Likes by Sarah Bynum (electronic book reader txt) 📕

(freelancer?), and sees, draped across his body, a black messenger bag with the name and jazzy logo of her new employer (Hey, what a coincidence) …

“Just leaving now,” he says, inching down the stairs.

She has the exact same messenger bag—given to her only a month ago by human resources on the day of her New Hire Orientation, and containing a huge three-ring binder holding the Employee Conduct Handbook as well as a reusable water bottle imprinted, like the bag, with her employer’s logo. A bag that’s remained untouched, she must confess, since she dumped it in a corner of their home office upon returning from the rather discouraging orientation. A bag that she hasn’t bothered to empty but that, she sees now, is perfectly useful.

He can hear a tinny voice coming from the telephone. “Are you still there?” the voice asks, as the nanny shifts the receiver from one shoulder to the other. “Hello?”

“That’s my bag.” The sentence comes out of her mouth before she even knows what she is saying. “That’s my bag,” she says again, as he squeezes past her and makes for the front door. The dog is barking. The phone is in her hand. “Where are you going?” she hears herself asking. With the other hand, she reaches out and takes hold of the strap. Everything feels both fast and slow.

He’s surprised by the way she asks it—“Where are you going?”—like it’s a real question. Not like, Where do you think you’re going. And not like, You better not be going anywhere with that bag. She asks as if she wasn’t expecting him to leave, and can’t imagine where in the world he could possibly be off to.

Let’s see: Her husband’s old laptop, which Violet uses to watch movies when they fly. The external hard drive that she bought last month but still hasn’t taken out of the box. Her husband’s off-brand noise-reducing headphones that she’s been planning to replace at Christmas with a fancy pair, the real deal. All of it known to her and protruding from the messenger bag.

Trying to pull away from her, he says it once more: “Just leaving now!” But she’s got a good firm grip on the bag, this lady, this nanny who’s turned out to be the lady. She’s grabbed hold of the bag, and somehow the weight of her hand on the strap has made it surprisingly heavy. “Ma’am, can you hear me?” comes faintly from the receiver. She ignores the voice and keeps looking at the bag. She doesn’t look at him, just at the bag, or maybe she’s looking at him as if he’s an extension of the bag or the bag is an extension of him and she is claiming both. She won’t let go. All he wants to do is get out the door and up the street and around the corner and back to his cousin’s place but this sweaty woman gripping the strap won’t let him.

The husband isn’t hungry but it’s time now to think about lunch. The menu from the Mediterranean place is circulating around the table, along with the sign-up sheet to write down orders. He doesn’t think he can do the chicken panini again—it would be the third time this month, and the pesto aioli doesn’t taste as good as it used to. No more fries on the side, either; he’s starting to feel like shit. At first what had seemed like unbelievable bounty—the kitchen’s always stocked with Pop-Tarts and Mexican Coke? The show buys us lunch every day?—now gives him a constant, low-grade stomachache. And, fuck it, who cares if eating kale is clichéd. He writes down a salad, and Lenny, at his elbow, lets out a little sigh of admiration. Lenny, plump as a partridge, who has asked on several occasions about his gym routine. “You eat smart,” Lenny murmurs. “You work out smart. You’re in the peak physical shape that a person can achieve.” He shakes his head in wonderment as the husband hands off the menu, laughing.

With the dog still barking, Emmett rounds the corner of the house and ambles along its shady side, now and then glancing into a window. What is he looking for? He’s suddenly not sure. The strange sense of purpose that brought him up the driveway and across the lawn has just as mysteriously deserted him. He drifts from window to window, and a part of him understands dimly that this is not the house he is looking for, that none of them are, that the house he is looking for and the girl who lives inside it are in some profound way no longer available to him. But he persists in his orbit of the house, for lack of any other direction. He reaches up to brush a bit of spiderweb from his face—the hedges are full of them—and when he does so is startled momentarily by the warmth of his own hand.

Automatically, she does the math. This has become an involuntary habit. When she got that ticket at the intersection, for instance—an outrageous amount, a stomach-twisting sum—she had paid it off by the time she reached home. By adding together the early-bird discount on Violet’s school uniforms and the first-three-months-free promotion on their cable package and the unblemished hundred-dollar bill that her great-aunt still sends her every year on her birthday, she’d made the ticket disappear. Ta-da! And now, hanging on for dear life to the strap of her messenger bag, she takes one look at the belongings shoved inside and immediately assesses the damage as minimal: two hundred and fifty bucks, tops. She can make that go away, no problem.

“Okay,” Lenny says, squinting at the board. “Okay, okay, okay.” When he pitches, he can say up to a dozen okays in a row without even noticing before he gets his first real word out. “Okay, so we start with a dead girl on the golf course, right?