How many people had worked at K&K in the twenty or thirty years that Duane Kolodny had managed the company? Maybe he no longer cared. The only constant, besides Duane, was Dolly Halloran. How could a woman with such a hoarse, acid laugh be called Dolly? Who’d ever thought she was a Dolly? She was too skinny. The skin hung off her elbows. She penciled in her eyebrows. Dolly favored tissues in little plastic packets, and she was always using these tissues to dab at her rheumy eyes. People said that Dolly had been Duane’s mistress, or at least Bonnie Stevenson said so. Yet this implied that at one time Dolly had loved someone.
What really concerned Ellie Knight-Cameron was not whether Duane and Dolly had conducted a bittersweet office affair. What concerned Ellie was that Astrid had now left the company, and Christina was gone and Annie Goldberg was gone, and with Annie went the room freshener that she used in her cubicle, one of those plug-in jobs. A hint of cinnamon. Christina had listened to music on her headphones. She was always tapping on things. She wore too many earrings. Christina was pear shaped, but in a cute way. Considering that Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to statistically sound methodologies, had in prior weeks removed Duane and Neil Rubinstein from consideration in the matter of the suggestion box, and considering further that Christina and Annie had now abandoned the K&K family, and discounting Astrid Lang, that left as potential suggestion box culprits only Angie, Dolly, Bonnie Stevenson, or Maureen Jones. These people had opportunity and access, but did they have motive?
Angie Roehmer cornered her by the water cooler. Down the hall from the bathroom. They were both working late. Business was so good Duane was thinking of expanding. Ellie was trying to get prices on a larger suite in the same office building. This despite the fact that they had never hired a fourth broker and the rest of the staff was actually shrinking. It had been raining for days. A yowling stray cat in the parking lot had scuttled all attempts to locate and muzzle it.
It was all about Chris Grady. Everything was different for Chris Grady, Angie Roehmer said. Things had been easier before Chris Grady. There were certain things that women did for one another, Angie said. One thing they did was they tried not to be cruel, and they tried to remember to clean the dishes in the sink in the lounge if the dishes piled up. They didn’t leave old coffee cups around with a three-day-old paste in the bottom. They didn’t ignore one another. They weren’t out for another person’s job. Even when the women were disrespectful to one another, they tried to do it in a graceful way where nobody had to go to the bathroom and cry. And if someone did have to go and cry, they’d offer her a hug after.
“I heard him in there, and I think he’s trying to get people fired. He’s trying to make us look bad.” Angie filled yet another paper cup with water from the cooler and downed it in a swallow. “You think I don’t notice stuff?” Crushing the cup emphatically. “I wasn’t hired yesterday.”
Angie suggested they booby-trap Chris Grady’s clients. He was offering discounts that he shouldn’t have been offering. On bulk enrollments. He took days off without marking the time sheets, which meant he was stealing from the company. He was always going sailing or waterskiing with his richer and more successful relatives. They could catch him in it, and things would return to their earlier, calmer state, where women coexisted peaceably, working together for the common good.
“Angie,” Ellie said, “I can’t do anything like that. That wouldn’t be right. I—”
Look at the organization chart! Read her job description! She was just an office manager. She ordered carpet remnants. She telephoned plumbers.
“I always thought you were a goody-goody,” Angie said.
How to make sense of this embittered remark? Well, for one thing, Angie’s daughter was going to college soon, and Ellie happened to know that her kid barely spoke to Angie, the single parent. Ellie had watched this daughter as she went through her sullen adolescent patch before graduating into a full-fledged hatred of her mom, which had been much on display at both the summer office picnic and at the Christmas party. Last Christmas, the daughter, whose name was Maria, got sloppy drunk, and later, when everyone was climbing into their cars behind the steak house, Maria could be heard berating her mother: You’re so fucking boring, why don’t you go take a boring pill or something. All I ever wanted was a little fun. Ellie gazed at Angie, and she saw herself in another fifteen years, desperate to hang on to a job she didn’t care about so she could pay for college for a daughter who hated her.
She may have been wrong about Chris Grady and Astrid Lang, but now she was right. It was Angie Roehmer. No question. Angie was the one who had written the suggestions. How could Ellie have missed it before? Angie was willing to do anything. She was willing to say whatever she had to say to protect her small, miserable family. You controlled or you were controlled, and if you didn’t control, if you saw life and liberty slipping beyond your grasp, then you began doing things you would regret later, like beating up on your girl’s soccer coach or embezzling company funds. You grabbed a Starbucks employee by her green apron and told her you were going to knock all her teeth out if she ever again put whipped cream on your half-decaf mochaccino.
Angie’s inexplicable sick-out started soon after the unpleasant conversation above. Duane Kolodny couldn’t understand it, because Angie was one of his best workers. He’d hired her away from a dead-end job long before Ellie had joined K&K. Why would Angie go unreliable on him? Dolly covered for her for a few days, and then Dolly told Duane, or this was what she told Ellie, that Angie just couldn’t take another minute in an office that featured boy wonder Chris Grady. “Oh, bullcrap,” Duane had said. “He’s our number one earner.” In fact, Chris was one of the top earners in the whole region for K&K’s parent company. And he was about to pitch the head of personnel at a local Fortune 500 conglomerate on their entire health insurance plan. If he got the account, it would secure K&K until well after Duane Kolodny’s demise.
Ellie was meant to conduct a new round of job interviews the next day. It was a rainy, angry morning in late summer, and the applicants would probably be coming in late. She took off her raincoat and her hat and put them in the coat closet, and she pulled the umbrella stand out of the closet and set it by the front door. Her duck-handled umbrella was comical, protruding above the rim of the faux-wood-veneer umbrella stand as if it didn’t want her to leave it behind. She loved ducks.
The unpleasant smell coming from the minifridge was as it always was. There was a leak by the front door where Ellie eventually set a metal bowl to collect the rain. And, after much disuse, the suggestion box, it seemed, contained a suggestion, one folded into eighths or sixteenths by some obsessive party. Here were the words of the new suggestion that Ellie now held in her hand: Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains.
The stress was beginning to get to her. The stress of the office, of the office that was changing so fast during the Chris Grady regime. You could see it all, as plain as the cancerous mole on your forearm. This piece of paper she held was practically a Communist suggestion, like you’d expect from someone who had read too much Marx in college. Still, Ellie couldn’t seem to talk about it with anyone else. She couldn’t seem to bring the suggestion box up with Dolly or Bonnie, because now that Angie was on sick leave or fired or whatever she was, now there were only three plausible authors, and two of them were her remaining friends in the company, namely Dolly Halloran and Bonnie Stevenson.