Valley of Ashes (19 page)

“Free excellent coffee and a nice chat with Madeline,” said Cary, raising his glass. “Not to mention getting to watch the pair of you lose your shit like that?
Totally
worth it.”

Dean stood up, kissed the top of my head, and ducked his head under his briefcase strap. “We should hit it. Sorry to run so late, Cary.”

He walked out to the dining room, stepped over the playpen fence, and hoisted the first of two cardboard cartons up off the table.

Cary put his helmet back on, hooked his bike over one shoulder, and reached for the second box. “I’ll get this one.”

Dean shifted his own, exhaling. “Watch your back, they’re heavy.”

I pulled a corner peg out of the playpen and pulled it open so they wouldn’t have to haul themselves over the railing, thus encumbered.

While they duck-walked single file toward the living room, torsos tilted back to counter the weight of their respective burdens, I jogged ahead to open the front door.

“Great to see you, Madeline,” said Cary, breathless. “Thanks again for the fortifying beverage.”

“Dude,” I said. “Thanks for being so
subtle
.”

I heard him cackle as he started down the porch steps.

I
always took what the girls wore pretty seriously, opting that day for contrasting OshKosh overall jumpers, shiny black lug-soled mary janes, striped tights and turtlenecks, and little knit hats that looked like a strawberry and an eggplant, respectively.

This wasn’t some grown-up reversion to playing with dolls; I’d preferred fort-building and Hot Wheels as a kid.

It was more because I still felt the sting of my own childhood wardrobe: half raggedy Salvation Army crap, half outlandishly expensive castoffs from older and wealthier cousins back east.

If you would like to make a small child morbidly self-conscious for life, equip her with a large vocabulary and send her to public elementary school in early-seventies Stevie Nicks California wearing knee-socks, penny loafers, kilts, and moth-eaten shocking-pink/acid-green cable-knit Shetland sweaters that have been monogrammed with other people’s initials.

Trust me, she will be contemplating the abyss by third grade and quoting Kafka under her breath well before she ever attends a middle school dance.

It was gorgeous out, surprise surprise. Sparkling sunshine, fluffy clouds, trees just budding out into pale leaf or fluffy blossom.

Three generations’ worth of blooms from the local iris farm, Long’s
Gardens, nodded from virtually every yard and swale like orchidy daffodils: salmon, cobalt, amethyst, Burmese-ruby fuchsia, yellows from butter to egg yolk to topaz, nursery-pastel pinks and powder blues.

I pulled the wagon onto the Boulder Creek Path and a slight breeze picked up, making new aspen leaves quake and shiver along white boughs so they all winked in the light like a thousand buckets of loose change tossed in the air at once.

Dean’s office was situated in one of those eastward industrial parks out where Boulder started getting really high-plains-y and treeless.

I’d figured it would be a thirty-minute walk, and that I could use the exercise, but the creek path was hilly enough to slow me down with the girls’ wagon in tow.

Then I got out onto the flats and had a moment of vertigo when it struck me once again how very broad the high plains were.

Okay, maybe it’s not vertigo when you aren’t standing on top of something tall and looking down. It was all sideways.

The whole Big Sky Heartland thing made me itchily paranoid, like I was about to get strafed by some Hitchcockian crop-duster biplane, or burned at the stake for being pro-choice and anti–Jell-O salad.

There was just something about the sheer numbing expanse and tonnage of those amber waves of grain, once you’d turned your back on purple mountains’ majesty.

This was Dean’s line of country, not mine. It must have reminded him of the corn-rowed acreage of his boyhood: that overcast upstate New York landscape in which things botanical were planted for income, not decoration.

I wanted to be near water, preferably an ocean. Somehow it always felt like then I’d be able to escape if things got really bad. Which was crazy… I mean, what would I have done if there’d been a nuclear holocaust while we were living in New York City, stolen a canoe and paddled up the Hudson with the girls in their car seats at my feet? Not bloody likely.

I trudged onward, wondering if my new pal Mimi had gotten any
farther with the arson investigations. I decided to call her that afternoon once I’d gotten home and seen the lab results were in…
after
I called McNally at the paper and asked whether it’d be okay to review Alice’s Restaurant for next week.

Despite what I’d said to Cary about not wanting to review a place I’d already gotten a free meal from, I realized Dean might take off at any time on another business trip, and I’d already spent this month’s hundred bucks from mom on babysitters.

Or maybe I’d get a check from the paper, for the first three articles? Kind of ridiculous, really, to realize I’d have to spend it on child care so I could keep writing.

Then again, I figured having even a semblance of a job was an investment in sanity—mine
and
Dean’s—whether or not I broke even at the end of the month.

Thank God I could bring the kiddos along to the Thai place for lunch. That was at least twenty bucks I wouldn’t have to blow on getting someone to watch out for them while I took notes on the quality of satay and green-papaya salad.

I’d loaded the wagon with boxes of apple juice and ziplock bags of Cheese Nips, but Parrish and India were sacked out for their morning nap beneath the white hooped-canvas roof. Perfect timing—they’d be bright and cheery at the office.

I stopped for a minute to catch my breath, tucking a bright patchwork quilt under their dear little chins.

And smiled to myself.
Jesus
but it had been a long time since Dean and I’d shared a good laugh.

The girls were just coming around by the time I entered the corporate park, murmuring and chirping drowsily as I tried to remember in which of the several dozen identically stark, flat-roofed beige buildings I would find my Intrepid Spouse.

The lawns looked as if they’d been spray-painted green, the parking lot asphalt was freshly smooth and black, and not one of the randomly capitalized company names emblazoned across each corporate barracks
revealed a thing about what the persons employed within actually did: VanaTel, AccenTron, Tacti-Tek, Micro
Next
.

I wandered right, left, and right again, squinting now and really wanting to get out of the sun, which had reached the blinding acme of its mile-high noonday glare.

No one outside but we mad dogs and English majors…

I turned one more corner and saw our beat-up Mitsubishi wedged into a row of shiny white and ice-blue LeSabres and SUVs.

Here was Dean’s building, at long last—the company name etched in early-eighties-hair-salon sans-serif gold across a squat pink-granite headstone slab: I
ONIX
, LLC.

I checked my reflection in a spotless car window before heading toward the glass-doored entrance. Bonus: There was no actual dirt on my face, and I only looked half as tired as I felt.

I hauled the red wagon inside, blinking while my eyes adjusted to the lobby’s dimmer interior light.

Setsuko smiled at me—cool and prim and perfectly coiffed behind the reception counter’s speckled gray Formica.

“Would it be okay if I parked this in here,” I asked, “or should I tuck it away somewhere outside?”

She smiled again. “You can bring it right back here next to me, okay? I’ll watch it.”

I thanked her and pulled the wagon around. She knelt down to help me pull India free, as I reached inside for Parrish.

“Very, very pretty, your little girls,” she said, holding her hands out so India could grab on with chubby fists to steady herself. “Such
cute
dresses.”

“Thank you,” I said again. “And thank you for looking after the wagon, Setsuko. You’re always so thoughtful.”

“My pleasure. I’ll buzz your husband and let him know you’ve arrived. But you have to promise you’ll let me babysit, sometime?”

“You’re wonderful,” I said. “And I
will
call you.”

Dean and Cary and the girls and I were finally settled around a faux-walnut six-top in the Thai place, having secured a pair of booster seats once I’d taken each kid in turn to the ladies’ room for a quick diaper change.

We plopped Parrish’s chair between Cary and Dean, with India and me ensconced directly across from them.

I’d broken out the Cheese Nips and boxes of apple juice, tied the girls’ bibs around their necks, and finally settled down myself to peruse the menu.

All I really wanted at this point was a personal gallon of Thai iced coffee—extra heavy on the caffeine—but I ran a list of appetizers and entrées past my dining companions that seemed like a reasonably varied overview of the place’s culinary aptitude.

Cary and Dean were discussing some new technical developments at work. I’d gotten a D-for the year in high school chemistry, so they might as well have been reciting toaster-oven instruction booklets in Lithuanian.

Our young waitress returned with a round of ice waters and my blessed gigantic vessel of high-octane caffeine, whereupon I proceeded to order a yellow curry and a green, a beef salad, the requisite pad Thai and chicken satay, and a handful of other house specialties I’d have to remember to write down and rate in my trusty notebook the minute we were back out the door.

India started tossing back Cheese Nips as Parrish drained her juice box.

“Look,” said Cary, “I think Bittler’s embezzling.”

I looked up, suddenly interested. “What?”

“You’re getting paranoid,” Dean said soothingly. “I mean, the guy’s an asshole, but—”

Cary shook his head. “When was the last time you got reimbursed for expenses? He’s late again, right? Used to take him a month, then six weeks. Now we’re talking two months, minimum. Sometimes more.”

Dean nodded, his face sour. “Not for the VPs, of course.”

Cary ran the tip of his index finger along the rim of his water glass. “Just for the underlings. The people who can’t really complain, am I right?”

Dean nodded again.

“That’s
totally
shitty,” I said.

“I had to hit up my father for the entire rent check this month,” said Cary. “I promised I’d pay him back as soon as I got reimbursed, but still…”

Parrish got a Cheese Nip wedged in one nostril. I reached across the table and pulled it out.

Dean leaned back in his chair. “It’s not like we’re lagging in receivables. P and L’s looking damn solid. We outdid ourselves on sales this quarter—and most accounts are paying early.”

“That’s my point,” said Cary. “There’s no cash lag. Just Bittler, fucking around. But there’s some weird shit going on with shipping spares, too. Fulfillment’s all backed up.”

“Well, that’s not good,” said Dean. “But really, man. I mean, I hate to say it, but you’re sounding a little paranoid.”

India chortled and shrieked with joy beside me.

I looked over to check the level on her Cheese Nip cache only to realize that she’d managed to drink my entire liter of iced coffee while I’d been distracted with adult conversation.

Oh fucking well, so much for the afternoon nap.

“Look,” Dean was saying, when I tuned back in to the grown-up channel, “you get that kind of wrinkle occasionally, with this whole just-in-time business model. Somebody forgets to replace one little belt on a drill press in Malaysia, and the global supply chain gets tweaked for a month. Shit happens. Just another downside of the old Japanese Management Style.”

“You guys heard about the four international CEOs who got abducted by a Marxist revolutionary front?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“French, British, Japanese, and American. Marxists have them up in a plane, tell them they’re going to push them out one by one, so do they have any last words…”

Parrish threw a Cheese Nip.

“Brit says he wants to sing ‘Rule, Britannia,’ French dude asks if he can do the Marseillaise, and the Japanese guy pipes up that he’d like to deliver the lecture on management techniques he was going to present at the conference they’re never going to get to attend now.”

“And the American?” asked Cary.

“He says, ‘Just shoot me first, before I have to listen to another fucking lecture on Japanese management techniques.’ ”

They liked that.

But Cary got serious again quickly.

“Look, Dean,” he said. “Have you been out to the warehouse lately? I’m telling you, something’s fucked up.”