The man waiting beside Nora's parking space had brought his own chair.
It was a folding lawn chair, green straps stretched over aluminum, and he had positioned it just inside the yellow rectangle marked VISITOR. On the asphalt beside him sat a travel mug, an umbrella, and a paperback thick enough to suggest he could stay all day.
Nora stopped her rental car. He looked up from the book and made a small turning motion with one hand.
She lowered the window.
“Employee parking's around the back,” he said.
“I'm a visitor.”
“Then I'd go somewhere else.”
He was perhaps sixty, with a trim gray beard and work boots unlaced at the top. The familiar red Morrow shirt had faded to the color of cooked ham. Nora could see his badge on its retractable cord. PETER. She couldn't make out the last name.
“I need to get into the building.”
“So do a lot of people.”
She looked past him. The distribution center occupied almost all the view, a low tan building laid across a great flat slab of Ohio. Trucks stood along its southern side. Above the office entrance, a banner said THANK YOU FOR SEVENTY YEARS OF MORROW. Somebody had drawn a black line through THANK YOU. The alteration was careful. Whoever had done it had used a straightedge.
“Is this your assigned space?” she asked.
“It is now.”
“Okay.”
She put the car in reverse.
He hadn't expected that. She saw it in the way he closed the book around a finger. He had prepared for an argument, and she was depriving him of half the event.
Nora parked three rows away, beside an enormous pickup with a small bicycle locked in its bed. She took her bag from the passenger seat. The man watched her come back across the lot.
“You Bell?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so.”
“Then why ask?”
“Wanted to hear if you'd own it.”
She stopped beside the chair. His mug had the company's old logo, the one with the little house inside the O. She had one of those mugs somewhere. Her mother had kept it after Nora moved away, used it for paintbrushes, then sent it to her wrapped in a towel when the house was sold.
“What's your last name, Peter?”
“Dunn.”
“Are you on the clock?”
He smiled without pleasure. “What are you going to do, fire me?”
“I'm asking whether somebody's covering your station.”
“Station went away Thursday. I'm training a man from Kentucky to do it in Kentucky. Except he's gone back to Kentucky, so I've got a little free time.”
A security guard came out of the office entrance. His belt kept sliding under his stomach. He pulled it up as he approached.
“Pete. Come on.”
“I'm on break.”
“Your break's fifteen minutes.”
“I've got twenty-three years.”
The guard looked at Nora. She could have introduced herself, taken his name, let him clear a path. It was usually the first favor a building offered: somebody else's little humiliation, performed to establish that she belonged.
“He's not in my way,” she said.
“I can move him.”
“I found another space.”
Pete looked annoyed now. She had made him look like a parking problem.
“Did they tell you what we're getting?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“All of us got a letter. Six weeks. That's not a rumor.”
“I've seen the letters.”
“Because there are rumors.”
“There usually are.”
“That isn't an answer.”
“No,” Nora said. “It isn't.”
She left him with the chair and went inside.
The receptionist's desk had been replaced by a waist-high turnstile and a tablet. A potted palm Nora remembered as thriving was now three brown fronds tied to a stick. Someone had taped a paper sign to the pot: ALSO SEEKING EMPLOYMENT.
The guard followed her through the outer door.
“Sorry about that.”
“Don't be. Is Pete doing anything dangerous?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“Ask me when he does.”
Nora signed in on the tablet. It offered her a selection of visits: CUSTOMER, VENDOR, CONTRACTOR, OTHER. She pressed CONTRACTOR. A small printer produced a badge with her name in larger letters than she wanted.
“You worked here, didn't you?” the guard said.
“A long time ago.”
“My sister was here a long time ago.”
Nora waited. This was one of the hazards of returning to a place where you had been young: everyone believed they owned a piece of you, and some of them did.
“Jeanette. Shipping.”
“Oh. How is she?”
“Dead.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Not from this,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the building. “Four years ago. Cancer.”
Nora remembered Jeanette's hair pinned into a glossy black knot, the formidable precision of her eyebrows. She remembered being scared of her, then realizing that Jeanette liked being asked questions because it let her explain why everyone else was wrong.
“She taught me how to read a packing discrepancy,” Nora said.
“Then you're one of the few.”
His mouth softened. He pointed her down the hall.
“They're in Training Two. Not One. One's full of boxes.”
Training Two had thirty-four chairs and fifty people in it. A few were office staff, but most wore work clothes. Several stood at the back with their arms folded. On the table beneath the whiteboard waited a sheet cake, still inside its clear plastic dome.
Nora stopped in the doorway.
A woman in a gray cardigan rose from the front row. “Nora? I'm Dana. We spoke.”
“Payroll.”
“And benefits. And, currently, toner.” She held up a black-streaked finger. “Graham's running late. We thought you could do the employee questions first.”
“Did he.”
Dana gave her a look that said yes, he did, and no, she wasn't defending it.
Nora set her bag on the table. Someone near the back said, “There she is.”
She took off her coat. A cheap white jacket hung on a hook by the door, its sleeves spread stiffly as if its owner had been arrested inside it. She had bought her own coat in Chicago last winter and liked it very much. For a moment she wished it were uglier.
“I'm Nora Bell.”
“We can read,” said a woman in the second row.
Nora looked down at her visitor badge. “Good. They've made it big enough.”
A few people smiled. Not the woman.
“I've been asked to handle the final week of the closure. I won't repeat the announcement you got in August.”
“Wouldn't want you to work too hard.”
“I'll do my best to keep the redundancy to a minimum.”
This time there was a small, startled laugh. The woman in the second row almost joined it and then refused.
Nora pulled a chair around and sat, rather than take the empty space by the whiteboard. She hated speakers who sat to look approachable. It also worked.
“What do you need answered first?”
A hand went up at the back. “Insurance.”
Another voice: “The references.”
“Whether they're taking the coffee machine.”
“That's company property,” a man in a blue shirt said.
“So were we.”
The room laughed hard enough that Nora let it finish. She had learned years ago not to compete with a better line.
Dana sat beside her with a notebook. Together they worked through the questions. Health coverage had dates. References had names. Nobody was required to sign a letter saying they were pleased to leave. Yes, the job-placement people were still coming Wednesday. No, there was no point asking Nora if she could make them better job-placement people.
A woman in the doorway wanted to know about her vacation balance. A man wanted to know why the new hub was getting new equipment while his shift had spent four months sharing a label printer. Nora told him she didn't know, and wrote it down.
“You going to do something about it?” he asked.
“I can get you an answer.”
“I know the answer. I want to hear him say it.”
Graham, then. There were six hundred employees on the eligible list. Nora had already begun to recognize which questions were about him.
Pete entered carrying his folded chair. He had apparently decided the meeting deserved attendance after all. He set it at the end of an aisle and sat down. The guard did not follow him.
“And the six weeks?” Pete asked.
Dana's pen stopped moving.
“The written separation terms are in your individual packets,” Nora said.
“That's a building answering. I'm asking a person.”
Nora had not yet met with Graham. Her contract referred to execution of the announced separation program. She had reviewed sample letters, timelines, a roster. The fee was excellent, the building familiar, the week short. She had asked the questions she always asked. She was beginning to suspect that she had liked the answers too much.
“I have a meeting about the program this afternoon,” she said. “I'll make sure that question gets answered.”
“Today?”
“I'll come back to you today.”
“That's not the same thing.”
“No.”
The woman in the second row made a quiet noise through her nose.
Nora turned to her. “What's your name?”
“Charlene.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“That you don't know.”
“I don't know.”
“There you go.”
It should have ended the meeting. It didn't. The questions continued until someone from receiving opened the door and said three people were needed downstairs. Chairs scraped. The room thinned. Those leaving took slices of cake on napkins, tearing pieces off the edges because no knife had been supplied.
Nora looked at the icing beneath the dome. WE VALUE OUR PEOPLE, in red script. An attempted Morrow logo had sagged into something like a kidney.
“They send that every year,” Dana said. “This one's just badly timed.”
“Who ordered it?”
“Me. Six weeks ago.”
Nora lifted the dome. “Then I'm having some.”
Dana cut a piece with the edge of a plastic ruler. She offered it to Nora on a napkin.
“I washed it.”
“I didn't ask.”
“You looked.”
Nora took the cake.
She had eaten two bites when a woman appeared in the doorway wearing a navy work shirt with MAE embroidered over the pocket. Her dark hair was cut to her jaw now. The last time Nora had seen it, there had been a braid halfway down her back, thick enough to hurt when Mae threw it over a shoulder.
Mae Torres looked at the cake, the notebook, the neat coat on its hook.
“Jesus,” she said. “They've sent an alumnus.”
Nora swallowed too quickly.
“Hi, Mae.”
“Don't hi-Mae me with that thing on.”
Nora glanced down. The badge.
She peeled it off her sweater.
“Now you're a guest,” Mae said. “Was that easy?”
Dana closed her notebook. “I'll get the rest of these.”
“You don't have to leave,” Nora said.
“I absolutely do.”
Mae waited until Dana had gone. Nora put the cake on the table. For twenty years she had imagined this reunion in a variety of settings, none of which had involved store-bought frosting on her finger.
“You look good,” she said.
“You look expensive.”
“It was on sale.”
“Your face?”
Nora laughed. She hadn't meant to, and Mae's expression changed for half a second before it closed again.
“I'm here for the week.”
“I know. My job's being closed. We get newsletters.”
“I tried to call you.”
“Last week. You left a message saying you hoped the timing wasn't awkward.”
“It wasn't my best message.”
“You've had better ones?”
Nora rubbed the icing off her finger with a napkin. The paper broke, leaving a little red streak on her skin.
“I should have called sooner.”
“Yes.”
“I'd like to buy you dinner.”
“I'm working.”
“After.”
“After I'm sleeping.”
“Breakfast, then.”
“Do you think the hours were the problem?”
Outside, a reversing alarm sounded in three slow bursts. Mae looked toward it automatically. She had always known which sounds needed her and which could wait. Nora used to know too.
“What do you need from me?” Nora asked.
“The handoff schedule. It says the night leads have to come in Friday morning, after Thursday night. Are we working both?”
“No. Not a full double. I'll get it corrected.”
“Don't get it corrected. Correct it. Dana's had that thing sent back three times.”
“Okay.”
“And don't stand up in front of them and say you've been where they are.”
“I haven't said that.”
“Good. Keep not saying it.”
Mae went to the table and cut herself a piece of cake with the ruler. She ate it in two bites, looking out into the hall.
“That's filthy,” she said.
“Dana washed it.”
“Dana says that about her mug. It's got a civilization in it.”
Nora wanted to ask about Luis, Mae's mother, the house on Harlan Street. She wanted to do it without making a list of the years she had missed. Mae crumpled her napkin and put it in the trash.
“You staying at that hotel by the freeway?”
“Yes.”
“Don't get the fish.”
“It's Ohio. I wasn't going to.”
“You used to eat anything somebody put on a plate.”
Nora had once eaten half a sandwich off Mae's dashboard because Mae had said it was probably still good. The memory arrived complete: hot vinyl, pickle juice, the two of them laughing so much that Nora could hardly swallow. She looked at Mae and saw that she remembered it too.
Then the alarm sounded again.
“I have to go,” Mae said.
“I'm supposed to meet Graham at two. Could I find you afterward?”
“You could try doing the schedule first.”
She left. Nora stood alone beside the cake, holding the visitor badge in her hand.
At the hotel that morning, she had left her suitcase zipped. It was a small habit, useful on short assignments. Nothing spread out. Nothing to go back for.
She opened her laptop and pulled up the shift schedule.