Rafe did not quite make it across the second desk. He made it far enough to knock over a jumbo tub of rubber bands.
Five thousand rubber bands hit the floor of Corvel Packaging at once. It sounded like applause from very small people. Everyone turned to look. Duncan stopped mid-sentence, folded paper still raised.
"Sorry," Rafe said from the carpet. "Inventory."
"Are you okay, Rafe?"
"Never better. You were saying, Duncan? A lot of things in the deal we need to..."
"To discuss," Duncan said, a little puzzled. "Over the next week."
Rafe lay back on the rubber bands and closed his eyes in relief. I stayed awake on my filing cabinet. I had never loved a man's clumsiness more.
The Committee met that evening in Loretta's office.
Loretta's office was a converted supply room with no window and a framed photograph of every Corvel employee since 1994. She'd hung them in order of hire. I was on the third wall, between a forklift trainer and a man named Phil who had left in 2021 to raise alpacas.
I had told Loretta everything. It seemed fair, since she had loaned me her October cardigan. She listened with her hands folded over a cough drop tin, and at the end she nodded once.
"So the problem is Duncan's phrase," she said.
"Yes."
"And you don't want to tell him."
"He'd feel awful. You know how he gets."
Loretta did know. In 2009, Duncan had accidentally deleted the company picnic RSVP list. He had apologized to each employee personally for three weeks. Then he'd made everyone a personalized cake, which somehow made it worse.
"Then we don't tell him," Loretta said. "We just make him stop."
Rafe leaned forward. "How?"
Loretta opened her desk drawer and took out a laminating machine. It was beige and older than Rafe, and she set it on the desk with great tenderness.
"Plain Talk Week," she said.
The email went out the next morning from the Office Manager account, which nobody had ever successfully argued with.
Subject: PLAIN TALK WEEK starts today!
Hi all,
To prepare for the Fisk Orchards visit, Corvel is going jargon-free. Mr. Fisk prefers plain talk, and so do I.
Banned phrases include (but are not limited to): "touch base," "low-hanging fruit," "circle back," "move the needle," and "park that."
A laminated card of plain alternatives is now on every desk. Please use it. I will be checking.
Loretta
"You buried it," Rafe said admiringly. "In the middle of the list."
"Camouflage," said Loretta.
I read the list again and felt my stomach drop. "Circle back is on there."
"Yes, dear."
"I say circle back."
Rafe pulled a sticky note off his monitor. He had been tallying since Monday. "Thirty-one times this week," he said. "You're going to need a bigger card."
"That was before the rule!"
"Plain talk, Maren," said Loretta. "It's a fresh start for everyone."
My card said Circle back → come back to. By noon I had needed it nine times.
I kept saying it in the middle of sentences, then stopping, like a car that hits a pothole. "Let's circ— let's talk about that later." Rafe recorded each one on a sticky note in lilac.
Loretta handled enforcement personally. She walked the floor with a spare card, and when she heard a banned phrase, she held it up without a word. She never stopped walking. She looked like a soccer referee who had also raised four children.
"You could appeal," Rafe suggested.
"Loretta doesn't do appeals," I said. "Loretta does lamination."
Duncan took Plain Talk Week seriously, because Duncan took everything seriously. He read the email twice and printed it out. He pinned it to his corkboard next to a photo of his golden retriever.
Then he discovered he could not run a meeting without his phrase.
It was like watching a man try to sneeze without closing his eyes. On Monday, in Conference Room B, Raj from logistics raised the question of overtime on the night shift. Duncan uncapped his marker, turned toward the PARKING LOT whiteboard, and stopped.
"Let's," he said. "Let's put that. In the..."
Rafe and Loretta both leaned forward. I gripped the arms of my chair like the edge of a cliff.
"...garage," Duncan finished.
There was a pause.
"The garage," Raj repeated.
"It's like a lot," Duncan said. "But with a roof." He wrote 65. NIGHT OVERTIME on the board, looking miserable.
On Tuesday morning he tried "Let's leave that in neutral." That afternoon he tried "Let's give that a rest stop."
By Wednesday he had abandoned automotive metaphors entirely. He just said "Hmm" while staring at the whiteboard. His laminated card had gone soft at the corners. He kept reading the wrong line.
His emails got stranger, too. On Tuesday one arrived at 3:52 in the morning with the subject line garage?? and no body text at all.
I didn't see it until seven. For the first time in four years, I hadn't been awake to receive it. I lay in bed holding my phone and felt a small, guilty pang, like leaving a party without saying goodbye.
Somebody else was still up there, counting something.
Then something strange happened.
On Wednesday morning, nobody could think of a way to postpone the microwave question. Duncan stood at the whiteboard, marker in hand, for almost a full minute. You could hear the HVAC.
"Fine," he said at last. "Buy a second microwave."
The room went very still. Loretta stopped unwrapping her cough drop. Duncan walked to the board, found 41. 2ND MICROWAVE? and erased it with the side of his hand.
It was the first item to leave the Parking Lot in four years. Somebody in the back started to clap. Then everyone did. Duncan looked down at his gray, smudged palm as though it belonged to someone braver.
"Huh," he said.
I hadn't fallen asleep at work once since the rubber bands.
At home I slept like a stone at the bottom of a lake. But during the day, without the cue, my old self crept back in a little.
I was alert, but my thoughts were soft around the edges again. I wrote the Fisk presentation slowly. It was fine, very fine. Fine was the problem.
"Your Column D numbers are down," Rafe said after lunch. He showed me the spreadsheet, still saved as Q4 Pallet Projections. "And Column E is empty."
"Because nothing's happening. Which is the goal."
"I'm just saying. The Halvorsen rewrite, the Brannock analysis, the pallet spec."
He tapped the screen with his highlighter. "Those were your best days, and you were asleep for four minutes of each of them."
"Rafe."
"I'm not saying anything. Data is saying something. I'm only its assistant."
That afternoon we had a prep call with Fisk Orchards. I put Harlan Fisk on speaker in Conference Room B. Duncan sat beside me with his hands folded, doing his best impression of someone who had never owned a marker.
Harlan Fisk was seventy-one. He spoke slowly, like a man paying for each word in cash.
He talked about his apples as if they were employees. "The Honeycrisps are divas," he said. "They bruise if you look at them sideways. The Galas are team players."
I walked him through our new crate design. He listened in total silence.
"Well," he said when I was done. "I'll want to sleep on it."
"Of course," I said.
"I sleep on everything, Ms. Lisowski. Bought my first tractor in 1978. Slept on that one for two years."
He chuckled. "My late wife said I'd sleep on my own funeral. See you Thursday."
The line clicked off. Duncan let out a long breath and stood up.
"I'm going to grab some files from the shared drive," he said. "I want everything we have on Fisk before Thursday."
I nodded and gathered my notes. It was a full twenty minutes before I remembered what else lived on the shared drive. By then it was too late.
Duncan was standing at my desk. He was holding a printout in five colors, including lilac. The title at the top read Q4 Pallet Projections.
He had opened it. In the entire history of Corvel Packaging, he was the first.
"Maren," he said quietly. "My office, please. Bring a chair you like."
Up next: Standard Ceiling
Continue to Part 4 →