He reattached the router cord and began extricating himself from underneath the desk. “This here is the hardest part of my job,” he told Mrs. Prescott as he struggled to his knees. He grabbed on to the desk frame and rose to a standing position.
“Oh, pshaw, you’re too young to talk that way,” Mrs. Prescott said.
“Young! I’ll be forty-four on my next birthday.”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Prescott said. And then, “I did tell Glynda you sometimes give lessons, but she claimed she would forget it all two minutes after you left.”
“She’s right,” Micah said. “She ought to just buy my book.”
“But lessons are so much more—oh! Look at that!”
She was staring at her computer screen, both hands clasped beneath her chin. “Amazon!” she said in a thrilled tone.
“Yep. Now. Were you watching what I did?”
“Well, I…Not exactly, no.”
“I turned off your computer; I unplugged the modem cord; I unplugged the router cord. See there where they’re labeled?”
“Oh, Mr. Mortimer, I would never remember all that!”
“Suit yourself,” he said. He reached for his clipboard on the top of her desk and started making out her bill.
“I’m thinking of ordering my granddaughter an African-American baby doll,” Mrs. Prescott said. “What do you think of that?”
“Is your granddaughter African-American?”
“Why, no.”
“Then I think it would just look weird,” he said.
“Oh, Mr. Mortimer! I certainly hope not!”
He tore off the top copy of her bill and handed it to her. “I feel bad even charging you,” he told her, “what with the piddly amount of work I did.”
“Now, don’t you talk that way,” she said. “You saved my life! I ought to pay you triple.” And she went off to fetch her checkbook.
The fact was, he reflected as he was driving home, that even if she had paid him triple, this job barely supported him. On the other hand, it was work he liked, and at least he was his own boss. He wasn’t all that fond of people ordering him around.
Once upon a time, more had been expected of him. He’d been the first in his family to go to college; his father had pruned trees for Baltimore Gas and Electric and his mother had waited tables, as did all four of his sisters to this day. They’d viewed Micah as their shining star. Until he wasn’t anymore. For one thing, he’d had to take a number of odd jobs to flesh out his partial scholarship, which had made keeping up with his studies kind of a struggle. More important, though: college just wasn’t how he’d pictured it. He had thought it would be a place that would give him all the answers, that would provide a single succinct Theory of Everything to organize his world by, but instead it seemed an extension of high school: same teachers at the front of the room repeating things over and over, same students yawning and fidgeting and whispering among themselves throughout the lectures. He lost his enthusiasm. He floundered about; he changed majors twice; he ended up in computer science, which was at least something definite—something yes-or-no, black-or-white, as logical and orderly as a game of dominoes. Midway through his senior year (which had taken him five years to get to), he dropped out to start a software company with a classmate named Deuce Baldwin. Deuce provided the money and Micah provided the brainpower—specifically, a program of his own invention that sorted and archived emails. Now it would be a dinosaur, of course. The world had moved on. But at the time it had filled a real need, which made it even more unfortunate when Deuce had proved impossible to get along with. Rich guys! They were all the same. Forever throwing their weight around, acting so entitled. Things had gone from bad to worse, till cut to the chase and Micah walked out. He couldn’t even take his program with him, because he hadn’t had the foresight to nail down his rights to it.
He turned into his space on the lot and cut the engine. His watch read 11:47. “Flawless,” Traffic God murmured. Micah had made the whole trip without a single misstep, a single fumble or correction.
Really, his life was good. He had no reason to feel unhappy.
* * *
—
A man needed the viruses stripped off his computer, and a mom-and-pop grocery store wanted to start billing its customers online. In between, Micah checked out a faulty wall switch in 1B. 1B was Yolanda Palma, a dramatic-looking woman in maybe her early fifties with a flaring mane of dark hair and a mournful, sagging face. “So what’s new in your life?” she asked as she watched him test the voltage. She always behaved as if they were old friends, which they weren’t. “Oh,” he said, “not much,” but he might as well not have spoken, because she was already saying, “Me, I’m at it again. Joined a whole new dating service and started over. Some folks never learn, I guess.”
“How’s that working out?” he asked. The wall switch was dead as a doornail.
“Well, last night I met this guy for a drink at Swallow at the Hollow. A real-estate inspector. He claimed he was six foot one, but you know how that goes. And he could’ve stood to lose a few pounds, although who am I to talk, right? Anyhow, turns out that he’d been divorced for three and a half weeks. Three and a half, like he’d been counting the days, and not in a good way. Like his divorce had been a personal tragedy. And sure enough, straight off he has to tell how his ex-wife was so gorgeous she could have been a model. How she wore a size two dress. How she didn’t own a single pair of shoes that weren’t stilettos and therefore the tendons in her heels or something had shortened so her toes were permanently pointed. If she walked barefoot to the bathroom at night she had to walk tippy-toe. He made it sound like that was an attractive quality, but all I could picture was a woman with sort of hooves, know what I mean?”
“I’m going to have to pick up a new switch before I can fix this,” Micah told her.
She was lighting a cigarette now and had to exhale before she spoke. “Okay,” she said offhandedly, dropping her lighter back into her pocket. “So we have one drink and then I say I’d better be getting home. ‘Home!’ he says. Says, ‘I was thinking we might go to my place.’ And he reaches over and clamps a hand on my knee and gazes meaningfully into my eyes. I look back at him. I freeze. I don’t say a word. Finally he takes his hand away and says, ‘Well, or else not, I guess.’ ”
“Ha,” Micah said.
He was replacing the switch plate now. Yolanda watched thoughtfully, batting her smoke away with one hand each time she exhaled. “Tonight it’s a dentist,” she said.
“You’re trying again?”