Spice Rack Persuasion

I am twenty-four years old and I write my first novel in the back corner of a former auto-body shop that now houses four food trucks, a walk-in freezer that hums like a dying fridge, and an office so small my desk chair squeaks against both walls if I lean back too far. The lease was cheap because the place used to be a grease pit, and honestly some of that grease feels like it soaked into the plaster and decided to stay. The walls are thin enough that I can hear the taco truck guy arguing with his wife about cilantro, and I once transcribed an entire argument about pallet weights without meaning to, which tells you how thrilling my days have gotten since I quit my office job and decided I was going to be a Real Writer.

The window in my office looks out over a narrow alley, and directly across that alley is another window, and in that window sits the most irritating man in Leicester. His name is Brent, I learned that from the commissary directory taped up by the kettle, and he is twenty-seven, a supply chain planner, and a person who alphabetizes things that were already alphabetized. He stole my parking spot three weeks after I moved in, the good one under the corrugated awning where the rain doesn't turn your laptop bag into a sponge, and he parks his grey Volvo in it every morning at 8:04 like the Volvo has an appointment with destiny.

The first time I really watched him work, I couldn't stop, which annoyed me more than the parking spot. He had a spice rack, this wooden rack with maybe twenty little jars, and he took every jar out, lined them up on the desk, and put them back in some order I could not fathom. Not alphabetical. Not by color. Some private Brent-order known only to Brent, and he checked each label against a list on his monitor, nodding to himself as a man would confirm the launch codes. It took him forty minutes. I lost forty minutes of my novel to a man organizing cumin, and when I realized it I put my head down on the keyboard and typed a paragraph consisting entirely of "jjjjjjj," which is probably still in my draft folder somewhere.

The thing is, his window faces mine and he keeps his blinds up, and I keep mine up, and neither of us has ever acknowledged this. There is a whole silent treaty about it. Sometimes he catches me looking and I pretend I was staring at the wall between our windows, which is about two feet of old brick and a drainpipe, and I think he pretends the same thing back. Once he opened the window and asked if I had a screwdriver, and I gave him one, and he returned it the same day with a thank-you note. A note. Who writes a note for a screwdriver.

"Who is that man," I asked Esme, who runs the taco truck and is the closest thing I have to a friend here.

"That's Brent," she said, folding a tortilla with one hand and texting with the other. "Supply chain. He does the orders for like half the trucks. He's fine, he just, you know, he's very Brent about things."

"What does that mean, very Brent about things?"

"He made a spreadsheet for the birthday thing," she said, like that explained everything, and then she got called back to her grill and I was left standing there in the alley with the word spreadsheet ringing in my ears like a curse.

The birthday thing, I learned through the wall, because thin walls and a vent that carries sound like a tin-can telephone, was for Dev, who owns the commissary and the truck called Mum's Chai and who was turning fifty in early March. Brent was organizing it. I could hear him in his office on the phone, patient and cheerful in a way I found deeply suspicious, saying things like, "no, the banner needs to be there before four, because the reveal is at four fifteen, and if the banner is late then the whole sequence collapses," and I sat there at my desk thinking, the whole sequence collapses, this man talks about a birthday banner like it's the D-Day landings.

But here is the part where I admit something unflattering about myself. I decided, sitting there with my novel open at 2,300 words and going nowhere, that my revenge for the parking spot would be to make him late. Not hurt him, not ruin anything, just knock one small domino over in his beautiful sequence and watch him scramble. I had broken up at twenty-two with a boyfriend who planned everything, trips, dinners, even our breakup was scheduled, so maybe there was something in me that saw Brent's spreadsheets and thought, right, that, that thing there, that needs stopping. It wasn't noble. I aim to be honest about that on the page, or as honest as I get, which is maybe sixty percent.

The plan was stupid and it worked, which is the worst kind of plan. On the Thursday, which was two days before the birthday, a delivery was scheduled for the bay doors at the back, and I knew from listening through the vent that Brent was personally supervising it because Dev had asked him to receive a special ingredient for the taco truck's new menu item, and Brent does not delegate anything with the word special attached to it. So at 3:50, when Brent went down to the bay to wait, I did the only thing I could do from a back office, which was nothing. I just called the depot. I have a work voice from my old job, brisk and apologetic, and I told them the delivery window had shifted an hour later, and they said no worries, love, and hung up, and I felt like a criminal and a genius at the same time.

It went wrong in a way I didn't plan. The driver, who had already left, decided not to trust my voice on the phone and showed up at the original time anyway, a big box truck backing into the alley at the exact moment Brent was standing in the bay with his clipboard, and the truck took the angle wrong and wedged itself across the bay doors, and the driver, a man named Teodor with forearms like hams, got out and said, "is fine, is fine, I do this every week," which was clearly not true.

I heard all of this through the wall, and then I heard Brent's voice getting that patient cheerful tone people use when they are dying inside, and I heard the bay phone ring, and I heard someone say goat, loudly, more than once.

There was a goat. The special ingredient, as far as I could work out, was not goat meat, because Dev had gone vegetarian in September, the whole truck knew about it, but the goat was meant to be there at the party as a sort of mascot for the new menu, a live goat with a ribbon, because Dev's family had kept goats and it was supposed to be a joke that Dev would appreciate. I learned later that Brent had arranged it, the goat, the ribbon, the arrival window, everything, and the goat was in a crate in the truck bed, and the truck was wedged in the alley, and the crate had a latch that Teodor had maybe not checked.

The latch opened at 4:09. The reveal was at 4:15. In between those two times, a goat the size of a large dog got out of a crate, down from a truck bed, and into a commissary full of food trucks, and I heard the whole thing happen through my wall like a war report. Somebody screamed. Esme shouted something in Spanish that I won't repeat. There was a crash that I later learned was the spice rack, Brent's spice rack, twenty little jars of cumin and paprika scattered across a concrete floor, and I laughed so hard I had to put my head between my knees.

And then, because the universe has comic timing, someone started banging on my office door, and I opened it, and there was Brent, twenty-seven years old, shirt untucked for the first time in recorded history, a smear of something brown on his sleeve, holding a clipboard against his chest like a shield.

"Are you the one who called the depot," he said.

I opened my mouth to lie and what came out was, "the goat got in through the chai truck, I saw it from my window, it's eating the menu board."

He turned and looked through my window, across the alley, and there was the goat, standing on the chai truck's counter, ribbon and all, chewing a laminated menu, and Dev was already in the alley below in a party hat, because Dev had come down for the reveal, and Dev was not running away from the goat, Dev was pointing at it and laughing so hard he had to hold the doorframe.

"The sequence," Brent said quietly, "has collapsed," and I don't know why that made me laugh harder, but it did, and he looked at me while I laughed, and I might have thought he looked angry but he didn't, he looked like a man meeting someone for the first time, which was ridiculous, because his office faced mine and I had watched him alphabetize spices for a month.

* * *

It took five people and a bag of tortilla chips to get the goat down, and the chips were Esme's idea, and the goat followed the chips like it had trained for this its whole life. Brent held the clipboard the entire time and wrote things on it, actual notes, observations about goat behavior, and I watched him from my doorway and thought, this man is going to write an incident report about a goat, and he did, I saw it later, it was two pages and it had a section called root cause.

Afterwards everyone drifted back to work, Dev still chuckling, Teodor reversing his truck out of the alley with the care of a man defusing nothing in particular, and the alley went quiet except for the freezer hum. I went back to my desk and my novel, which was about a woman who inherits a lighthouse, and I looked at the lighthouse for a while and thought about how I had ruined a birthday reveal and how the birthday wasn't even for two more days, which meant Brent had two days to rebuild his sequence, and for some reason that thought made me feel warm instead of guilty.

There was a knock at my door at six, when the trucks were closing down. Brent stood there holding a tupperware of biryani, which Dev had apparently sent around as thanks to everyone, and also, in his other hand, a small jar labeled CUMIN, GROUND, with a strip of masking tape on it in neat capitals.

"You owe me a cumin," he said. "It got under the truck. It's gone."

"I'll replace it," I said.

"They don't sell this one anymore. I get it from a place in Birmingham. It's a whole thing." He held out the tupperware instead. "Dev says thank you. Dev does not know it was you, by the way. I have not mentioned the phone call."

I took the tupperware. "You're not going to report me?"

"There's a form for that," he said, "but it's three pages and honestly the goat incident already used up my paperwork appetite for the quarter."