“Now where is your organization based?” Cecelia’s mother asked.
Cecelia didn’t know what to do. She could hear the central melody of the new song in her head. It sounded like one of those lullabies that could fill adults with fear. Cecelia felt weird at how not weird it felt to her now, receiving the songs. It was a vested condition of her life. Each song could reasonably be deemed a miracle, and to Cecelia each was only an interesting chore. She wasn’t missing Reggie on her own terms, but nothing ever happened on her terms. She listened to her mother ask question after question. Something was off. The conversation didn’t seem friendly. Cecelia’s mother was asking questions about where exactly her money would end up and she wasn’t getting an answer. Cecelia saw a tiny insect bumbling across the wall and she didn’t disturb it. She shifted so it could pass. Here came her own voice trilling in her head. Here came the lyrics, something about praying for a drought. She tried not to hear them.
“Money is no object,” she heard her mother say. “I have a great deal of money.”
Cecelia knew that wasn’t true. It seemed like her mother was getting transferred, working her way up the ranks of holy telemarketing. She still wasn’t getting answers. She wanted to know that her donation would help people in need. Cecelia’s legs were starting to ache. She was hearing the chorus now. If I can’t take your hand for a dance, there ain’t no Egypt, there ain’t no France.
“Does it feed orphans?” Her mother was almost yelling. “Or does it buy your boss a speedboat?”
Cecelia saw now. She got it. Her mother was prank-calling them, harassing them. Cecelia had never heard of a person engaging in solitary pranking and she’d never heard of a fifty-year-old woman prank-calling anyone at all. She ought to be relieved, Cecelia supposed. Her mother wasn’t brainwashed. Her mother still had her spunk. Maybe, when she thought no one was around, she allowed herself moments as her old self. Or maybe her and Cecelia’s uncle were turning back into the early-twenties punks Cecelia used to hear stories about. Cecelia didn’t care if she wasn’t the one capable of helping her mother, as long as someone did.
The religious people were trying to get her off the phone and Cecelia’s mother wasn’t going quietly. She was still claiming to want to donate a large sum, a sum they’d finally become convinced she didn’t have. She wanted to sow a significant financial seed, she kept insisting.
Cecelia slipped back in her room and finished getting dressed, still hearing Reggie’s song, which was telling her that missing people was a way of giving yourself the sour rewards you deserved. And how else could it work? Cecelia was missing Reggie but she was also missing herself as she’d been when Reggie was around. She was missing having a place in the world, because a world without Reggie didn’t seem to want her.
She went out the front door without a sound, her mother more or less in a shouting match now, about to get hung up on. She had an afternoon shift in the booth at work. She drove fifteen over the whole way and jogged in from the parking lot and arrived only a couple minutes late.
She opened the door to the A/V booth and there was her boss, sitting in Cecelia’s chair. Her boss held up a finger. She was reading a young adult novel, as she was known to do. It appeared from the cover to be about zombie cheerleaders. No one knew if she herself preferred this brand of literature or if she liked to screen whatever her children were going to read. No one knew if she even had children. No one knew a thing about the woman. She got to the end of a chapter and snapped the book closed.
“Don’t put your bag down,” she said.
She stood and faced Cecelia and informed her that her services were no longer required by the Office of Internal Resources. It was that simple. Cecelia’s boss thanked her for her time. It didn’t seem like Cecelia was getting fired, because the air was not charged, but she was. She was being fired. Her boss wasn’t going to be dramatic, but neither would she be unclear. No one ever got fired from OIR. Not even Marie, who missed a shift about once a week. True, everyone else could work the equipment. Cecelia had had plenty of time to learn how, to ask someone to teach her, and she hadn’t. She’d remained ignorant.
Her boss held her hand out and Cecelia reached and shook it. This lady wanted Cecelia to leave so she could get back to her zombie book. This lady had never been a bit curious about Cecelia and she wasn’t curious now. She was only curious about her undead pep squad. Cecelia had an impulse to tell the woman that sometimes her enemies became victims of arson, that the woman better watch her back, but she stifled it. Cecelia still hadn’t heard anything about the barn. Nate hadn’t said a word. Nate’s parents had probably decided to cover the whole thing up, for whatever reason, and they probably had the pull to do that, to make it like something that was important to someone had never happened. But there was another way to think about it. Maybe the barn was exactly why she was being fired. This was the world’s next trick, the next step in the dance. She’d taken the barn and now she had to give up her job.
“I can’t believe it took so long for you to do this,” Cecelia said.
The woman made a face.
“What’s the worst part about being old?” Cecelia asked her.
“I’m only forty-one. I guess that’s old to you.”
“You’re forty-one but you might as well be seventy-one, and when you were twenty-one you might as well have been seventy-one. Right?”
The woman’s face had very little animation, but there was fear in her eyes, if Cecelia looked hard enough.
“I’m broke,” Cecelia said. “Which means I wasn’t in a position to quit a job, so thank you for firing me. It was up to you and you finally did it.”
The woman set her book down on the counter. On the back cover was a terrified crossing guard. “You’re welcome,” she said. “It was my pleasure.”
“Yeah,” Cecelia told her. “It turns out I’m not a piddling kiss-ass nerd, so this wasn’t going to be the job for me. I’m not like you. I can be miserable and I can be happy. I’m in congress with music from the great beyond. It lands in my brain. It’s happening now, in fact. I’m important. I’m needed.”
“I’m not miserable,” said the woman.
“This job is beneath me. I have a higher calling.”
“So I guess this is perfect. Everyone’s happy.”
“I’m not happy that often anymore,” said Cecelia. “But I’m happy right now.”
SOREN’S FATHER
He had sold his remaining three lunch trucks, but when Gee asked him what was new, he only shrugged. He had admitted to himself that inevitably he was going to wind up selling off the whole fleet, and a man selling three trucks was still a man selling a business, while a guy selling one truck was a guy selling one truck. If he let Gee know the business was gone, she’d double her efforts to recruit him to be the cook at her restaurant. The restaurant was going to happen, apparently. She’d even gotten an investor. She’d come to terms with the fact that Soren’s father wasn’t going to be her partner, wasn’t going to come up with any seed money or even an idea or two, and now she wanted him to be her “wing man.” She’d offered him thirty dollars an hour to learn how to make the chicken and then keep it coming. Then she’d offered thirty-five. If he were going to do it, he would’ve agreed by now. Soren’s father had more money in his bank account than he’d ever had, and the thought of that made him feel lost. It was supposed to mean something, having a hefty sum in the bank, but it felt like nothing. Everything was this way. He ought to have been over the moon to have Gee, but nowadays he felt lonelier during her visits than any other time. None of their talking felt right. He didn’t want to talk about the future, about plans, and small talk in the presence of a boy in a coma felt that much smaller. Gee could tell. She was testy. The last time she’d visited, a nurse had asked her if she could wear soft-soled shoes the next time she came to the clinic because her heels clacked and some of the patients slept in the afternoon. Gee had let her have it, a nurse Soren’s father had seen around but didn’t know yet. Gee had asked her if she thought the patients appreciated the toxic cloud of perfume she dragged into all their rooms. She asked if the nurse had had a run-in with a skunk and was trying to cover it up. She asked the nurse if she owned stock in the perfume company. She asked the nurse if she thought it would be pleasant to be trapped in a flower shop as it burned to the ground.