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I PULLED UP THE UNIVERSITY’S online directory, but it was so out-of-date, Bob Wilson was still listed as chair of the history department. In fact, Bob had “voluntarily” retired. Right after he’d publicly opposed the administration’s plan to make our general education sequence more “customer friendly” by removing the history requirement.
There was no way around it. I was going to have to speak to an actual person. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“IT department,” answered a pleasant male voice. “Atticus Marx speaking. Help you?”
He was new, of course. Mahina State both underpaid and understaffed the IT department. The predictable result was the kind of employee turnover you might expect to find among the Borgia family’s food-tasting staff.
I introduced myself and asked where I might find an up-to-date employee directory. I didn’t want to ask for Melanie Polewski’s email address specifically. Her name had been in the newspaper, and Mr. IT Guy might recognize it and get suspicious. I just needed Melanie’s campus username. Once I had that, I could guess her password and get into her email. Going through her email would certainly be a better use of my time than suffering through her appalling attempts at narrative nonfiction.
“We’re working on the update,” he said. “Should be done by September.”
“Oh, dear. September is three months from now. Do you have a draft of the new directory you can send me?”
“If we had that, we’d be almost done. I have our list of updates, though. If you want, I can shoot it over to you. It’s a mess, I gotta warn you.”
“No, the update list would be perfect, thank you.” I gave him my email address, thanked him again, and went to my inbox, where his message was already waiting with the attachment. Gold! There she was. Melanie Polewski, assigned username mpolew10.
I pulled up an incognito browser window and logged into the campus email as mpolew10. After a couple of tries at her password, I was in. (It was Ph@llusinwonderland.) I congratulated myself on my clever solution. Not only might Melanie’s email contain some useful clues, but the medium would have discouraged the stylistic excesses that made her fiction writing so painful to read.
I didn’t find anything remarkable right away. There were some routine human resources-related messages in her inbox, and some back and forth with her new English department colleague Nicole Nixon about meeting for lunch. Then I clicked on her ‘sent’ folder and was surprised to see a message addressed to me:
Hey Molly your the first one im writing to from this email guess what this is from my new job! At Mahina State! One year VAP position but I hear they have a permanent opening fingers crossed! OK I know your really bad with email haha so ill call.
It was perfectly Melanie, all friendly up until the little poison barb at the end. And she had my email address wrong by one letter, which was why I had never received it. I was surprised to see I was the first one she had written to from her new work account. Nothing in her sent mail folder had an earlier timestamp. Melanie and I hadn’t been very good friends, but apparently she didn’t have any better ones.
I closed the email program and went back to my paper. I made some comments and changes in the text, and then emailed Betty with the revised paper and the output showing my statistical analysis.
I was fortunate to have Betty Jackson as a collaborator. We’d gotten our work into some decent journals already, and she had a nice, rich dataset we could squeeze a few more pubs out of. One thing that made Betty a dream to work with was her top-notch time management. This was a skill developed out of necessity. Every year, Betty got stuck onto about fifty different high-profile committees, each one wanting to claim “diverse” membership.
The conference paper was now back on Betty’s desk. I’d crossed one task off my short to-do list, at least for now. And I had looked through Melanie’s email account, if not her computer files, so there were at least one and a half things checked off. My feeling of accomplishment evaporated as I realized I had one more task:
I still had to call Donnie to let him know I was returning his key.
Had I given it some thought, I might have realized it wasn’t necessary to call Donnie on the phone. I could have just put his key in an envelope and dropped it into the mailbox. For some reason, this elegant solution did not occur to me at the time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Donnie answered on the second ring; mid-morning was a slow time at Donnie’s Drive-Inn. Keep it neutral, I reminded myself. Businesslike.
Funny how businesslike has come to be a sort of synonym for rational. As if businesspeople were not subject to moods, feuds, prejudice and pettiness. Having worked in a business school for a few years now and having interacted with the College of Commerce’s Friends in the Business Community, I truly had no idea why anyone thought that.
“Oh, hi Donnie, it’s me. I’m just calling to let you know I’m going to return your key. I can drop it off at your house today.”
So you don’t even have to see me, I thought.
Donnie was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said,
“Molly, do whatever you need to do.”
Whatever I need to do? Like this was all my doing?
“So it sounds like you’re perfectly happy to let this whole thing fall apart the first time we have a fight?”
“Do I seem happy?”
“Then why haven’t you tried to contact me at all?”
“I didn’t want to push you. I know you don’t like being pressured. You’ve made that very clear.”
Sure. I was supposed to believe that the only reason he hadn’t called to apologize was because he was really concerned about respecting my boundaries. More likely his ardor had cooled when he found out that unlike his skinny ex-wife Sherry Di Napoli, I wasn’t really Italian.
“Do you even remember what we fought about, Donnie?”
“Of course I do. Davison was rude to you. His behavior was inexcusable. I had a long conversation with him after you left.”
“Well, okay, it’s a start, but here’s the thing. You’re not addressing the larger issue. Davison’s appalling behavior wasn’t some aberration. Davison, sorry to say, is spoiled. And it’s a shame, because that kid has every advantage in life. He could make something of himself if he had any guidance at all.”
“Molly, what do you want me to do? He’s almost twenty-one years old.”
“I don’t know, Donnie. Fix him. I mean, not like that, although now I think of it...okay, look. He’s still financially dependent on you. You have a lot of leverage.”
“I thought you hated the word leverage.”
“Only when it’s used as a transitive verb.”
“It’s not so simple, Molly. I don’t have as much influence as you think I do. Especially now. He’s been avoiding me.”
So Donnie was abdicating his responsibility again. He gave Davison a little talking-to, and as far as Donnie was concerned, that was the end of it. I was seething, but I didn’t want to give Donnie the satisfaction of staying calm while I ranted and swore at him.
“I’m very sorry to have bothered you at work. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.” I managed to hang up before I burst into tears of frustration.
So that was it. I said I would return the key, so now I had to follow through. Let myself into Donnie’s house, drop the key in some obvious place, and vacate the premises. Should I leave a note? No, I didn’t trust myself not to be melodramatic, and besides, there was a good chance Davison would find it first and read it. I couldn’t bear the thought.
At this point I still could have put the key into an envelope and dropped it in the mail. But again, this sensible solution continued to elude me.
I got dressed and drove down to Donnie’s neighborhood, where unremarkable mid-century ranch houses sat on three acre lots, bounded by chain link fencing. My mainland prejudice against chain link fences had not abated. Where I was from, houses surrounded by chain link fences were usually marked with graffiti, a clear signal to passing motorists to lock the doors and drive straight to the freeway onramp. Mahina was different. Chain link carried no stigma; it was a practical choice, one of the few materials capable of standing up to Mahina’s relentless rainfall.
I couldn’t tell whether anyone was home. Donnie had converted his open carport to a garage, and the garage door was closed. I knocked on the door and heard no reply, which was a relief. I really didn’t want to run into Davison. I took Donnie’s key out of the change compartment of my wallet, and let myself in.
“Hello?” I called out.
“Hello,” answered a cheerful female voice with an East Coast rasp.
“Hello?” I followed the voice to the hallway off the living room, where the bedrooms were.
And who did I see coming down the hall but a slim woman in an oversized black satin bathrobe, her corkscrew hair still wet from the shower.
We stood and stared at each other for a few seconds. Then she broke into a broad grin.
“Molly!” She held her arms out. “C’mere!”
I approached her warily and she clasped me in a damp hug.
I had been afraid of running into Donnie’s son. I hadn’t even considered the possibility I might encounter his ex-wife.