Ben continued to work on his project mainly at night, after Jeannie had taken her sleeping pill and would be guaranteed not to stumble in and yell at him once again. It had grown to the point that it now hid behind two rolling cabinets in the storeroom and encompassed over two hundred separate pieces of paper with scribbled notes, photographs, and bits of news reports.
His eyes were blurred from fatigue, but he couldn’t sleep. Not until he’d spent some time on this spider web of a chart, making whatever connections he could find, organizing and reorganizing the tip line on different hunches to see if a pattern emerged. To give his eyes a break, he picked up the beer bottles that littered his workbench and took them out the back door to the recycling bin. There almost wasn’t room in it due to the stack of bottles already there, though he could have sworn that the recycling truck had come by two days ago.
Once back inside, he pulled over a stack of notecards that held the most believable tips and shuffled it. He found this method of randomization often formed interesting patterns that seemed worth pursuing. After five shuffles, he spread the cards out on the table and started moving them around, blindly pushing them back and forth, already knowing most of the content by heart. His eye started twitching and he rested his head on the desk for a moment to wait for the twitch to subside.
“I can’t believe you.”
Ben’s head jerked off the table and he nearly fell off his stool. Light was streaming in the workshop windows and he had an index card adhered to his face with spit. Brushing it off, he turned to confront his wife.
“What?”
“This!” She gestured at the wall covered in paper, the note cards piled on his workbench. “I thought you were going to get rid of it. I thought you were supporting me, us.”
Ben scrambled to wake up enough to defend his project, cursing himself for falling asleep at the desk before covering up his work. “I am. This is the only way to find our son. No one else is doing any work. I have to!”
“No, you’re obsessing. And I can’t be healthy here if you keep this up. The last time I asked if you had thrown this all out, you told me you had, and I believed you. If you’re lying to me about this…”
Ben approached her with his arms out. “Jeannie.”
“No, Ben.” She backed away until she was in the doorway again. “Not—I can’t.”
“You haven’t let me even hold you for months! All you do is sleep in Benny’s room, and I can’t even put a hand on your shoulder. You call that being healthy?”
“I’m healing, and you’re not helping, not with this—this idiocy!”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Ben’s hands clenched and unclenched in frustration. He didn’t know how to make his wife see that what he was doing was for them, for their family. How could she not see that? He was so caught up in trying to figure out a way to get her to understand that he missed the next thing she said.
“What?”
Jeannie repeated herself, stronger this time. “I want you to leave.”
“But, Jeannie, please.” He moved toward her but stopped when she took another step away and shook her head.
“No. This is bad. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for me. Hopefully this will make you see that.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than anyone else.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Ben couldn’t think, couldn’t process this.
“I don’t know. But I want you to find someplace else.” She paused. “I don’t want to see you around the store, either. It’ll be too difficult.”
He slammed his hand onto the metal desk and she jumped. “Dammit, Jeannie! Not only do I need to find someplace to live, I need to find work, too!”
She flinched but stood firm. “You can have some of our savings to hold you over.”
“Fat lot of help that is.” All he was trying to do was find their son. She couldn’t see that. She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. He knew it was because she blamed him, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
“Ben, I’m sorry, but it’s the only way—”
“It’s the only way for you to put your head so far in the sand it hits bedrock. I get it. I’ll be gone by this afternoon.” He turned to his web of information and started carefully dismantling it, making sure each piece of paper and pin was carefully stowed.
Sylvia swirled a shot of bourbon and downed it. She added it to the stack of glasses already on their table. “And then you came to Atlanta.”
“Eventually, yes. Took me a month to land here. Staying at crappy subsistence motels, trying to find work while still having time for Benny. And then this job opened up.” Ben was feeling a bit worse for wear. It was thirsty work, wrenching your heart out all over again.
“Why did you take it?”
“Hmm?” Ben had been admiring the balanced stack of glasses they had created. His brain was fuzzy, soft, and it was hard to concentrate on the here and now instead of reliving the arguments over and over again. “Oh. The databases. I wanted access to those databases. Since the police aren’t doing shit anymore, and I didn’t have any way to look things up before, this seemed perfect. I can finally start doing something with all that information I’ve been collecting.”
“Is it working? Have you found anything?”
Ben shrugged. “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t had much time to actually work with the computer much. Spending too much time getting acclimatized to the warehouse. Soon though. I spend most weekends out canvassing still. There’s a chance he could have ended up here; there were enough tips from this city at any rate.” He lowered his head to the table for a moment in an attempt to keep the world from spinning hard enough to drop him out of his chair. It had been a long time since he’d managed to get quite this drunk and he was surprised at the amount of alcohol it had taken. A lot more than in college, that’s for sure.
“Alright you, I think you need to go home.” Sylvia gestured to the barkeep to close out their tab, retrieved her credit card, and hauled Ben upright. “I think you need a cab.”
“I think you may be right. Just this once. Don’t let it go to your head.” He weaved to the door, trying not to put too much weight on the small woman beside him. They flagged down a cab and Sylvia poured him into the back seat. “What about you? How are you getting home?”
“I’ll get another cab. I live in the opposite direction.”
“Oh, right.” Ben folded his frame into the cab.
“Before you go though, can I have a stack of those flyers?” She was leaning into the cab, putting his nose even with her breasts, though he was trying not to look.
“Sure, I guess, how many do you want?”
“Oh, I was thinking thirty or forty should do it.”
“Are you going to be handing them out? Or what?” He dug through his bag and pulled a handful out. “You can make more copies at work if you need, too.”
“More like posting them actually, if you don’t mind.”
“No, thank you, please. You can have as many flyers as you can stand. Thank you. Really, I mean it. Thank you.”
She shrugged, riffling through the flyers Ben handed her. “You know me, I just like to help.”
“Actually, you tend to avoid doing work and only do what you feel like.” He leaned back into the seat with a sigh, closing his eyes.
“True, but this isn’t work. This is finding. And I love finding things.” She started to turn away, but Ben leaned forward and stopped her.
“Sylvia? Thanks. This was—thanks.”
Sylvia smiled and closed the door to the cab, waving as they drove away.
Insufficient Postage
Some people just can’t follow directions. The worst offenders are those who try to mail something like a packet of pictures in a regular letter envelope and think they can get a
way with a regular stamp. Some people are just unwilling to put in even the minimal required effort to do something properly.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
When Ben rolled over to kill his alarm the next morning, he realized it had been going off for fifteen minutes already. He thought it had only been around eight when he came in last night, but he had tumbled straight into bed. And he slept straight through the night without waking once thinking Benny had just called his name. He lay there for a minute more, trying to decide if that was a good thing or not. He couldn’t come to a decision and instead decided he should probably get up and get ready for work.
As he stood, the world very forcibly reminded him how much alcohol it had taken for him to arrive at that dreamless state. After he finished bringing up what little was left in his stomach he felt remarkably better, though definitely not hungry. He dragged himself into the shower and bit by bit prepared himself to face the warehouse and Sylvia.
He couldn’t believe how easy it had been to tell her everything. It shouldn’t have been that easy, but she had just watched him, actually listened to everything he said. She didn’t interrupt with platitudes in order to cut short the pain of the telling. No. She had listened, and he could almost believe she had understood. That was a new one.
When Ben mustered into the warehouse only fifteen minutes late, Sylvia smiled at him cheekily. Even though she had consumed quite a bit herself the night before, she showed no evidence of their debauched evening. As always, she was neatly dressed in tight jeans and another of her omnipresent vests.
“I almost didn’t expect to see you here today. You’re a mite worse for wear than when I shoveled you into that cab last night.” She finished stacking the empty trays in her cart and leaned on it.
Ben slumped into his chair and leaned his head back, eyes closed. “Nothing a morning spent in the bathroom can’t fix.”
“And water and Advil and dark, right?” She abandoned the cart and came around behind him to massage his temples and head. He sighed. It felt wonderful.
“Actually, I had an idea in the shower this morning that I thought I might run past you.” Her fingers paused and when he made a complaining noise, she resumed.
“And what was this watery epiphany?”
“I thought I’d start with Celine when I try and convince the readers to hand out the flyers in the mail. What do you think? Is she a soft touch? Besides, she already knows about Benny.”
“Oh.” Her voice fell a little and she stopped the massage altogether and went back around the front of the desk. “Yeah, sure. She’s a good one. I think, though, while you try and win our fair reader over, I will go take care of the morning shredding. Let me know how it goes.”
“Will do.” He watched her leave before getting up carefully and doing a few soft stretches to try and work out some of the kinks. He wondered why Sylvia had been so quick to abandon the warehouse at that moment, but he was soon distracted by the prospect of asking someone for help, something he had not done in a long while.
As he walked into the bullpen, the readers ignored him completely, continuing with their morning routines. Jillian was chugging cup after cup of the acrid coffee; Geoffrey was polishing his glasses to a mirror-bright hue; Celine was busy picking out a donut from the Krispy Kreme box; and Sean seemed to be meditating.
Mustering his courage, he walked up to Celine and offered his advice. “That one has the most icing.”
She didn’t look up, instead focusing entirely on the box in front of her. “But I don’t like icing. I’m trying to find the one with the least.”
“Hard to get a Krispy Kreme with no icing, comes pretty standard.”
“A girl can dream.” She picked up a donut and napkin and proceeded to try and wipe off a lot of the dripping icing, resulting in a rather crumbly donut.
Ben paused before launching into his pitch. “So, I wanted to say thanks for last night.”
“Sure thing, every newbie needs to learn sometime. Glad I could help.” She started for her desk and Ben trailed after her.
Screwing up his courage, he finally started, “I was wondering, Celine, if maybe—”
“No, I won’t go out with you.”
Ben stumbled against a desk in surprise. “What? No, that wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
“Really? That’s a damn shame, wasted a preemptive strike for nothing.” She settled in behind her desk and leaned back, picking at the donut.
“No, I was just going to ask if you thought it might be possible to, maybe, include my flyers in the return forms, maybe copied onto the back of the informational flyers about why this or that package was opened? Or damaged?”
She set down her donut and faced him, crossing her arms. “Just so we’re clear, you’re asking me to include an unauthorized communication in official United States Post?”
Ben wondered if he’d crossed a regulatory line but decided he could always play dumb if that turned out to be the case. “Um, yes?”
“Sure. Sounds like a good plan. Reach a lot of people that way.” She picked up the donut and took an enormous bite out of it, continuing with her mouth full. “‘Course I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m in.”
He gave an inward sigh of relief. It had been a lot easier than he had expected. “Do you think you might possibly be able to help me convince some of the others as well?”
“What do I look like, your project coordinator? Go ask them your own damn self. I have work to do. And gimme one of those flyers so I can start copying it.”
“Yes, of course. And thank you, a lot. I really owe you one for this.” Ben fumbled one of the flyers out of his bag and set it in her in-tray.
“Could you not owe me by releasing a certain item to auction for me?”
Ben paused with his hand still on the flyer. “I’m not sure. I mean, I can look at the piece, definitely. But I thought we couldn’t bid on anything.”
“Uh-uh. You and Sylvia and the auctioneering crew can’t bid on anything. Nobody who has a direct say in determining what goes up for auction can bid. But we lowly readers can. As can our boyfriends. And there is a particular necklace from 1997 that has been sitting back there because it’s engraved: To my love, Celine. It’s time to come to terms that no one is going to be claiming that locket, and my boyfriend should bid on it.”
“Hah, right. I’ll look for it. Can’t make any promises, though.” Ben ran his hand through his hair. He was definitely going against the carefully laid out rules in Bunion’s book now, but it couldn’t hurt anything to at least look at the locket.
Celine shrugged and headed out to the copier with a stack of forms and his flyer. “I know, but it’d be nice. If you get me.”
Ben grinned as he watched her begin copying the flyer onto the back of her forms. He had a good feeling about this. “I get you. Thanks, Celine. Sure you won’t help me with the other readers?”
“Sure you can’t release that necklace?” she retorted over her shoulder as she returned to her desk.
Ben turned to the rest of the bullpen and decided that Jillian was his next recruit. She was just starting to organize the mail in her cart into generic mail and larger envelopes with the few packages sitting on the floor beside her desk.
“Hey, Jillian, can I interrupt you for a minute?” Ben leaned on the edge of the desk. She nodded without looking up at him, continuing to organize her desk. “So, do you—uh—like working here?” He cursed himself for the awkward opening, but Jillian just shrugged, straightening the slumped pile of letters in front of her.
“So I was wondering...that is I just—” and his nerve failed him. He sat there for a moment trying to figure out how to tell this woman that his son was missing and he wanted her help, but it was much harder than telling a random stranger passing on the street. He didn’t have to see their looks
of sympathy and pity every day. He passed them a flyer and they were gone. And it wasn’t like she’d already found out, as Celine had. It’s not like he was having to broach the subject and watch their eyes melt and their eyebrows pinch into that exaggerated look of sadness. A treacherous part of his mind reminded him that Sylvia hadn’t reacted that way.
“You know, never mind. I’ll catch you later.” He turned and started back to his warehouse, shaking his head at his own melodrama.
“Ben, a second?” He turned back but Jillian still didn’t make eye contact.
“Sometimes it helps—well—Uncle Shem is a good listener. Try him first.”
Ben suppressed the smirk that threatened to cross his face, instead simply saying, “Thanks, I’ll think about it.” But he highly doubted that talking to a pile of ashes would do him any good. Instead, he made his way back to the warehouse to take care of the data entry for the day.
“Earth to Ben.” Sylvia stood in front of him, leaning on her latest empty cart. When he looked up from the entry he was working on, she smiled. “I’m headed down the road to grab a sandwich for lunch. You want anything?”
“Oh? Sure. That’d be great. Could I get a salami on rye?” He reached into his pocket for his wallet, but she waved him off.
“It’s on me today. I’m feeling creatively generous. Salami on rye it is.”
“Thanks, but here. I know how much I make, and you probably make less. Take the cash.”
She pouted for a moment. “Fine. When you put it that way.”
He smiled and waved her out the door. When she was gone, he turned to straightening his desk and saw the pile of flyers sitting there. “Talk to Uncle Shem, eh?” He bit his lip in indecision, then stood abruptly to go stand in the long-term storage bay.
It was silly, talking to an urn. It couldn’t possibly do him any good, but both Sylvia and now Jillian had said it was therapeutic. He walked up to the urn, hands thrust into his pockets and shoulders hunched. He stared at it, then opened the lid to peer in at the ashes, replaced the lid, and backed up a step. He paced to the left and right, stopping again in front of Uncle Shem and giving it a hard look.
Undeliverable Page 11
