Duncan's office had a desk, two chairs, a golden retriever calendar, and no whiteboard. I had never noticed that before. The man who ran the Parking Lot did not keep one in his own room.
I brought the rolling chair from Conference Room B. It had good lumbar support and a proven track record. Duncan closed the door and sat down across from me. He set Rafe's printout on the desk between us, facing me, like evidence he was sorry to have found.
"Location: copier," he read quietly. "Location: breakroom. Location: Conference Room B."
He looked up. "Maren, is this about me?"
There didn't seem to be any point in lying to a man holding a five-color spreadsheet.
"It's about your phrase," I said.
"Which phrase?"
I took a breath. "The thing you say. About the whiteboard."
He went pale above the beard. I watched him work it out, the way I'd watched Rafe work it out, except Duncan did not look delighted. He looked as if he'd just learned he had been standing on a cat's tail for two weeks.
"Oh, no," he said. "Oh, Maren. I'm so sorry."
"It's not your fault."
"I said it at the copier. You were on the floor."
"Loretta gave me a cardigan. It was fine."
He put his face in his hands. Through his fingers he said, "That's why Rafe threw himself on the rubber bands."
"He was very brave."
I told him everything. The four years, the ceiling, Dr. Harrow, the station wagon, my father's hand on the dashboard.
I told him the cue was mine, chosen freely, and that it had worked better than anything in my adult life. I told him about the four-minute naps and how good I felt after.
He listened without interrupting once. It occurred to me that Duncan was a very good listener. It was the deciding part he struggled with.
When I finished, he sat back and looked at the ceiling. It was the standard acoustic kind, with the small, irregular holes.
"Fourteen hundred and forty," he said.
I stared at him. "What?"
"The holes in one of those tiles." He pointed upward without looking. "I counted mine at home. Twice."
"It's the same tile?"
"Same tile in every building in the Midwest, I think. We all have the same ceiling."
"You counted the holes."
"Around three in the morning, usually." He gave a small, embarrassed shrug. "That's when I send emails. You've probably noticed."
"I've received about four hundred of them."
"I'm sorry about that, too."
We sat for a moment in our matching chairs, beneath our matching ceilings. It was the strangest kinship I had ever discovered. It was like learning a coworker had grown up on your street, but the street was insomnia.
"Can I ask you something?" I said. "Why do you park everything?"
He was quiet for a long time. Then he picked up a pen and turned it over in his fingers.
"Because once I decide something, I lie awake thinking about it," he said. "Was it right? Did I miss something?"
"So you stopped deciding."
"I stopped deciding things in rooms. I take them home and decide them at three a.m."
He set the pen down. "Then I email myself, and I park them again in the morning. It's not a great system."
"The Parking Lot has sixty-five items."
"Sixty-four," he said, with a flicker of pride. "We bought the microwave."
He wanted to fix it immediately. Duncan's instinct, once he understood a problem, was to apologize to it personally.
"I'll never say it again," he said. "Not once. I'll put a rubber band on my wrist as a reminder. I'll tape Loretta's card to my forehead."
"Please don't tape anything to your forehead."
"Then I'll just carry it. Everywhere."
"Dr. Harrow's back on Saturday," I said. "She'll change the cue in one session. After that you can say whatever you want."
He nodded. Then he looked at the printout again. His finger moved to the last column.
"What's Column E?"
I hesitated. "It's what I did next. After each one."
He read it: the Halvorsen rewrite, the Brannock analysis, the pallet spec that had been wrong since March. I watched him do the math he was so good at doing in his head, at three in the morning, alone.
"These were your best days," he said slowly.
"That's what Rafe says."
"So when I put something in the Parking Lot..." He stopped, genuinely horrified at his own sentence.
"No. Absolutely not. Forget I started that thought."
"Duncan..."
"Nobody is putting you to sleep in a meeting, Maren. Not for a contract, not for anything."
He shook his head firmly. "That's your thing. It's yours. You decide what happens with it."
I believed him. It was, I realized, the fastest decision I'd ever seen him make.
I called Dr. Harrow from his office, on speaker, with his permission and hers. It was nine at night in Lisbon. I could hear dishes and a guitar somewhere behind her.
"Interesting," she said, when I'd explained about Duncan. Then, kindly: "Hello, Duncan."
"Hello, Doctor. I'm very sorry."
"You've done nothing wrong. You said a perfectly ordinary phrase."
There was a clink, like a glass being set down. "Maren, I want to be clear about two things."
"Okay."
"The naps are harmless. They're light rest, nothing more. And the choice to keep or change your cue is entirely yours."
"I know."
"I'll be back Saturday. Your appointment is at nine. Until then, I trust you both to be sensible."
After she hung up, Duncan cleared his throat. "Are you going to change it?"
"I don't know yet," I said truthfully. "I'd like to sleep on it."
He laughed so suddenly that he startled himself. I'd never heard Duncan laugh in four years. It sounded rusty, like a gate nobody had opened since spring.
On Thursday morning, Duncan arrived with a rubber band on his wrist anyway. He promised it was purely "symbolic," and turned slightly pink.
Loretta had taped a poster over the header of the whiteboard. It read WELCOME, FISK ORCHARDS! in green marker, with a drawing of an apple that looked like a tomato with ambitions. Nobody mentioned what it was covering.
Rafe handed me a sticky note at the door. DUNCAN: 0 SINCE WEDNESDAY.
"Keep it that way," I said.
"I'm not the one you need to tell."
Harlan Fisk arrived on Thursday at 9:52 a.m. carrying a wooden crate of apples.
He was tall, slightly stooped, in a canvas barn coat and a brown felt hat.
He set the crate on the table in Conference Room B the way you'd lay down a winning hand. "Honeycrisps," he said. "Picked yesterday. Don't drop them, they hold grudges."
Duncan shook his hand. I shook his hand. Rafe sat in the corner, taking notes, which was his official role. Unofficially he was guarding the room.
Loretta had brought coffee and propped a laminated card against the sugar bowl. It was, she said, a "visual reminder."
The meeting went well for twenty minutes. I presented the new crate design. Harlan asked good questions, slowly. He turned a Honeycrisp over in his hands while he listened, like a man reading a very short book.
Then he set the apple down.
"Brannock Box called me Tuesday," he said. "They'll do a similar crate for eleven percent less. My nephew works there. Thanksgiving's going to be awkward if I don't at least consider it."
The room went quiet. Eleven percent was the whole margin. It was more than the whole margin.
"I like you folks," Harlan went on.
"But you know me. I'll want to sleep on this one." He reached for his hat. "Probably a good long while."
I knew what a good long while meant to Harlan Fisk. It meant two years and a tractor. It meant Brannock.
Duncan saw it, too. I watched panic rise in him like water in a basement. Twenty-three years of habit took the wheel.
"Harlan, wait," he said. "Please. Let's just park—"
He heard it a half-second after I did. His eyes went wide. His hand flew to his mouth.
But my chair had excellent lumbar support. Somewhere far away, an engine was ticking as it cooled. The last thing I saw was Harlan Fisk, seventy-one years old, lowering his hat and leaning in for a closer look.
Up next: Somebody Already Slept on It
Continue to Part 5 →