digging. We’ll play around with some other arguments. We won’t give up. I’m on your side, Mrs. MacKinnon,” he said.
“They make you say that, don’t they?”
He looked a little hurt. “No, I really am,” he said. “I believe what you’re saying is true. I want to see you win, Mrs. MacKinnon.”
Pauline looked up at him. “It’s Pauline,” she said. Really. Why had she been letting him call her “Mrs. MacKinnon” all this time? What was she, an old schoolmarm? He grinned. Lord. Those eyes. Were they contact lenses? Couldn’t be.
“Failure is not an option, Sam.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “I guess I’ll get back to work, Pauline.”
She returned to her computer and started pecking away at emails. But it was so distracting, having him sitting right there across her desk. God, did he have to be working on that stuff right here in her office? Couldn’t he take it back to the conference room? She should ask him to relocate, she told herself. Just ask him if he’d mind. She started to gather the words. She edged her eyes over and caught sight of his profile. And then—Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Pauline, leave him be. He’s all spread out here, comfortable. He’s not hurting you. Let him work. She returned to the monitor and leaned in tight, hoping to give the appearance of being deeply engrossed in reading something. Though actually what she was doing, she realized after a moment, was listening to the sound of him turning pages, and beyond that, to the rhythm of his deep, warm breathing.
Seven
After Pauline left for the factory, Johnny called next door. He knew Jerry wasn’t home, but it wasn’t Jerry he wanted to talk to. The teenage son answered.
“Yo,” he said.
“Yes,” Johnny said. “It’s your neighbor, next door. Is this Jerry’s son?” He realized he did not know the kid’s name.
The boy snorted. “No,” he said. A television chatte
red somewhere behind him. Johnny walked through the house to the dining room window, from which he could see across the two yards into Jerry’s house. The kid was standing in his living room, on the phone, talking to Johnny.
“No?” Johnny said.
“He’s not my father.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Happens.” Johnny watched him through the window. “He’s my step father.” Why was he talking so loudly? Johnny held the phone a few inches out from his ear. The kid aimed a remote at the television and clicked rapid-fire through the stations.
“Right. Also, I’m sorry,” Johnny said, “but I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Chemal.”
“Chemal.” Shuh-mall. He didn’t recall Jerry ever saying this name. “Chemal, are you doing anything today?”
“Why?” Chemal said. He sounded suspicious.
“I need a ride,” Johnny said. “I have this medical thing. I’m not supposed to drive, and my wife’s not home.”
“Oh,” Chemal said. “Wow.”
Through the window, Johnny could see that he’d stopped changing channels. The TV was stuck on a motorcycle race. Dirt bikes. They jetted up dirt ramps and flew in great wide arcs across jumps.
“I’ll pay you,” Johnny said. “I have a few places I need to go. It shouldn’t take too long. Fifty dollars?”
The TV screen went black.
“Yeah, man,” Chemal said. “No prob.”
Johnny told him to come over when he was ready, told him they could take his car. He had a moment’s hesitation over the idea of the kid behind the wheel of his Suburban, but what could he do? Desperate times. He dragged the General out of bed and made him go for a pee. The dog took two steps off the deck, lifted his leg, then trudged back into the house and back to bed. Johnny locked up and went outside to wait for Chemal. The sun was warming the street, and what puddles lingered from the rains were turning slowly to steam. A few frogs remained on the driveway, some dead, some dying. He went around to the side of the house and got the hose to clear them off.
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