The Cubicle Next Door (27 page)

Ruffians. Only Joe would utter a word that had gone out of use a century ago.

He handed me a pair of brass knuckles.

Everybody laughed.

I didn’t think it was very funny.

The next morning brought snow with it. And it had started sticking to the roads.

About ten minutes before I was supposed to pick Joe up, he knocked on our door.

“I thought I was supposed to pick you up at your house.”

“You were. But I changed my mind. We’re taking the SUV.”

“That would involve me driving it back from the airport, and I don’t do SUVs. I don’t even normally sit in them. I’m making a big exception in your case.”

“Then make it a gigantic exception.”

“My car is fine.”

“Your car is made out of a shoebox. I wouldn’t be surprised if the engine was held together by rubber bands and clothespins.”

Now that was not nice. And he must have known it.

“It’s just that I don’t want to be flying over Utah worried about whether or not you made it home alive. Okay?”

He wasn’t really asking a question. In fact, he could have substituted the phrase “Got it?” because he was clearly not going to let me drive my car. Not that morning.

I grabbed my wallet and shoved it into my pocket. Felt the doormat with my foot before I shut the door to make sure the key was still there. It was.

Joe opened the SUV door for me and shut it after I got in.

I felt the SUV slide for a fraction of a second as we turned onto Manitou Avenue. Joe drove at 25 mph down to the interstate. And compared to other vehicles, he was going fast.

At the stoplight I glanced around, surveying the traffic. It wasn’t too heavy. Hopefully it would remain as light until after I got home. I trusted my own driving in bad weather, but I wasn’t so sure I trusted anyone else’s. In looking over into the other lane, I saw a single duffel bag on the backseat. And that was it.

“Aren’t you staying for the week?”

“Christmas through New Year’s. There’s lots of celebrating to do. Lots of nieces and nephews to play with.” He saw me looking at the bag. “They teach you how to pack light in Boy Scouts. How to make one pair of underwear last four days. Things like that.”

“By washing it in a stream?”

“By wearing it right side out, frontward and backward. Inside out, frontward and backward. Four days.”

“With the added benefit of being able to scare away bears with your foul scent.”

Cars had already begun to slide off the interstate. I saw Joe look at them as we passed by, and then he slid a look at me.

He had been right about the weather. “You were right. We needed the SUV. Are you happy now?”

“Ecstatic.”

My car was not the most stalwart of vehicles. I have never pretended it was or wanted it to be. Because most of the time in Colorado when snow falls, it’s gone by the next day. Sometimes by the same afternoon. So most of the time, I don’t need a Driving Machine. The environmentalist’s dilemma: Stay at home the two days in the year when the snow is really bad or waste gas for the remaining 363 days?

Easy choice.

North of town, at Monument, the shoulders of the road looked like a game of bumper cars. The altitude was just enough different, the wind had just enough bite, that the road turned into an ice rink under certain conditions. Like the ones we were having. Looked like the early birds had gotten more than they’d bargained for that morning.

Joe downshifted and steered around a three-car collision. “When you come back this way, try not to step on the gas or the brake unless you really need to. Just go slow. No quick movements.”

“You might not believe this, but I’ve been driving in Colorado most of my life. If you tell me next how the roads become slippery right after it starts to rain, I’ll have to throw something at you.”

“It’s really slippery out here.”

“I know.”

“Just warning you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe you could call me when you get home. I’ll probably still be waiting at the gate.”

“Right. I’ll hurry home so I can do that.”

“Don’t hurry, but would you call? Please.”

“I’ll call.”

He made me write his cell number down on a napkin I fished out of the glove box.

We finally made it to the airport and climbed out. He grabbed his duffel bag. I walked around to the driver’s side, trying to avoid the biggest piles of slush.

“Thanks. See you next year.” He lifted a hand as he walked backward toward the curb. “Merry Christmas.”

“Wait.”

He stopped.

I walked up to him, took a small paper bag from the pocket of my coat, and gave it to him. “Some cookies. For the flight.”

His smile encompassed his whole face. “Thanks.” He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “A pretty woman to see me off. Food to take with me. What could be better? You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“No.” Not on the outside.

“Well…I’ve got to…” He shrugged. “Have to go.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I watched him walk into the terminal.

He’d left the monster running, so all I had to do was get in and drive.

I made it out of the airport without sliding around too much and merged onto the interstate. It was slippery. More than I had realized.

But driving the SUV was kind of…nice. It was. It was nice to be so far off the ground. It was nice to be able to see around and over the tops of other cars while I was driving. It was nice to think of those thick tires biting into the snow, cutting through the slush. Nice to know that if I got in an accident, I’d probably come out of it just fine.

And I began to understand the right of all Americans to own an SUV, even when they don’t need one.

I pointed the beast south and let it rumble down the road.

In the last decade, there had been an explosion of growth from South Denver toward Colorado Springs. Castle Rock, the midpoint, was a slash of tidy middle-class suburban sprawl. Rows of new developments were strung across the two sides of the interstate, their white frames gathered like a flock of seagulls against the lee side of the mesa.

When I got to Monument Hill I downshifted. Many vehicles in the Colorado Springs area sported bumper stickers saying “Ski Monument Hill.” They weren’t just being facetious. Monument is notorious. It’s the most treacherous place between Colorado Springs and Denver in the winter.

I crept past the fake tree cellular tower near the County Line Road exit. Saw the chapel in the distance. From my vantage point, coming down the decline, the foothills looked likely to sweep the northern parts of the county up in their undercurrent and deposit them on the other side of the hills.

But as I drew parallel to the Academy, I could see the illusion. The movement was halted by a plateau, a brief pause in the march of land up to the Continental Divide.

By the time I reached Manitou, the sun had banished the snowstorm and driven the clouds into hiding. The snow had begun to melt off the streets.

I parked the monster in Joe’s driveway. I’d walked halfway home before I realized I hadn’t locked it. I never lock my own, but I figured I owed Joe’s vehicle that courtesy. Went back.

I beeped the key chain at it.

Turned around and started home again.

I picked up my pace when I remembered I was supposed to call Joe to tell him I’d made it home okay.

THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

Gone

The department is a wasteland of empty chairs and abandoned desks. I feel like a forlorn, forgotten child. It’s strange—I used to love this week every year. I could actually get things done. No meetings. No e-mails interrupting my work. And now I’m counting the days. Dropping paperclips into the mug on my desk one-by-one. Why has your absence made my week so bleak?

Posted on December 27 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

Comments

If you’re converting the Christmas holidays into a personal affront, you might suffer from abandonment issues. Rejection is an instinctive fear, one of the first we ever experience. But the biggest tragedy of abandonment is that the victim often copes by blaming and then abandoning themselves. Many victims of abandonment go through life sabotaging all their close relationships.

Posted by:
NozAll | December 27 at 08:09 PM

Don’t pay any attention to him. I feel the same way about my officemate. Most of the time I want to kill him, but when he’s gone…well…I guess I kind of miss him.

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | December 28 at 08:10 AM

I hate to say it, but it might be true. Maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Posted by:
philosophie | December 28 at 08:12 AM

Get over him. People come and go. In fact, mostly they just go.

Posted by:
survivor | December 28 at 11:41 AM

Twenty-Seven

T
he ladies reverted to bridge that Wednesday night. They didn’t need me as a substitute, but I lounged in the living room anyway, eating a slice of applesauce cake and sipping tea. That’s when Adele had her great idea. “Let’s go up to Cripple Creek!”

Cripple Creek. An old gold mining town in the mountains, southwest of Pikes Peak. Though the population of the district has shrunk by at least half in a little over a century, Cripple Creek still draws people up to where the air is rare. But these days, the sound of commerce is the ka-ching of slot machines instead of the chug and grind of mining gear.

Betty laid her cards carefully on the table, facedown. “I haven’t been there in years.”

“We deserve a break. And it’s Christmas.” Adele, herself, looked like Christmas. She was wearing a ruby-colored satin shirt and had an emerald green bow pinned to her hair.

“Who’s going to drive?” That’s Thelma. The straightest point from A to B. No use in talking about it if they couldn’t do it.

They all turned toward me. I felt pinned to the couch by their expectations. “You can’t all possibly fit into my car.”

“I wasn’t thinking of
your
car.” Adele’s eyes were twinkling.

“Whose? Thelma’s? Betty’s?”

“I was thinking of Joe’s.”

Which is how I came to be driving Grandmother and her three closest friends up to Cripple Creek at 6:00 Friday morning in Joe’s SUV. I took the day off work. There was no one around the department to even care. I tried to convince the ladies to stay overnight, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

“And pack a suitcase?” Adele had frowned at the thought.

Thelma was frowning too. “I don’t think I even own one anymore.”

“I never sleep well if it’s not in my own bed.” Betty would know.

We wound our way up through the canyons between Manitou Springs and Divide, and emerged at Florissant. I pulled into the Fossil Beds National Monument and did a quick oxygen check. At altitudes like these, with women like those, you never knew what might happen.

“Everyone still breathing? Anyone feel faint? Speak now and I’ll turn around. Otherwise, the next stop is Cripple Creek.”

They all said they were fine, even though Adele looked a little blue in the lips. She swore it was her lipstick.

Half an hour later, we crested the hill that looked down into the town. Normally, Cripple Creek sat at the bottom of a well-scoured bowl. But today it almost looked pretty. The barren ground and the assorted rubble of abandoned mine shafts and homesteads had been covered by the grace of new-fallen snow.

The mining district is one gigantic object lesson about littering. Know what happened when the gold petered out? People left. Left behind all sorts of things. From houses to bicycles. From scaffold-like headframes and hoists to pails. Piles of rubble still marked the entrances to unprofitable mines—and there were five
hundred
mines at the height of the gold rush. Guess what? All that trash was still there. And at this altitude, it probably would be for another 200 years. The earth mends slowly, if ever. A gouge in the landscape at 10,000 feet will stay raw and ugly without urgent and regular care.

We parked at Womacks Casino because, well, it was paved. And it was free, as long as you played for a while inside. So we did. And then we wandered into the connected Legends Casino.

We paused for lunch at the Gold Rush Hotel and Casino and then gambled some more. I thought about an idea I’d been toying with all week—getting a gift for Joe.

I wasn’t going to of course. Because that would be admitting I thought about him…cared about him…more than I was supposed to. Which brought up another thought. Maybe the time had come to put a stop to our relationship.

But that wasn’t very practical, was it? We worked together.

So maybe it was time to just stop doing so much with him. Stop seeing him socially.

Maybe.

By 2:00, everyone’s eyes were droopy. Even mine. No one had hit a jackpot or scored big at blackjack, but they all insisted they’d had fun. As much fun as they’d wanted. So we piled into Joe’s SUV and drove home.

They slept all the way while I yawned.

I drove back to Denver on Sunday to pick Joe up.

He bounded up to the SUV when he saw it.

I got out and changed sides. Let him drive it home. Because I’d driven it enough.

He tossed his duffle bag in the back, put the SUV in gear, and pulled away from the terminal building.

I saw him scan the dashboard. Saw his eyes return to the odometer.

“You didn’t
drive
the SUV while I was gone, did you?”

“Um…”

“Because I know you don’t do SUVs.”

“Well…”

“And you certainly wouldn’t have driven it a hundred miles or so…?”

“I filled your tank up.”

He just smiled.

I have to admit, I had missed those dimples.

On Monday, a paper plane sailed over the wall of the cubicle and landed on the floor behind my chair. I spun around to retrieve it.

Written on one of the wings was this question:
Have plans this Saturday? Besides work? Which I can get you out of
…