The Return Of Jonah Gray. Heather Cochran

to me. “Play nice,” she said.

      “Why?” I asked. I looked at Carl. “I wouldn’t think a guy in your financial situation would spend like that on shoes.”

      Carl stopped smiling. “You don’t know anything about me.”

      “No? How’s this? You’re an over-extender. You’re all plans, always with a scheme, but you’re not much for actual work. You drive a fancy car, but I bet you’re behind on your payments. You seek out women with good incomes, because your own money never comes in fast enough. You want everything before you’ve earned it. You saw the Prada shoes, so you got them. You saw Martina sit down and you figured for the cost of a few cheap drinks, maybe you’d get lucky. Besides, if you stay over at her place, the repo man won’t be able to find your beat-up old Porsche. And you’ll give Martina your work number, because you don’t expect to finish out the week there. Then you’ll start the cycle all over again. Another temp job, another bar, another girl.”

      Carl had waved to the bartender before I finished speaking. “Give me my card back,” he said, his features furrowed all together.

      “Is any of that true?” Martina asked. She unfolded a napkin that had been written over. “Is this your work number?”

      “It’s not fucking true,” Carl snapped, right before he got up and stalked out of the bar.

      Martina turned back to me. She didn’t look upset. In fact, she was sort of smiling. “It’s not like I was going to end up with a guy who spends more on shoes than I do,” she said.

      “That’s what I figured. He wasn’t your type.”

      “But sometimes it’s better to wait for the whole story. You’ll never know everything. You can’t.”

      “I’ve heard Carl’s story more times than I can count,” I said. “I know it backwards and forwards.”

      “You really ripped that guy a new one,” Kevin said. “How did you know all that?” Even before I turned to look at him, I knew that his smile was gone and it wasn’t coming back. Kooky was bad enough, but now I had scared him.

      “Go ahead,” Martina said. “Why not?”

      I pulled out my business card and handed it to Kevin. He looked at it, then dropped it onto the bar, as if it had burned his fingers.

      Sasha Gardner

      Senior Auditor

      Internal Revenue Service

      “I guess you see all types,” he finally said.

      “All types,” I agreed.

      Soon after, Kevin excused himself to go feed his parking meter. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t return. Then again, I was rarely surprised anymore. It was my job to notice details, see patterns of behavior, and infer attitudes, motives, tendencies and likely actions. Once you’ve learned to do that, you start to realize how predictable most people are. There’s actually a degree of comfort in that.

      “Two guys scared off in record time,” Martina said. “That was fast, even for you.”

      “I didn’t scare them off,” I said.

      “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