The Squash Pro

I got fired on a Tuesday. That's the kind of detail that sticks with you. Not the reason, not the speech, just the day of the week.

Wilma called me into her office at 4:15, which I already knew was bad because Wilma left at 4:15 every day, rain or shine. She had her reading glasses pushed up on her head and a folder on the desk, and she didn't do the fake-friendly voice she usually did.

"Helena, sit down."

I sat. The chair still had a crack in the leather from when a customer threw his keys at Shane two years ago. Funny what you notice.

"There's been a restructuring decision," she said. "The dealership is consolidating the sales floor. Shane is taking the senior rep position. Your position is being eliminated."

"Eliminated," I said. "Like a bug."

"Like a line item," she said, and I'll give her this, she didn't pretend it was anything else. She said something about severance and COBRA and how it wasn't personal, and I nodded along because what else do you do. I was forty-seven years old, I'd been selling cars for three years after twenty in insurance, and the whole thing took eleven minutes.

Shane got the promotion. I want that understood up front, because it matters later. Shane, who is thirty-one and has been at the dealership exactly as long as I have, who sells mostly to guys he plays poker with. Shane got the job and I got a folder with my name misspelled on the tab.

I drove home in the Corolla, which was mine, at least, and sat in the driveway for a while before going in. Russell was still at the club. He coaches at the squash club across town, head pro, has for years. He got home around seven carrying his racket bag and took one look at me and put it down by the door instead of in the closet, which is his version of dropping everything.

"Well," he said. "Somebody lost a battle."

"I got fired."

He made us dinner, which he does anyway, and while he chopped an onion he asked questions in his slow way. Not what happened, not who did what. He asked whether I'd eaten lunch, and whether the parking lot had been icy, and whether I wanted the window open. It took him forty minutes to get around to the actual point, which was: "So what are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know. Nothing, maybe. Look for something else."

"Uh huh." He put the knife down. "You've been gunning for that senior spot since you started there. You've got a plaque in your sock drawer that says Salesperson of the Month. People who gun for things don't do nothing."

He's fifty-two. He's been around long enough to be right about things in a way that's annoying instead of comforting.

* * *

Wilma called with the house-sitting offer two days later, on Thursday morning, sounding smaller than usual on the phone.

"I'm going to Sedona," she said. "My sister's place. Six weeks, maybe eight. I need somebody to stay at the condo. Feed the parrot, water the plants, make the place look lived in."

"You fired me two days ago."

"I know when I fired you." A pause. "The pay is nothing. The parrot bites. But you'd have the place to yourself, and Russell's welcome, and frankly I'd rather have somebody I know in there than one of those services."

I asked her why me. She said, "Because you're the only person I fired who didn't cry, yell, or threaten to sue," and hung up before I could argue.

So that's how I ended up staying in my former boss's condominium with a grey parrot named Captain and a spare bedroom that smelled faintly of potpourri. Russell thought it was a good idea, which surprised me more than the offer did.

"You need a place to sit still," he said. "You haven't sat still since I've known you. Maybe six weeks of feeding a bird will fix that."

He still coached every day. I'd drive him to the club in the morning, that squat concrete building with the wax-and-sweat smell that gets into your coat, and pick him up in the evening. In between I did a lot of nothing. I read Wilma's paperbacks. I learned that Captain says "hello, asshole" only when the phone rings. I updated my resume twice and sent it nowhere.

The condo has a home office that Wilma told me not to go into, in the same breath she told me where the spare key to it was. She did that thing people do, telling you the rule and the exception in one sentence. I didn't go in for the first week and a half. I could claim that was out of respect, but honestly it was out of not caring. I was in a fog. Fired people move slowly.

Then on a Wednesday, Captain knocked his water dish off the cage, and while I was wiping it up I noticed the office door was ajar. Wilma must have left it unlatched when she left. It was barely open, maybe two inches, and I stood there with a wet paper towel and told myself to walk away.

I went in.

It was neat, the way her desk at work had been neat. Folders in a hanging rack, labels typed. I wasn't looking for anything. I told myself that too. I was just closing the door properly, being a good house-sitter, and the folder nearest the door had the dealership's name on the tab.

I opened it. I'd like a better excuse than that, but there isn't one.

Inside were printouts, bank statements, and copies of invoices. Some of the invoices had amounts that didn't match the statements. Some had vendor names I'd never heard of, and I'd spent three years learning every vendor that dealership had. There was a second set of deposit slips, in a folder labeled with a tax year, and the numbers on the deposit slips were smaller than the numbers on the invoices.

I sat down in Wilma's desk chair and did arithmetic for about twenty minutes. I'm a sales rep, was a sales rep. I know numbers and I know commissions and I know what a skimming operation looks like when it's explained at a sales meeting, which ours had been, once, by the accountant with the laser pointer. Somebody was pocketing money. Somebody with access to the books, and the keys, and the authority to make vendors appear out of thin air.

It was Wilma. It didn't take a detective. Her handwriting was on half the slips.

I put everything back the way it was, exactly, the way you see people do on TV, and I closed the door, and I stood in the hallway with my heart going hard while Captain said "hello, asshole" from the living room at nothing.

Russell noticed something at dinner that night, because he always does. He didn't ask what. He said, "You've got the face you get before a test," and changed the subject to a club member who'd thrown his racket at the wall.

I sat with it for a week after that. Five more weeks of house-sitting, theoretically, though who knew what Wilma's plans were. I kept thinking about Shane, who got the job I wanted, and about Wilma in her office saying line item as if it were nothing, and about the folder with the typed labels sitting three feet from a parrot who says hello to bill collectors.

I could report her. I could use it. I could walk into the dealership's owner's office and trade what I know for my job back, and it would probably work, which was the part that scared me. Because if it worked, I'd get to be the person who did that.

Russell would have said something about gunning for things. I didn't tell him.

That Saturday he had a lesson with a nineteen-year-old trying out for the national squad, and I told him I'd come watch, which I never do. He seemed pleased about that. One of us should be having a normal week.

I went back into the office on Friday morning. Not for the folder this time. There was a filing cabinet in the corner, the green metal kind schools used, and it had a lock on it. The folder rack had been left out where a person would see it, if that person was prone to snooping, which apparently I am. The cabinet was something else. Wilma had told me where the key to the office was and not said one word about the cabinet.

I tugged the handle once. Locked. I stood there a minute and then left it alone, which I want noted, because later I did not leave it alone, and a person should get credit for the first attempt.

Russell came home around six with two pizzas and the flat look of a man who spent the day teaching footwork. The boy had a shot at the national squad, he said, if he stopped trying to end every rally in one swing.

"He's nineteen and he hits like he's angry at the ball," Russell said, pulling off his shoes in the entryway. "I told him. He said, well, I'm like that at home too."

"Sounds like Shane," I said. "Shane sells like that. Every customer is a rally he has to kill."

Russell grunted, which from him is agreement. We ate pizza on the couch with Captain yelling at the lamp. It was a normal evening. I kept the folder in the back of my head the whole time, sitting there like a passenger.

We went to bed early. It was Friday, and Russell had back-to-back lessons Saturday, and neither of us drinks much anymore, so the night was quiet in the way nights get when you're both a little tired and neither of you wants to say so.

He lay on his side facing me and pushed my hair off my forehead. "You're watching tomorrow," he said. "You never watch."

"I'm unemployed. I've got a full calendar."

"You're gonna watch and then you're gonna judge my coaching."

"One or two. Nothing major."

He smiled and put his hand on my hip. We'd been married five years and I still liked his hands, broad and a little dry from the courts. "You okay?" he asked. "You've been somewhere else all week."

"Ask me again tomorrow," I said. Then, because he waited, the way he does, I said, "Yeah. I'm okay."

He took that at face value, which is one of the things I love about him and one of the things I was using against him, maybe. He kissed me, slow, and I opened for him, and after a minute I pulled my shirt off over my head because I didn't feel like waiting. He did the same with his, and his chest was warm against mine and I made a small noise into his mouth that he answered with a laugh.

"Condom?" he asked, even after all this, out of habit, and I told him to forget it, we were past that, and he said good and reached down and pushed my shorts off my hips. I kicked them off the end of the bed. He ran his fingers down between my legs and I was already wet, which surprised me a little, given the week.

"There she is," he said, quiet, working a finger into me, then two. I pushed against his hand and told him to get on with it. He rolled onto his back and I went up on my knees over him and took his cock in my hand. He was hard, thick, the head dark, and I liked the weight of it, same as always. I held him against me and sat down slow, taking him inch by inch until I was full and had to stop and breathe.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Give me a second." I moved. It took a while to find the rhythm, my thighs were tight from nothing at all, but I got there, rocking on him with my palms flat on his chest, and he watched me the whole time with his mouth open a little. I reached down and touched my clit in slow circles while I rode him, and he put his hands on my hips and helped, pulling me down on each stroke, and it built in me the way it does, low and then fast.

"I'm close," I said, and he said, "go on," and I did, I came with my head back and my teeth clenched so I wouldn't yell, since we were guests in the man's condo, technically, even if the man was in Sedona. Russell followed a minute after, pushing up into me with a groan, and I felt him pulse and I lay down on his chest while we both caught our breath.

We stayed like that until he started to soften and I rolled off him onto my back, and the ceiling fan moved the cool air over the sweat between my breasts. "Fifty-two years old," Russell said to the ceiling, "and you still ride like that."

"Forty-seven," I said. "You're not getting credit for my age too."