At nine o'clock Sunday morning, my CEO sat on my parents' couch with a coffee, a plate of sliced peaches, and her notebook open on her knee, prepared to watch a detective show like it was a board meeting.
"You take notes," Dad said, with rising respect.
"I take notes on everything. It's not a compliment to the show yet. It has one episode to earn the pen."
"Dad, tell her about the canal one. She'll get it faster than I did."
"You didn't get it at all," Dad said. "You said it was the wife."
"I said it was the wife because the show spent twenty minutes telling me to say it was the wife."
It earned the pen. Mom drifted in around the second commercial break and pretended to fold laundry that was already folded.
Ori settled on top of the television with her hands flat on her knees, in the everyday dress, having ruled the day ordinary and turned herself out correctly for it regardless. She gave the detectives nine minutes.
"The partner did it."
Dad checked the top of the television, found nothing there, and went back to the show.
"The partner has held the second chair eleven years and wants the first," she said, under the music going into the break. "This one has watched men want the first chair. They all sit like that."
Evelyn's pen stopped for a second and then went on.
I sat in the middle while my father presented the canal evidence to a nine-figure executive, and she weighed it seriously.
The partner did it. The show gave it up in the last five minutes. Dad stood, pointed once at the television, and said nothing at all.
Evelyn nodded. "The partner."
Dad held out his hand. Evelyn shook it with complete sincerity, one pump.
"Anyone could see it was the partner," my mother said, from the laundry.
Dad turned around slowly. I got up to help pack the car before the trial started.
At the door, my mother handed Evelyn a bag heavy with containers, stacked and labeled, banchan for a week. Evelyn received it with both hands, which was the correct form. My mother saw that it was.
"Thank you for the guest room. And for the stories about him," Evelyn said. "I'd like to come back when there's galbi again."
"Galbi has no season," my mother said. "Come back."
I drove her to the airport with the containers riding in her lap because she declined to trust them to the truck bed.
"So I fly home," she said, watching the fields go by, "with eleven declines, four pages of notes from your mother, and no answers. It was the most productive trip I've taken in years, and I want you to know I mean that without any irony at all."
"You don't do irony."
"I don't. It saves everyone time."
"Serious question. What happens to that bag when you land? My mother packed a week of food for a woman I have watched eat exactly twice, and both times you went at the plate like somebody was about to take it away. There's a version of this where those containers die in a refrigerator on the eleventh floor and I hear about it in March."
"I'll eat them."
"Standing up, over the sink, with your coat still on."
"Yes."
"That's what I thought. Eat the sprouts first, then. They go off before the rest of it, and my mother is going to ask me which one you started with, and I'm not going to lie to her about it." I watched a mile marker go by. "Is anybody meeting you at the other end, or is it just the car?"
"The car."
She turned a page in the notebook without reading it. "Wednesday. My office, one o'clock. I've cleared the whole afternoon and told no one why, which was easy, since I don't know why. I only know what you said on the porch."
"I said what I meant. Wednesday at one, and I'll be in the chair early with the coffee, and bring the notebook, because some of what comes off that window is going to need writing down."
She looked at me for a long moment past comfortable. For once I couldn't tell what she was looking for.
At the curb she got out, gathered the case and the containers, and stood a moment in the wind coming off the flat land.
"Thank you for the weekend, Chairman," she said, and went through the doors without looking back.
Ori came up off my collar onto the top of the wheel and stayed there while the doors closed and a shuttle bus pulled in and took them out of sight.
"This one has a request and it is not a small one."
"Go ahead."
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"That one has served you since September without a title that means anything. Chairman and chief executive are trade words. They describe a function. This one is asking you to give her something that is not a function."
"She'd hate that."
"This one is aware." She had not moved off the wheel. "This one is asking anyway, and this one will ask again."
I put the truck in gear and drove home with the radio on and the window down.
The squad chat found me before I made the county line.
Jenna.SIGHTING REPORT. sol was downtown saturday night with a tall gorgeous mystery woman in a COAT
Kayla.i have a friend who works the door at the taqueria. the committee requests a statement
Dana.maybe his cousin!!
Jenna.dana. sweetie.
Sol.Business colleague, here to see some land the company owns. She flew home an hour ago, and she'd want you to know the coat was tailored. The committee may stand down.
Kayla.statement received. the committee is not adjourning
Sienna said nothing in the chat. She knew everything the chat didn't, and I sat at a red light thinking about how backwards that was.
Monday afternoon she was at the table first. Third floor, corner window, the good light she claims is the reason.
My highlighter sat by her elbow. It was hers now. She had the practice ponytail in and her econ spread out across the table.
I set her latte down on her side and took my seat, which used to be my other seat, and the wobbly leg thunked its greeting.
"Okay so. Before you even sit." She pointed the highlighter at me. "I have a list. Of questions. It's the length of a CVS receipt, I typed it at one in the morning, and at some point it developed SECTIONS. I'm not proud of the sections."
"I've seen the planner. Honestly, I'd have been worried by anything less than sections."
"Right?? Okay, but here's the thing." She uncapped the highlighter and recapped it. "I looked at the list at one a.m. and I got, like, weirdly sad about it? Because the second I start asking, stuff changes. And I don't want stuff changing on a MONDAY. Mondays can't carry that. So today's normal. You bring the latte, you're mean about my error bars, the list stays sealed. That's the whole. That's today."
"Then that's today, and it sounds like a good one to me. And whenever you do open the list, I'll be at this table for that day too. Same seat, same coffee, and I'll bring the latte whether you open it or not."
"Good. Great. Being so normal." She pulled a problem set over and then didn't look at it.
Ori had gone up into the stacks while we worked and came back without saying where she had been. She landed on the corner of the table and stood there a while before she said anything.
"This one cannot check any of it."
Sienna moved the highlighter three inches without knowing why she had.
"On the other side this one could confirm a thing by asking. Here this one has to believe the shelf." Her wings had gone still. "They wrote it all down because they had to. This one has decided that is the more impressive method and is not enjoying having arrived at it."
"One thing that's not on the list, though, because it's not about you. Bryce and I talked. Saturday, after you left."
"How'd it go?"
"He asked me straight out if it was a date. And I owed him a real answer, so I gave him the real one, which was 'I don't know,' which is the WORST possible answer, Sol. You can't hand a quarterback 'I don't know.' They're not built for it. They need the coverage named."
"What did he do with it?"
"And he was decent about it. Completely decent. Which somehow made it worse? We're fine. The team still does tacos. I'm not talking about it anymore, except I'm clearly still talking about it, so stop me."
"I'm not stopping you. Think out loud, that's what the table's for. And look, he asked you a real question and you answered it honestly, and 'I don't know' counts when it's true. He'll be okay, Sienna. That's a steady guy, and I say that as somebody whose hand he tried to crush at the fence."
She looked at me for a second too long.
"You're doing the supportive thing again."
"It's one of my qualities. The chat has a whole thread about it." I pulled my notes over. "How's the shoulder holding up? You were rolling it at the end of practice Thursday."
"Fine. Coach had me ice it. It's fine."
"The chat is BANNED from this table." She finally looked at the problem set. "Okay. Error bars. Be mean."
So we worked. She mouthed the formulas and parked the highlighter behind her ear and accused the table of hiding it twice. I was mean about the error bars at the exact level of mean she finds useful.
A hundred years ago I carried this table in my head across ten worlds.
Wednesday at one I'd be in Manhattan, taking the first questions off a window. The pulling back had already started. So I stayed in the Monday all afternoon.
She started packing her bag around five, then didn't finish. "Hey. There's a thing at the dollar theater tonight. It's a shark movie. It's supposed to be genuinely terrible, like, historically terrible. Maddie bailed because she has her night class."
"That's the one she's been at war with all semester."
"The war is not going well." She zipped the bag and didn't look up. "So. Terrible shark movie. Not a date. You in?"
"I'm in. I haven't seen a historically terrible movie in years, and I've missed the genre more than I can say."
"See, that's the correct attitude. Bring it exactly like that."
The dollar theater had fifty years of popcorn butter in the walls and ran its trailers loud enough to feel in your ribs. We got the middle seats of the middle row and split the biggest popcorn they sold.
The movie was everything she'd promised. The shark defied three separate laws of physics in the first ten minutes, and Sienna grabbed my arm at the first jump scare and then pretended she hadn't. She provided quiet expert commentary on the cheerleader character's form, which was, in her professional opinion, criminal.
"Nobody hits a toe touch in a tsunami," she whispered. "Respect the craft."
"The shark has no craft to respect. I'm starting to think that's the whole premise."
Ori came off my shoulder a minute before the commentary stopped and settled on the seat back in front of us, which she does not do in a room with strangers in it.
Somewhere past the second act, the commentary stopped.
Her head came down on my shoulder, slow, in stages, and stayed. The ponytail tickled my neck. Her breathing went long and even. The shark ate a helicopter and she slept through it.
I sat very still. Her weight against my shoulder was slight and specific, and I kept my breathing even so she'd stay. The shark worked through the third act without us.
She had seen it coming before I did, from a seat on my own shoulder. She sat facing us with her hands flat on her knees and her wings stopped, and she said nothing for the rest of the movie.
The credits ran. The lights came halfway up. I let her sleep four more minutes into them, because practice runs her into the ground on Mondays and because I could.
And then, for the first time since a bus shelter in September, my status screen chimed.
I didn't open it. Opening it meant moving.