the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.
“I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”
“We have a question,” Susan said.
“Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.
“Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”
“Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”
“Paper?” Susan asked.
“Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.
“And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.
I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”
Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.
“Fine. You win,” she said.
“Win what?” I asked.
“I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”
“Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”
“I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.
“Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Ricardo started to laugh.
I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.
“Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”
“Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.
I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.
I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.
“I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.
“Resident warehouse,” I muttered.
“You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.
“Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.
But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.
“Sasha Gardner,” I answered.
“Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you have some nerve.”
“Do you?” I’d never considered myself particularly brave.
She didn’t answer. She just kept barreling on. “You’re harassing one of the best people I’ve ever known. If you’d only take the time to know him, to talk to him, you’d see.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked, understanding at once the sort of nerve she’d meant. My cheeks started burning. “Who is this?”
“But no, you have to drop your poison into his life. Now, I don’t know what sort of a family you were raised in, Ms. Gardner, but I hope you take a good look at how you’re spending your time on God’s green earth and move on to better things. He’s had a hard enough year. Look at all he gave up. And for what? To have you bothering him? How about planting some happiness for a change and letting go that misery you sow?”
“Who are you?” I asked again. “How did you get my name? Do you know Gordon?”
“I’m a concerned citizen who felt an obligation to tell you that you work for the worst branch of our government.”
“The IRS isn’t its own branch,” I said. “We’re a part of the Treasury which is a part of…” She had hung up. “Never mind.”
I replaced the handset. In my previous six years at the service, I hadn’t received even one complaint. Now two in one afternoon? I looked around my office for clues. I listened for Cliff’s voice, wondering whether he was receiving the same phone-line vitriol. How could I defend myself when I didn’t know what I’d done, or to whom I’d done it? Who was this “he” that both callers had referred to?
I was so flustered that when my phone rang again, I barked into it. “I know—I’m awful. There, I beat you to it, didn’t I? Surprised?”
“Uh, this is Jody in reception. Your three o’clock appointment is here.”
“Oh. Sure, Jody. I’ll be right there.”
I had to get it together. I took a deep breath and glanced at my watch. That made me smile and, at least briefly, forget the phone calls. It was three o’clock exactly. They were right on time.
I had predicted by the way they prepaid their bills that the Ritters would be punctual. I had a clear-cut image of them in my mind: Donald Ritter, the avuncular former radio-station manager, his stomach straining against the spongy weave of a golf shirt, his all-purpose, slip-on sneakers, and Miriam, who’d only started to work that year, half time at a children’s clothing store. She would get her hair set every week, was a crossword fanatic and probably carried her knitting in a public-radio tote.
I didn’t know if the image I had built would be accurate, of course. I was never sure before I got an auditee into my cubicle. But I enjoyed the puzzle immensely, as well as the interim between the moment I wasn’t sure and seconds later, when I was. Imagine a life. Have you got it? I mean, have you really got it? Well then, let’s raise the curtain and bring out Donald and Miriam.
I walked into our no-frills reception area and looked around. Three sets of folks were waiting. One guy, off the bat I knew he was way too slick. He wore a perfectly tailored suit and crocodile loafers. My folks, the Ritters, they were savers. They weren’t wealthy, but I reckoned they’d been saving ten percent of Don’s take-home for the past twenty years. The guy in the suit—he’d dropped some
