Jealous Janitor Gets Trapped

I been a janitor for eleven years and I never once thought the job would follow me home like this. But here I was, Friday night, mopping beer slop off a plywood ramp at the Desert Roots festival while my wife was somewhere on the other side of that main stage talking to my boss.

Let me back up. My name is Lenny Slater, I'm twenty-nine, I clean offices at the warehouse and now apparently festival grounds for extra cash. My wife Mariah is twenty-eight, she got laid off from the warehouse in the spring, and since then she's had too much free time and my boss has had too much interest in her. Marshall Holland, forty-four years old, married, been my boss for two years now. He started showing up next to Mariah at every company picnic and Christmas party once she stopped working, putting his hand on the small of her back, leaning in close when the music was loud. I saw it. She swore nothing was going on. I wanted to believe her.

So when I picked up this cleaning gig for the festival and found out Marshall was volunteering as a stage manager, I figured the universe was handing me a chance to catch him with his hand where it didn't belong. Not to catch her, mind you. To catch him. There's a difference, or I told myself there was.

I clocked out of the vendor area around nine and cut through the crowd toward the main stage. That's when I saw her. Mariah was standing near the food trucks in that yellow sundress she bought back in June, the one she said made her look like a glass of lemonade. She did look like a glass of lemonade. And standing next to her, holding two plastic cups of beer, was Marshall in his staff lanyard and one of those stupid straw hats.

My stomach did a thing. I don't know how else to put it. Two beers. He brought her a beer.

I ducked behind the big trash bin next to the water station, the one I'd emptied twice already that night, and I watched. From that distance I couldn't hear anything over the band, but I could see it plain. Marshall said something to her and touched her arm, right there on the forearm, just laid his fingers on it. Then he leaned in close to her ear to talk over the music, and I watched his mouth move next to her hair for what felt like a minute that stretched on and on.

And here's the part I keep turning over. She laughed. She tipped her head back and laughed, and she touched his sleeve while she did it, just a little tap, and I know, I know that's nothing, people touch sleeves. But when it's your wife and the man who signs your timesheet, a sleeve tap looks different.

Mariah said something else, pointed off toward the stage, and then she turned and started walking. Toward the back of the stage. Toward the staff-only zone, the area I'd been cleaning all weekend, the one behind the plywood fence with the vendors and crew and the trailers. And laughing the whole way.

Marshall followed her. Still holding both beers.

Now, I want to tell you I thought it through with the seriousness of an adult. I did not. I stood there behind that trash bin with a mop bucket handle in my fist and my heart hammering, and then I just went. I cut through the crowd sideways, apology-ing my way past a couple in matching tie-dye, and got to the staff gate on the north side where the security guy checks badges.

My badge worked. That's the funny part about taking a cleaning job to spy on your boss. I'd been issued a staff credential that morning, laminated, with my name on it and everything. The security guy glanced at it and waved me through, and just like that I was inside the zone where nobody expected a guy in a gray work shirt pushing nothing.

The backstage area is a mess of cords and equipment cases and food tables, with a line of crew trailers along the far fence and a couple of canopy tents where the vendors sit when they're not selling. The band had a break between sets, so there were maybe a dozen people milling around, mostly crew guys with headsets and two women from a taco truck arguing about cash box math. No Mariah. No straw hat.

I walked the whole row of trailers casual, as a man who belonged there, which technically I did since I had a badge. Nothing. I checked under the canopy where they keep the folding tables and the extra chairs. Nothing. I checked the little tent where the stage manager keeps his clipboard, and there was his clipboard but no Marshall, which told me he wasn't working, he was wandering. With my wife. With two beers that by now were warm and flat.

There's a part of you, when you're doing something like this, that keeps asking what exactly is the plan. What happens if I find them? What do I say? Hey boss, nice straw hat, get away from my wife? And the other part of you, the dumber part, just keeps walking.

I looped back toward the main stage side, past the beer tent itself, which was hopping, a long line of people and one bartender working her tail off. I recognized her from earlier, a woman about my age, dark hair, quick with the taps, wearing a festival volunteer shirt. Annie, according to the tape on her register. She was pouring three beers at once and didn't look up at anybody, just worked.

I was standing there like an idiot in the walkway between the beer tent and the stage fence when I heard her laugh.

Mariah's laugh. I'd know it anywhere, that big open laugh she does when somebody actually gets her. It came from behind the beer tent, from the gap between the tent wall and the back fence where the kegs are stacked and nobody's got any business being.

I moved without deciding to. There's a gap in the fence, a maintenance cut where we ran the hoses, and I slipped through it into the gravel strip behind the tent. And there they were.

Not doing what you think. Marshall was sitting on a stack of plastic beer crates with both cups on the ground next to his boots, and Mariah was standing in front of him, arms crossed, and she was not laughing anymore. Her voice carried clear over the tent fans.

"So then why is Annie telling everybody you're single?" she said. "That's all I asked him, Lenny. That's all."

Wait. She was talking about me. Somebody named Annie was telling people something about me?

Marshall spread his hands. "Because he asked me to keep it quiet at work, that's why. Guy doesn't want his business all over the floor."

Mariah turned her face away from him and I saw her wipe at her eye with the back of her wrist. "He told me he was working tonight. He told me he was cleaning the vendor lot."

"He is. He was. Then he went around back of the beer tent, is what I heard."

I stood there in the gravel with the fence at my back and my badge hanging off my belt, and every fact I thought I had came apart in my hands like wet paper towel. She wasn't flirting. She was asking my boss questions about me. And the answer, the answer apparently involved some bartender named Annie and a story that I was single, a story I never told, except I had told it, hadn't I, back in the spring, one night at Marshall's barbecue when I was sore at Mariah over money and ran my mouth about how maybe a guy ought to be single.

That's what he'd kept quiet at work. That's what had grown and changed shape over the summer. And now my wife was crying behind a beer tent because of it.

I should have stepped out right then. Right then, before anything else happened, before the next thing came out of anybody's mouth. Instead I stood there in the dark between two keg stacks like a coward, listening, and the band started up the next set on the other side of the fence, and Marshall stood up off the crates and put his hand on Mariah's shoulder, and she didn't shrug it off.

She didn't shrug it off, and that one little fact sat in my chest like a swallowed bolt. I told myself it didn't mean anything, that she was upset and people don't always pay attention to where hands are when they're upset. I told myself a lot of things standing in that gravel. Mostly I told myself to walk out there. Instead I backed up through the fence gap like a roach going under a door, and I heard the tail end of Marshall saying something low that I couldn't make out, and then his laugh, and I was gone.

The main stage was in full swing by then. Some band with a fiddle player, crowd packed in shoulder to shoulder, dust hanging in the light over everybody's heads. I pushed through it without seeing any of it. My whole brain was chewing on one bone. Annie. Who was Annie, how did she know me, and why would she go around telling people I was single when I had a wife who was apparently asking questions about it behind a beer tent. I ran the whole spring back in my head while I walked. The barbecue. The ribs. Marshall's buddy from the warehouse cracking jokes about how married life was slowing me down, and me, three beers in, sore about the overtime and the money and Mariah being home all day now, saying what I said. Maybe a guy ought to be single. Joke. A dumb joke. And apparently it had crawled out of that backyard and been living its own life all summer.

The night went sideways from there. I did a quick lap of the festival doing my actual job on autopilot, dragging a trash bag down the vendor row, hosing a spot near the porta-johns where somebody had lost a fight with a funnel cake. Twenty minutes gone like that. Then I circled back toward the beer tent because I couldn't help myself, and that's when I saw her.

Mariah was sitting at the little rail they set up along the side of the tent, on a stool, alone. No straw hat anywhere that I could see. No Marshall. And on the other side of the rail, pulling taps and sliding her drinks, was the bartender. The one from the register tape. Annie.

So that was Annie. Dark hair tied back, sleeves rolled on that volunteer shirt, working the rail and talking to my wife like they'd known each other a while. I couldn't hear a word of it over the band. Mariah had a fresh cup in front of her and her shoulders had come down from around her ears, so whatever they were talking about, it wasn't a fight. Annie poured her something that wasn't beer, some clear thing over ice, and said something that made Mariah smile, and I stood behind a tent pole with my mop cart like a guy doing surveillance on his own marriage.

Which, fine. I hear how it sounds. A woman sitting