[Brackets] (2 page)

After ten more practice shots, all direct hits, he carefully wrapped up the sling, put it in his pocket, and headed back home. It was almost 11 o’clock, and he never missed the news.

[
East Division:
First Round]

[Thursday, March 19]

The icy Connecticut air was relentless, attacking every inch of skin exposed to the morning chill. For Cole Kaman, that meant he could no longer feel the tops of his ears. He made it to the front door of his office without slipping on the icy patch in the walkway, fumbled the keys with his thickly-gloved hands, and heaved inside with a shiver
.

I can’t believe it’s like this in March
, he thought.

The cubicled
offices of the Cheney Real Estate Agency were empty. Cole was always the first one, and the unpleasant morning weather would ensure his solitude for at least another half-hour. He walked over to the switches on the wall and flipped them on one by one, illuminating
in a fluorescent glaze
the same array of desks, phones, computers, and chairs that he saw every morning. Eight and a half hours until he was off. Sixteen hours until the weekend. He ran his fingers through his floppy black hair and breathed in the smell of Thursday Morning.

Coming in early was not officially part of Cole’s job description, but it had become part of a routine that the other office workers now expected. For him, the advantage was a leisurely start to the day, first dibs on the coffee he made, and a radio station of his choosing. There was a certain contentment in being king of the office for a few moments before succumbing to the title of of
fice lackey. Within a half hour
the coffee would be gone, replaced by a stack of to-do items all marked urgent, and the office music would be unceremoniously switched from classic rock to light hits. For reasons he sometimes acknowledged, there was more satisfaction to being alone in a place where privacy was a premium than in being alone in his apartment, where privacy was the default.

After nearly half an hour, Anne Marie Cheney, owner and manager of Cheney Real Estate, entered the building. She hustled in and shook off the snow that had fallen on her wool cap. Her high heels clicked on the tile as she stepped off the doormat.

“Hiya, Cole. How about this
weather
, huh?” she said brightly. He nodded. She had said almost the exact same thing every
work day for the last three and a half months. The click-clack of her high heels followed her as she went into her office.

It was a nice enough job for him. He’d had so many in the last five years, most of them less comfortable, all of them equally unimpressive. For now, he was content where he was, and there was no pressure from within or without to search for something different. In his last job, as a cashier at a home improvement store, it was bad luck that had
forced
him
into
switch
ing
. The sharp clacking of Anne Marie’s heels evoked the smallest shudder as he recalled being the victim of a disturbing collision between a box of hammers, a potted rhododendron, and a seeing-eye dog.

From the window, Cole watched as each coworker survived the ice and entered with the relief of coming from cold into warm. Tom, Linda, and Nera all arrived within five minutes of each other. Tom said hello to Cole with his eyebrows before slumping into his chair and rubbing his entire face several times. Linda promptly marched over to the radio and changed the station. Nera hung up her coat and brought some papers to Cole’s desk.

“Hey Cole,” she smiled, removing a scarf that clung to her hair.

“Hey. How about this weather, huh?” he replied, instantly loathing himself for not thinking of something else.

“Who cares about the weather?” she retorted. “It’s Opening Day! The good times are going to roll.”

Cole smiled involuntarily every time he talked to Nera, but now he could tell that he looked both goofy and clueless. “Opening Day?”

“For the tourney? March Madness?” She looked at him with surprise, then exasperation. “Tom didn’t explain this to you on Monday?”

“Uhhhhh,” Cole stalled.
He did remember. Vaguely.
But b
asketball had never been his thing
, and neither had college
. So when Tom had told him about the annual office ritual of filling out brackets for the big annual
college
basketball tournament, he had taken a blank bracket without questions and without enthusiasm and scrawled out his picks almost at random.
If he remembered right
, he had been eavesdropping on Nera
talking about her weekend
while he wrote.
He had even given up ten dollars without thinking much
about it. In fact, he would have preferred to keep that money. 

Now Nera turned on Tom accusingly. “Tom, you didn’t brief Cole about Opening Day?”

“I thought you did,” Tom said. “We better do it now.” Tom motioned Cole over to his desk. He sat forward, his receding hairline glowing under the lamps. Glancing covertly at Anne Marie’s office, he began to speak in unnecessarily low tones.

“Every year, we all fill out our brackets on Monday. On Thursday, the first day of the games, today, we track what happens in the first few games, which start around noon. We used to listen to the games online and make a big deal of marking the brackets after each game ended. But a few years ago, Anne Marie heard a story about how much time people wasted following March Madness games at work. So, she thought of this ‘clever’ way to eliminate waste at work while still keeping up morale.”

He checked his watch. “The games start at noon, and new games start about every two hours. That means there are two big blocks of games during the afternoon of the workday. So what’s going to happen is that Anne Marie is going to call group meetings at 2:00 and 4:00. Everyone has to report on what they did during those two hours, and you need to show that you were productive. At 4:00, at the end of the second meeting, whoever is ahead in the bracket guesses gets to leave an hour early with pay, as long as that person worked through the afternoon. You understand?”

“What about the money?”

“Hey, shhhh.” Tom’s voice lowered even more. “That we keep to ourselves. We’ll give it out at the end of the tournament.”

“Oh,” said Cole, thinking that this just wasn’t as fun as Tom was making it out to be. But he wasn’t the type to spoil a good mood.

Tom cleared off a medium-sized bulletin board on the wall near his desk. He put up, in very neat rows, each handwritten bracket from the office. With the passion of an artist, he explained to Cole that he preferred to have everything filled out and checked by hand instead of having everyone just make their picks online and seeing their wins and losses spewed out by a computer. “It needs to be tangible,” he effused. “It needs to be organic.” Cole’s bracket, messy and hurried, was tacked right next to Nera’s, which had been written
carefully.

Nera walked by to inspect the picks. As she paused over his, Cole held his breath, looking sideways at her to take in the olive skin, the athletic build, and the certain knowledge that she could break his arm if he ever tried to make an unwelcomed move.
One of these days,
he let himself think.
And why not? I’m a good guy, there’s no reason why we couldn’t…
He was awakened by a sound that was part giggle, part scoff, part snort as Nera turned away from his bracket.

“Seriously Cole?” she asked, not even looking at him. “UCLA over Boston College? Sorry, but, wow.” Cole went back to his desk with the enigmatic sensation of becoming defensive about something that, five minutes ago, he hadn’t cared about at all.

As noon passed, Cole noticed that Tom began to slow down in his movements. He had headphones on. He seemed to be making notes on a legal pad, but he only used the pen in his hand occasionally. Every once in a while he would adjust the volume or click on something, but otherwise he seemed to just sit tensely, eyes distant. When two o’clock approached, he began to whisper something that sounded like an urgent whimper. It looked like he wanted to jump out of his chair and was using all of his strength just to maintain the image of calm diligence. At one point, Cole
distinctly heard Tom whisper, “J
ust shoot the ball!” Looking around the room, Cole noticed several others, including Nera, with headphones on and identically distracted looks.

At two o’clock sharp, Anne Marie popped out of her office and summoned everyone to the conference table, instructing them to bring what they had been working on for the afternoon. Cole printed off some documents and stretched his back as he le
ft his desk, checking on Tom with a curious glance
. Tom was standing, headphones still in, looking like there was just one more thing to listen to. When Anne Marie called over again, he ripped off the headphones in frustration, hastily reached into a drawer for a file, and huffed into the conference room. Cole followed.

Just as Tom described, Anne Marie very nicely asked to have short reports of their day’s productivity. Cole was able to show that he had done exactly the same amount of work that he always did. Others gave similar reports.

When they got to Tom, he opened the folder and removed a set of documents, each filled out very neatly. His report was the longest, and the volume of work was superhuman.

“Tom, this is very impressive,” Anne Marie glowed. “We should do this every day, huh? Am I right? OK, we’ll see everyone again at 4:00.” The praise drew annoyed, sarcastic glares from everyone else, but Tom perked up and bowed his head in fake modesty. Cole wondered how much time Tom
spent
to do an extra day’s work in advance. He had to admire the foresight that he had never seen his coworker apply to any other workday.

During the next two hours, as his coworkers sank back into faux productivity, Cole felt a mild case of afternoon grogginess set in. He did the normal work, answering the normal phone
calls
and entering the normal data. He paid a few minutes of attention to the radio station’s normal three o’clock news updates. The Thai ambassador was visiting somewhere, the inconclusive hunt for the Wall Street arsonist was ongoing, the American poultry industry was spooked by recent recalls. The reporter
on the arsonist story was Anne
Marie’s sister, Deborah Cheney, whose local morning TV show occasionally featured Anne Marie as an industry expert in the housing market. When the radio began rattling off the scores of the first games of the tournament, Tom could apparently hear them through his headphones, and they made him growl. A client came in to ask for information on mortgage rates, and Cole took some pleasure in sending him to Tom right away.

As four o’clock neared, Tom, who had dispensed with the client very efficiently, ripped off his headphones in sudden disgust. He pounded his desk softly, grunted as if he’d been kicked from somewhere under his chair, and then composed himself as he turned toward the bulletin board full of brackets. He held two markers in his hand: a thin red one and a bright yellow hi-lighter. One by one, beginning with his own, he began to make marks. As a judge both exacting and merciless, he colored each bracket by crossing out or highlighting a team, leaving each sheet with a splash of golden approval and bloody punishment. When he finished Nera’s, he made eye contact with her and chuckled maniacally, holding up three fing
ers. She nodded her capitulation.  S
he already knew her score.

Then Tom arrived at Cole’s bracket. Team by team, Tom
marked with the highlighter. After a pause, he dropped the red marker on his desk.

“Holy cow,” he said to himself audibly.

Anne Marie came out and called everyone to the table. There wasn’t much time, she prodded, and they needed to get this over with. Tom looked at Cole with a narrow-eyed expression that Cole couldn’t interpret. Then he quickly reached into his desk, grabbed a second folder, and went to the conference table.

After they had issued their reports, Anne Marie drum-rolled on the table with her fingers. “So, Tom, who is today’s lucky winner?”

Tom didn’t answer for a moment. It looked like he was debating something internall
y, and losing. “Cole, by a lot. Five
for five
,” he finally said. There was weak applause around the table.

“Hey, Cole! On the first try! Congratulations!” Anne Marie cheered. “You can feel free to call it a day. For the rest of you, let’s finish the day strong, OK!”

Tom fell in beside him as they went back to their seats. “I cannot
believe
how lucky you are,” he grumbled. “You even had West Virginia over Boise. I had Boise in the Sweet Sixteen. I didn’t even come close.”

“Did you come in second?” Cole asked encouragingly. Tom drooped his head in shame.

“No. Linda did.”

“Sorry, man,” Cole apologized, but he wasn’t really sorry. Going home early was going home early.
Cole shut down his computer
as
Tom put his hands in his pockets in resigned disappointment
.
Grabbing his coat, Cole
looked ov
er at Nera, who was inspecting his bracket on the wall
. She looked back at him, impressed, and gave him a smile.