The Return of Jonah Gray Page 2

  “Right. It must have been me,” Martina said. “Didn’t that Kevin have a nice smile?”

  “Contractor,” I explained. “They get audited an average of three times throughout their careers. A lot of cash expenses. I knew as soon as he told me.”

  Martina shook her head. She reached into my purse and pulled out my accounting book. She placed it on the bar between us. “Guys skip the brainy girls.”

  “That’s not always true.”

  “Okay. Guys skip girls who can assess penalties with interest.”

  I conceded the point.

  “And he was cute,” she went on. “If you’d just said that you work at the Gap, you’d be on your way to a first date right now.”

  “I don’t work at the Gap,” I reminded her. “That’s the problem. That’s always the problem.”

  Chapter Two

  SO PEOPLE SOMETIMES TRIED TO AVOID ME. SURE, I might have wished it were different, but I was an excellent auditor. Not everyone could do my job. Not everyone could build lives atop quantitative foundations or look beyond numbers to the events and decisions that put them there. The best auditors love to unravel the story that lurks in the data, to see hidden meanings and solve the puzzle. They have an eye for detail and great powers of concentration.

  At least, they should, and I always had. Only, sometime earlier that month, I had started to drift. I couldn’t trace it to a single event or day. I’d only realized it once inertia had taken hold—like a cold you think you can keep from catching, or maybe it’s just allergies, and then one day you wake up clogged and froggy and foggy. Looking back, it felt gradual. I was late for work a few times one week, and again the next. I noticed that the muscles in my thighs were a little sore from bending at the knees to sneak by my colleagues’ cubicles. My calves felt stronger from taking the stairs more often to avoid running into my boss in the elevator. And then there was that feeling, more and more frequent, of having barely dodged a pothole or avoided a stray banana peel.

  Luckily, I’d been at my job long enough to know the minimum amount of work I could do without raising concern. I hadn’t even noticed the extent of my distraction until the day that my friend Ricardo, our office’s hiring manager, found me in the supply closet.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, after knocking on the door.

  “Sure. Why?” I asked back, looking up from a box of pens.

  “Uh, because you’ve been in here for, like, twenty minutes.”

  “Oh please.”

  “You have. I saw you go in and thought I’d wait, but you never came out. I thought maybe you were having a tryst.” He looked around the closet to see whether anyone else was hiding amid the office supplies. “What have you been doing?”

  “Thinking, I guess.” I hadn’t realized it had been twenty minutes.

  “Thinking? In here? About what?”

  I decided to be honest about where my mind had been. “Legal pads are yellow, right? And the original highlighters were yellow, too.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So wouldn’t they have been useless on a legal pad? I think maybe that’s why highlighters ended up branching out into blue and green and pink, while legal pads remain yellow.”

  “There are white legal pads,” Ricardo said. “I’ve seen them in all different colors.”

  “Sure, but when you think ‘legal pad,’ you think ‘yellow,’ don’t you?”

  “Honey, unless I’m bedding a handsome lawyer, I don’t think about legal pads.”

  “And then there are these ledger books, which are always light green. My theory is that they’re green because they’re reminiscent of the dollar bill, since they’re intended to hold financial data. But that begs the question of whether ledger pads are also green in England. Because the British pound isn’t green, and that might imply a totally different color origin.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ricardo said.

  “You asked what I was thinking about.”

  “I mean, why are you worrying about this? You’ve been in here for twenty minutes contemplating the history of office supplies? It’s August, sweetie. Every other auditor is complaining about the workload. I assume you’re snowed under, too. Is everything okay? You’re not in trouble, are you?”

  “You think I’m not getting my work done?” I asked, careful to sound indignant.

  “I’m just pointing out that maybe your investigative energy could be put to better use than in here.”

  I made a show of taking a box of pens before returning to my cubicle. What he didn’t say—maybe he didn’t know—was that I wasn’t getting my work done. I hadn’t been for weeks.

  Before that August, I’d taken pride in my ability to plow through, audit after audit, without a drop in focus. But the morning after Kevin’s unceremonious leave-taking from the Escape Room, I’d begun to review a return, only to find myself eavesdropping on Cliff, the auditor who sat on the far side of my cubicle wall. Later that afternoon, I had spent twenty minutes trying to deduce which grocery chain would be carrying the best peaches—based on proximity of the largest stores to local trucking routes. Moments after, I’d found myself wondering why horses and cats and dogs have hair but rabbits have fur. Ricardo was right; I was in trouble.

  In my double-wide cubicle at our Oakland district office, I stood up, jogged in place, did a few jumping jacks, then sat back down. I stared hard at the paperwork on my desk, hoping that the brief burp of exercise had forced blood into my brain. Ricardo had a point: the auditing season was in full swing. Stacks of folders had massed on my worktable, each file representing a return awaiting my analysis. I had to buckle down. I had to find some momentum or fake as much. I was a senior auditor, not a veterinarian, nor a fruit wholesaler, nor an office-supply historian. I was supposed to be setting an example.

  Then the phone rang, and I imagined that it might be Kevin, feeling guilt over his graceless getaway from the aptly named Escape Room. Maybe he had memorized my phone number and was calling to apologize. Maybe he’d called the IRS switchboard and asked for an auditor named Sasha. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Near the edge, maybe, but not beyond it.

  “Sasha Gardner,” I answered, glad for the excuse to close the file in front of me.

  “So S is for Sasha then,” a man said. It wasn’t Kevin.

  “In my case, yes.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by the comment. “May I help you?”

  “You’re not even a man,” he said. It sounded like an insult.

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “Though, as you probably know, Sasha is a male name in parts of Eastern Europe. How can I help you, sir?” I always tried to be polite at work. During any audit, and in the necessary correspondence before and after, I strove to remain detached but formal. I called people sir and ma’am and addressed them by their salutation and last name, assuming I knew it. There were strict codes of behavior to be followed when interacting with the public, and I took a certain pride in adhering to them. People will grasp at any excuse to hate the IRS, and one of my jobs was to keep them empty-handed.

  “My name’s Gordon, and I’m calling to tell you to stop what you’re doing. Just stop it! Cease and desist!”

  I glanced at the pad of paper on my desk. Earlier, I’d been doodling. Pictures of sailboats and rough waters. Pictures of trees, uprooted, leaves piling and swirling around them. “What I’m doing?” I repeated.

  “Pestering an honest, upstanding, hardworking man,” the man named Gordon said.

  “Do I know you?” I asked. “Was I pestering you?”

  Gordon harrumphed into the phone. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to get your mitts on all of us. Well, you won’t. Not if I can help it,” he said.

  “But—” I tried to cut in.

  “You make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?

  “Sir—” I tried again.

  “All you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much
right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.

  I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.

  “That is not a happy face.”

  At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.

  “I just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”

  “We have a question,” Susan said.

  “Susan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.

  “Dirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”

  “Not just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”

  “Paper?” Susan asked.

  “Legal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.

  “And we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.

  I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “Pica is from the Latin for magpie,” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”

  Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.

  “Fine. You win,” she said.

  “Win what?” I asked.

  “I bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”

  “Pica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”

  “I should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.

  “Like the Enigma?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

  Ricardo started to laugh.

  I was irked. “I have to get back to work,” I said. I made a show of standing up, walking to my table and pulling a folder from my stack of upcoming audits.

  “Sweetie, I meant it as a compliment,” Ricardo said. “We both did. Didn’t we, Susan?”

  “Sure,” Susan said, only less believably.

  I thought of Martina’s comment, about guys avoiding smart girls. Maybe she’d been wrong. Ricardo claimed to appreciate my magpie mind. Of course, I hadn’t realized that he’d been using it to earn money. And besides, Ricardo didn’t swing that way.

  I made a show of glancing inside the file I’d taken from the table.

  “I suppose we’ve all got work to do,” Susan said. I saw her glance at my stack of folders. “Some of us more than others.” They left me alone then.

  “Resident warehouse,” I muttered.

  “You say something, Sasha?” Cliff called through our mutual wall.

  “Nothing,” I called back. I looked again at the file I’d pulled off the table, then closed it and dropped it back atop the pile. Every folder represented someone who had already been notified of his or her upcoming audit. They weren’t going to wait until my inertia was gone.

  But then my phone rang again. Maybe it was Kevin.

  “Sasha Gardner,” I answered.

  “Sasha Gardner,” a woman repeated back. Her voice was wavery, watery, but her words were determined. “I’m calling to say that I think you have some nerve.”

  “Do you?” I’d never considered myself particularly brave.

  She didn’t answer. She just kept barreling on. “You’re harassing one of the best people I’ve ever known. If you’d only take the time to know him, to talk to him, you’d see.”

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked, understanding at once the sort of nerve she’d meant. My cheeks started burning. “Who is this?”

  “But no, you have to drop your poison into his life. Now, I don’t know what sort of a family you were raised in, Ms. Gardner, but I hope you take a good look at how you’re spending your time on God’s green earth and move on to better things. He’s had a hard enough year. Look at all he gave up. And for what? To have you bothering him? How about planting some happiness for a change and letting go that misery you sow?”

  “Who are you?” I asked again. “How did you get my name? Do you know Gordon?”

  “I’m a concerned citizen who felt an obligation to tell you that you work for the worst branch of our government.”

  “The IRS isn’t its own branch,” I said. “We’re a part of the Treasury which is a part of…” She had hung up. “Never mind.”

  I replaced the handset. In my previous six years at the service, I hadn’t received even one complaint. Now two in one afternoon? I looked around my office for clues. I listened for Cliff’s voice, wondering whether he was receiving the same phone-line vitriol. How could I defend myself when I didn’t know what I’d done, or to whom I’d done it? Who was this “he” that both callers had referred to?

  I was so flustered that when my phone rang again, I barked into it. “I know—I’m awful. There, I beat you to it, didn’t I? Surprised?”

  “Uh, this is Jody in reception. Your three o’clock appointment is here.”

  “Oh. Sure, Jody. I’ll be right there.”

  I had to get it together. I took a deep breath and glanced at my watch. That made me smile and, at least briefly, forget the phone calls. It was three o’clock exactly. They were right on time.

  I had predicted by the way they prepaid their bills that the Ritters would be punctual. I had a clear-cut image of them in my mind: Donald Ritter, the avuncular former radio-station manager, his stomach straining against the spongy weave of a golf shirt, his all-purpose, slip-on sneakers, and Miriam, who’d only started to work that year, half time at a children’s clothing store. She would get her hair set every week, was a crossword fanatic and probably carried her knitting in a public-radio tote.

  I didn’t know if the image I had built would be accurate, of course. I was never sure before I got an auditee into my cubicle. But I enjoyed the puzzle immensely, as well as the interim between the moment I wasn’t sure and seconds later, when I was. Imagine a life. Have you got it? I mean, have you really got it? Well then, let’s raise the curtain and bring out Donald and Miriam.

  I walked into our no-frills reception area and looked around. Three sets of folks were waiting. One guy, off the bat I knew he was way too slick. He wore a perfectly tailored suit and crocodile loafers. My folks, the Ritters, they were savers. They weren’t wealthy, but I reckoned they’d been saving ten percent of Don’s take-home for the past twenty years. The guy in the suit—he’d dropped some serious cash (or more likely, credit) on his threads.

  And anyhow, the crocodile man had an oily, better-than-you-are air. Donald and Miriam were softer than that, more hamburgers and horseshoes. The year before, they had donated an old car to a children’s hospital and hadn’t even claimed full value.

  The folks by the door were too young. I knew that the Ritters had recently moved into a senior-living community, and both members of a couple usually had to have passed fifty-five to buy into such a development. Call me a warehouse, but that was the obscure sort of rule I got paid to keep track of.

  “Ritter,” I called out, looking directly at the couple I had pegged as Donald and Miriam.

  They stood. Tote bag and slip-on sneakers. I loved being right.

  “I’m Sasha Gardner,” I told them. “Would you follow me, please?”

  They looked unhappy to s
ee me. I got no joy from ruining their day, but you can’t complete an audit without a face-to-face interview. It gives people a chance to explain themselves. Auditing might sound formulaic, but even I’d been surprised a few times. Sometimes, I would think I had someone pegged as an evader, and she’d arrive with a God’s honest explanation about the terrible year she’d had (and that’s why her numbers had gone all to hell). Other times, a taxpayer I thought I would surely let off would sit down and start lying through his teeth, even about the legit stuff. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.

  “Here we are, Mr. Ritter, Mrs. Ritter,” I said when we arrived at my cubicle.

  “Call me Mitzi.” As she folded up the newspaper she’d been holding, I could have sworn I caught sight of a crossword.

  “Mitzi, then,” I agreed. “Have a seat.”

  I noticed her staring hard at me. “You’re so young,” Mitzi Ritter finally said. She turned to her husband. “This girl can’t be older than Molly.” She turned back to me. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Molly?” I asked.

  “Our daughter,” Mitzi said. “You don’t know that? They said you’d know everything about us.”

  “They?”

  “Our new neighbors got audited once,” Don Ritter said. “Everybody has an opinion.”

  “I don’t know everything,” I said. “But we don’t mind the rumor if it keeps people honest.” I smiled at Don Ritter to try to put him at ease.

  He didn’t smile back.

  I had assumed that the Ritters had kids by the size of their former house. “I take it Molly’s not a dependent anymore,” I said.

  “Oh no. She’s been out of the house since, gosh how long has it been, Don?”

  “Ten years,” Don said.

  “Has it been that long?”

  “She’ll be twenty-eight come December.”

  “Time sure flies,” Mitzi clucked, then turned to look at me. “How old are you?”

  I saw Don Ritter roll his eyes.

  “Is that rude?” Mitzi asked. “It’s only because you look so young.”

  “You think everyone looks young,” Don said.