43

Rose

Rose worked the 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. shift, and she comes home exhausted and stinking of grease. Of all the things she hates about this job, the grease is the worst. It sticks to her for hours after she’s punched out and makes her feel like the place never leaves her. Grease in her hair and in her skin and in her clothes.

Vince is watching television from his chair when she walks in the door. He doesn’t turn, but she says hello on her way to the shower. He’s still mad at her, and even if he has the right to be, he also doesn’t have the right to be. But all she can think about now is getting rid of the grease that reminds her of the job she now has and the better one she had before.

She started sending out résumés the day after Garrett Haines fell, even though Zach didn’t fire her until the next day. She knew it was coming, and what with Vince and all, she had to get a jump on things. She applied for administrative assistant jobs everywhere, from an accountant around the corner to an engineering company in Cambridge to big corporations through Monster.com. Even a couple of staffing agencies. She got lots more interviews than she thought she would, but when her references were over ten years old and she had none from her last position, the employers lost interest real fast. So she took the job at Taco Bell.

She stands under the shower and tries not to get mad at Vince but she does anyway. He still isn’t working and when she confessed everything to him about Metropolis he threw a fit. He got all furious over the money she took from Serge, Marta, and Liddy, and especially about her letting Serge into other units to take pictures. Vince said it was immoral and she was immoral and that she’d broken the law. He insisted she go to confession that very day.

But when she came home from church, he was still on the warpath and started in on her about how she had broken the law just so Michael could be on the football team that didn’t do anything to stop him from screwing up. Vince claimed he was so deeply disappointed in her that he didn’t want to even look at her. That’s a laugh. How about how deeply disappointed she is in him—always being in his chair with his drink, and his dirty hair that’s no picnic to look at or to smell.

And “immoral” is the wrong word anyways. She didn’t hurt anyone and actually helped them by giving them a place to live when they didn’t have anywhere else to go. She wasn’t blackmailing anyone or threatening them, and they were all happy to pay her. Grateful even. She isn’t saying that what she did wasn’t wrong because Zach could have gotten into trouble if she got caught, but it wasn’t immoral. And it isn’t even why Zach is in trouble now. She didn’t say any of this to Vince and just listened to him carry on. She doesn’t like to argue and didn’t want to start a fight that would upset the girls.

After her shower she starts dinner. They’ve been eating a lot of pasta since she got fired, which is what she’s making when the doorbell rings. Vince doesn’t move so she wipes her hands and goes down to the first floor. The young girl who’s standing on the other side of the glass has skin the color of Marta’s and is nicely dressed. Rose opens the door. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Ms. Rose Gentilini,” the girl says with a weak smile. When Rose says that’s her, the girl pulls an envelope from her oversized bag and offers it to Rose. “This is for you.”

Rose takes it from her. “What is it?”

“You’ve been served.” She nods and walks back to the sidewalk.

Rose turns the envelope over and back. Very official-looking. She rips it open. A subpoena ordering her to appear at the law offices of Bernkopf Goodman on March 22, to be deposed in the personal injury lawsuit of W. Garrett Haines III, of Boston, Massachusetts, vs. Metropolis Storage Warehouse, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dear Jesus.

“I’m, I mean, I was, I was the office manager there,” Rose answers Mr. Blalock, Garrett Haines’s lawyer. Ms. Rubin, Zach’s lawyer, told her to give short answers because if she kept talking she might admit to some important thing by mistake.

“Ms. Gentilini, could you please tell us exactly what your duties were at the Metropolis Storage Warehouse?”

Rose is nervous enough and being called Ms. Gentilini when she always thinks of herself as Mrs. Gentilini is making it worse. She also doesn’t like how they keep saying Metropolis Storage Warehouse instead of just Metropolis. She tries to answer Mr. Blalock’s question, but she stumbles and stutters and is sure she’s repeating herself and leaving things out. She didn’t know a deposition was so much like a trial and all official like this. She thought a lawyer was just going to ask her questions in his office.

Instead she’s in a big conference room on the thirty-third floor with a huge table and walls on three sides that are all windows facing the water and the city. Mr. Blalock is here with two other people, and Ms. Rubin has one assistant. Then there’s the stenographer and two other girls that seem to be just hanging around. The lawyers made Rose swear to tell the truth, and now both of them are asking her questions back and forth and back and forth. She’s been afraid of this ever since the girl gave her the envelope, but it’s even worse than she thought.

“So one of your duties was to oversee maintenance of the two elevators in the building?”

“Yes,” she says, and it comes out almost like a whimper.

Mr. Blalock checks his notes. “And ensuring that annual inspections were completed in a timely fashion was also part of this responsibility?”

She closes her eyes and nods.

“Please speak up, Ms. Gentilini. The court reporter needs verbal responses.”

“Yes.”

“And when was the last time these inspections were done?”

Rose stares out to the harbor and watches the planes taking off and landing at Logan. She doesn’t look at anyone in the room and just answers each question as quickly as she can. Except that no matter how fast she talks, each answer makes her sound like a bigger and bigger fool. And this makes it seem like Zach is a bad owner who cared so little about the safety of his building that he turned the responsibility for it over to a fool.