CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Today’s staff meeting was the most orderly that I’d ever seen it, although admittedly I didn’t have a large sample size. Vanetta looked cheerful and optimistic and was wearing a sort of bronze power suit that said “don’t fuck with me.” Tyler was looking preppy in a Calcutta collar and brown blazer, and even Gary was less schlubby. I think there had been a general effort to dress up for Mr. Granger, and I hoped he appreciated it. This was what it felt like to not be on a sinking ship. It seemed like yesterday’s good news, such as it was, had finally percolated through. The poor saps.

Not present, once again, was Archie. This time his absence went entirely without comment, almost without observation. So much so, in fact, that I took it that there was a natural and mundane reason that he wasn’t around. This turned out to not be the case, but I get ahead of myself.

“Good morning, everyone,” said Vanetta. “I didn’t ask you, but I can see we all dressed up a little. We’re looking good, fellas.”

“I always look good,” said Gary, who, in point of order, did not look good on this or any other occasion I had seen him.

“Mr. Granger should be here in an hour or so, and DE would like for this event to go as smoothly as possible. He’s going to do what is called in the business a puff piece, and while I usually hate this kind of thing, I think it’s the least we can do for our corporate overlords.”

“All praise the Dark Ones,” said Gary, who had clearly already had too much caffeine.

“Dahlia,” said Vanetta. “You’re going to get to play hostess here. Lead Mr. Granger around the office, and make nice.”

“I am the physical embodiment of niceness,” I said, which didn’t even prompt a snarky remark.

“Start at Lawrence’s office,” said Vanetta, “and after a half hour pick him up and escort him to Archie.”

“Does Lawrence know about this?” I asked.

“This was all Lawrence’s idea,” said Vanetta. “He’s awful, but this kind of business-media relationship thing is his bread and butter.”

“It’s good to know you have a reason for keeping him around,” said Gary.

Vanetta did not respond to this remark either. Like I said, it was early.

“Gary and Quintrell, that means you get our visitor at eleven, and then I’ll have him from eleven thirty until whenever he leaves. When you’re not with him, look busy and productive, and when you are with him, seem engaging and act like you are not busy and have all the time in the world.”

“Those are opposite things,” said Gary.

“Ours is a house of lies,” said Vanetta.

“When do I see him?” asked Tyler.

“Let me check my schedule. Ah, yes, that would be never,” said Vanetta.

This irritated Tyler more than I thought it should, because he became positively peevish.

“I’m interesting. I could be profiled.”

“I’m not suggesting that you aren’t interesting,” said Vanetta. “But he didn’t mention wanting to meet with middle management.”

“I used to be a musician, you know,” said Tyler. “PocketApp called my score to CoffeeQuest Two ‘bracing.’”

“Please don’t do CoffeeQuest stories again,” said Gary. “We cannot endure them.”

I was keeping an eye, as best I could, on the desk in case of the—what I perceived to be unlikely—circumstance that someone would show up there. This was fortunate, because someone did show up there, just now, in a green paisley shirt.

“Hang on,” I said to the group, and left to greet the visitor, closing the door behind me, because I am a model of discretion.

“Cynthia Shaver?” said the man in front of me.

“Oh my God,” I told him.

This is probably the wrong response to any journalist visiting you, puff piece or no, but as I was not expecting Ignacio Granger to arrive for another fifty-five minutes, I was somewhat taken aback. I assumed it was Ignacio Granger, because who else would call me Cynthia Shaver, with an odd and distinctly menacing emphasis on the “v,” but I did double-check.

“Are you Mr. Granger? We weren’t expecting you to be here for another hour.”

“At last we meet. And please, call me Ignacio.”

Okay: a lot of simultaneous thoughts here, but I’ll try to turn through them in an orderly way. First and foremost: Did I screw up? I had been so occupied by the mysteries here, with the murders and the corporate espionage, had I actually just screwed up on secretarial stuff? Was he really supposed to be here at nine all along? Or was this jackass just early?

Secondly: I had sort of assumed that with the first name Ignacio, our touring journalist would be Hispanic, but in fact, Mr. Granger looked to be exceedingly Irish. He had short, wavy red hair and peach skin with freckles and was even wearing green. He looked like the leprechaun on a box of Lucky Charms.

Thirdly, I still had to deal with my ridiculous explanation that my name was Cynthia, which was now coming back to haunt me like we were in the final act of a Greek play.

Of these, I asked about question two, because it was the safest territory.

“You don’t look like an Ignacio,” I told him.

Ignacio responded to this in a way that suggested that he had been subjected to this observation hundreds of thousands of times. He wasn’t irritated or bored, but somehow both together in a DQ Blizzard of petulant emotions. I shall call him boritated. He looked so wearied by the inquiry, that detective or not, I felt guilty for pointing it out.

“I was named for the cabbie that delivered my mother to the hospital,” he said. “There was a whole thing, family lore, big story, blah, blah, blah.”

“It sounds fascinating,” I said, despite the fact I could clearly tell that Ignacio did not want to discuss his name. It couldn’t have been clearer if he had been wearing a T-shirt that said: DON’T ASK ME ABOUT MY NAME. But there I was.

“It’s really not,” said Ignacio.

“I find names fascinating,” I said, which was also not true, but I felt like I needed to stall this goon for forty-five minutes, and we had to talk about something.

“The full version of the story isn’t that great. Plus,” said Ignacio, displaying a reporter’s instincts for separating fact from fiction, “I think my family has exaggerated it.”

“Parents lie about names,” I told him. I wanted to tell him the origin of my name, which my mom said came from a dream, where she was walking in a field of dahlias, and which I later learned was bullshit, because she just ripped the name from Knots Landing. I couldn’t tell that story, however, so I made up one for Cynthia.

“My parents claimed that they named me for Cynthia Ozick, the poet,” I told them. “But it turned out that I was named after my grandmother’s dog.”

This appeared to be the right thing to say to Ignacio Granger, because he smiled and seemed less odious.

“Could be worse,” he said. “You could be named Fido.”

I feel as though there is undoubtedly some hipster named Fido reading this passage now, and to him, I apologize. These are Ignacio’s words, not mine. Feel free to cross out the phrase “less odious” in the preceding paragraph, and replace it with “more odious” or even “a real jerkface.” Or just improvise, Fido! You are the captain of your own ship.

“Things could always be worse,” I said, probably hollowly, because at the time I was thinking: “This is rock bottom.”

“So your name is really Cynthia Shaver?”

“Yes,” I said, quickly and confidently, because stalling on an easy question like “what is your name?” is not the way to inspire trust.

“You wanna show me an ID that says that?” asked Ignacio.

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”

Then I stood up, confidently strode to Vanetta’s office, and said: “Give me just a second to let everyone know you’re here.” Ignacio wanted to follow behind me, because he is an ass, but I told him to sit down and to wait a damned moment, and that we would be with him in a second. Only I didn’t say “damned.” At least not with my lips. I said it with looks and with gestures.

I reentered the office to find that Tyler was still whining about not getting a special visit from this idiot journalist. It was hard to diagnose the origin of this obsession, given that he alone knew that the company was doomed, but we all have our private quirks. I interrupted his whining, which brought me goodwill from everyone, even Tyler.

“Ignacio Granger is here early,” I said. “Surprise!”

Thankfully the gang wasn’t hit as hard by this news as I had feared might be the case.

“Nothing ever goes as planned,” said Vanetta. “We’ll just have to move up our schedule. Does that work for everyone?”

“Stall him fifteen minutes,” said Gary.

“Got it,” I said.

Everyone did not leave the office at once—I suppose because Vanetta had a few more things to say, and so I returned to the room to talk to Ignacio Granger a little more.

“There’s a funny story about my brother’s name, actually,” I said, stalling.

“Oh?”

“It was supposed to be Alder, like the tree, but it was typed incorrectly on his birth certificate. And my parents just went with it.”

“What his name?” asked Ignacio.

“Alden.”

“It’s hard to fact check stories like that.”

People began quietly filing out of Vanetta’s office, but slowly and gracefully, and not desperately running toward their cubicles.

“Do you have any questions for me about how Cahaba works?” I asked, which was stupid, really, because I didn’t fully understand how Cahaba worked.

“I really want to speak mostly to Vanetta,” said Ignacio. “This is mostly about her, actually. There are so few female designers, much less black designers, she’s sort of like a unicorn.”

This question made me a little wary of Ignacio, because I was guessing that this was not how Vanetta wanted to brand herself. But, of course, I couldn’t speak for her. Maybe she knew about this angle all along and was delighted by it.

“I don’t know that I’d call her a unicorn,” I said. “She’s more of a dragon, or perhaps a sphinx.”

“What’s it like having a lady as a boss?” asked Ignacio, blithely, as if this were the sort of question a human could ask in 2017.

“You know,” I said, “let me check on Lawrence, very quickly, because he’s going to be the first person to meet with you.”

Ignacio smiled at me and reached over my desk and took an éclair. I didn’t offer him the éclair, and this irritated me. As I left, I told Ignacio:

“It’ll be just a second—and trust me, you’ll love Lawrence.”