40

Sea of desks. Blackened computer monitors angled toward empty chairs pushed in as employees departed for their homes, families, husbands, wives, and children their paychecks supported.

Jason wandered among the furniture. Here was Janine’s desk, cluttered with hockey souvenirs. Jason had never asked her how a banker in LA could become a Carolina Hurricanes fan. He picked up a puck, examined the swirling red and black pattern of the logo. This puck was all he really knew about her. He replaced it in the ring of pale dust the cleaning crew had missed.

He crossed to Dan’s office. He stared into the darkness, the shapes of chairs and desk reminders of how vacant this office would be after he fired Dan tomorrow.

Margaret from HR or one of her flunkies would serve as Jason’s wingman on this search-and-destroy mission. He would do it as he’d been taught. Stick to the facts. Don’t let it get personal. It’s not about you, it’s a reduction in force. RIFs happen in the best of businesses, to the best of people. Talk about the severance package as soon as you can. Cover the benefits, active another thirty days and what it will cost after that to keep them going. Stave off any emotions. Have the HR rep accompany Dan back to his office so he can clear out his personal belongings—but leave that rolodex. And no computer access. Then have security escort him to the door with a cardboard box loaded with all that would remain of his life with the bank.

It happens.

But Dan was nearing sixty. Going back into the dating game of the job market wouldn’t be easy for him. If you put Dan and his gray hair next to some young, ambitious guy you could pay less and get more years from, the young guy would get the job every time unless Dan could convince you that his clients would cut their ties to BTB and follow him.

Jason turned his back on Dan’s office and stared over the desks, file cabinets, chairs. He had to fight a sensation that the floor was sloped toward him. That he stood on an incline without traction. That soon this furniture would begin to drift toward him, gathering momentum and speed into a stampede of wood and metal he could never stop. Everything would slide down, drive him backward even farther than he’d already slid, into the darkness behind him. Into a pit of dark ruin.

He’d tried to fix this. He’d fought Vince as long as he could. The mistakes he’d made were clear to him now, but at the time they had seemed like risks worth taking. If he’d made different choices—involved Mark and Scotty more in his decisions, stopped trying to protect his staff from the politics by taking so much responsibility himself—maybe he could have kept enough juice around here to stop this.

His feet shuffled along the carpet away from Dan’s office. Tomorrow he would fire five of them. No, four. He wouldn’t fire five. Four more people in the unemployment lines was enough, four more to watch their savings dwindle as what few interviews they could schedule led to no hope, no hope at all. Four more families swallowing their pride, four more marriages cast into struggle and doubt. Tomorrow Jason would sit behind his desk and recite the salary and benefits packages the four of them would be shuttled away with like things bagged up at the end of a stick.

Hopefully the meetings would be over before their shock wore off.

Word would spread quickly. Soon everyone would be on edge, waiting for the next name to be called.

Jason found himself outside Vince’s office. How convenient for Vince to deflect this dirty work to Jason. The staff that used to claim loyalty to Jason would see him, not Vince, as the hatchet man. Vince could sit in this office like a manager in a slaughterhouse, hands unsullied by the carnage played out around him.

Vince had been gone for an hour or more, but the rank cologne he slathered himself with still drifted out of the room. Jason’s upper lip curled with the smell of it. He moved away, trying to distance himself from the abyss everything seemed to be sliding toward.

He should leave. He should have left hours ago, when his coworkers were shutting things down, filing down the escalator, calling good-byes to one another. The escalator was shut off now.

When Brenda had leaned through the doorway to let him know she was leaving, her glance had lingered on him long enough to let him know she would be waiting for him at her apartment.

Serena waited for him too, he knew. At home. Home. The word lodged in his mind like a splinter. What kind of home was it when there was no trust, no honor in the marriage there? It was no home at all. Just a set of walls and floors hammered together, plaster and paint slapped over sticks and nails.

The pastor would have him go to his wife. “You got to weed that garden,” he’d said.

Jason stared over the unpopulated desks. The silence of the room pressured his ears with want for the ordinary clamor of any day here. He wanted the phones ringing, wanted movement in those chairs, voices calling out, deadlines impending—the pressures and the sense that the thirty-five people on his team were pulling on the oars together, with him at the helm, a pilot and navigator.

But the place was empty. And tomorrow he would cast four of his crew overboard, and good luck with that swim, guys. Hope you make it to land. Hope your families survive intact. Here’s your severance. Here’s your last office supply from BTB: a cardboard box you can unfold and tape together and pile your few personal effects into under the distrustful eye of an HR rep standing over you to make sure you don’t take any pencils that don’t belong to you, that you don’t download something you shouldn’t onto a disk, that you don’t get into any mischief on the bank’s system as your final sally before you’re cast over the rails.

He should go to Serena. He felt her drawing him. He pictured the expression on her face when she’d pulled away from him this morning, knowing what he’d done, that he’d been with someone else. Maybe she had smelled Brenda’s fragrance on his cheek. Maybe guilt simmered in the whites of his eyes. She knew him well enough to see it if it was there.

The darkness outside had turned his office window into a mirror. He meant to see if guilt revealed itself in his eyes. But he turned away from his image too fast to see anything but the face he used to trust.

The whir of the air-conditioner cut off. At eight o’clock every night, the building’s system shut down. The silence took on an even greater depth.

He grabbed his jacket and made for the elevator. At the push of the button, the engine that drove the car surged somewhere below, behind the closed panels he faced, and he had to resist the urge to look over his shoulder to see if the whole place was sliding toward him in an avalanche.

The doors opened. He stepped inside and pushed the button to take him down to the garage.

Wherever Serena was, that was where he belonged. The pastor was right. He should go to her, try to get past this suspicion. But how could she claim someone had forged that letter? It was absurd.

And Brenda drew him as well. With her eyes, with her skin, her hair, her electric touch. Want clawed at him in his deepest places, want for her and want for something only she could give him. No one else—not Serena and not anyone since he was a very young man—could make him feel this way.

She reminded him of Danah, he realized. It must be the reason he’d been so fascinated by her the instant she’d stepped into his office. Thinking of it made the want inside him grow into something so primal he couldn’t imagine having the strength to resist.

The elevator doors opened, and his cell phone chirped. The readout said Brenda Tierney.

He stepped into the garage and clicked on the phone icon to make the connection.

“I’m on my way.”