Free Spygirl by Amy Gray

job at the Agency. I arrived at the office a little early to find Evan holding court with a Marlboro Red hanging out of his mouth and one foot on his desk. “Hey, Gray,” he said, calling me over and gesturing with his chin like a movie-made mafioso from the 1950s.
    “It's freezing in here,” I said to him. It couldn't have been more than forty degrees, and the whole airy space shivered as gusts snuck through cracks in the windows, holes in the floorboards, pipes in the walls.
    “I know, it's pretty bad,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that the heat is busted and you can feel free to take your laptop and go work at home, “cause it'll probably be awhile before we get this fixed—HEY, ASSMAN!” Evan called over me to Matt to deliver him the same good news. I was blissful with the prospect of a grownup snow day, a clean white layer to erase everything— my doubts, my mistrust, my hangover. I was opening the door of the office, which swung open a little too easily with the pull of the wind behind it, when Evan made an announcement: “Nobody move!”
    We all gathered around his desk. Evan explained that Sol had called in and told him that his father had just died. We could use our discretion about whether or not to attend the funeral, whichwould be that day in Neptune City, New Jersey. They were going to rent a van to get there.
    I was quietly beset. On the one hand, I was thrilled with the gift of snow, and relieved to have another day to clear my head. On the other hand, it would be an egregious slight to blow off the funeral to have a few extra hours at the Liquor Store Bar, or, even worse, shop, which my bank account couldn't sustain right now. Still, I was used to the steadfastness of massive central heating systems, like the one in the fifty-floored building, where I'd hammered out flap copy till one or two in the morning to the soothing hum of the air flowing through ten thousand tiny grates in ten thousand tiny cubicles in a hundred thousand square feet of perfectly calibrated office space heat. A broken heating system was—a gift from God! It released me, however temporarily, from another day of professional self-flagellation. A day off was painfully alluring, but attending the funeral might be the perfect way to ingratiate myself with Sol. Or he might consider it an intrusion to have me there, a new hire, witnessing one of the most intimate moments of his life. In the end, I decided to go.
Another Baptism by Fire
    This funeral was actually the second time in two years that I'd started a job and been plunged into the intimacies of death and loss in the lives of my bosses. Two weeks before I graduated college, I got my first publishing job, and a week later I was in Cape Cod, with my mom for the weekend. I went into town in the morning for a hot jelly doughnut and the
Times.
When I sat down with the paper I instantly noticed a front-page article titled P ULITZER WINNING WRITER DIES IN CLIMBING ACCIDENT. According tounconfirmed sources,” the writer's body had not yet been recovered, but it was believed that, while hiking a particularly difficult part of the Himalayas, he was overtaken by altitude sickness, leading him to freeze to death. His hiking partner had managed to return to a base camp and was hospitalized in critical condition, with both legs amputated. I wasn't sure it was him at first, but I remembered some particulars my new boss Gloria had revealed to me about her husband: He was a writer, and his nickname was Newlyn or Newt Ebersol. At my you've-got-the-job-lunch at La-Grenouille, she gave me the portentous warning, “Never marry a writer.” When I read, at the end, “Mr. Ebersol leaves his wife, Gloria Nelson, a book editor, a son, Myer Tate Ebersol, and a daughter, Olivia Marcel Ebersol,” I dropped my plate and said, “Fuck!” I left the hot raspberry jelly and torn dough in a fleshy pile on the floor.
    A week and a half later, I was sitting in St. Bartholomew's Church at Park