Free Paradime by Alan Glynn Page A

Kate, what happens to him? Where does he go?
    I have no answer, and with each passing day things just get more complicated. My final cheque from Gideon comes through, accompanied by a three-month unofficial severance payment, which is fucking great, but I find myself not mentioning this last part to Kate. My hours at Barcadero mean that I have fewer opportunities to mention anything to her, but when I do have a moment, my brain is usually fried and I’m not inclined to – which means it’s easier to just let things fester.
    How this plays out on a day-to-day basis is that I get home from work in a sort of operational coma, and, depending on which shift cycle I’m on, early or late, Kate is either there at the kitchen table doing her coding stuff, or she’s out, or watching TV, or having a bath, or even already in bed. We talk, and are cordial, we deal with the small stuff – shopping for food, cooking, doing the laundry – but day after day the subtext gets buried that little bit deeper. Occasionally, a ripple of anxiety will surface. A violent item on the news will spark an unwelcome association, say, or a phone call from the debt-collection agency that now owns Kate’s student loan will detonate like an IED in the quiet of our living room. Or a simple sex scene in a movie we’re both watching late at night will serve as an uncomfortable reminder of how long it’s been for us .
    The worst thing is that we don’t seem capable of going into reverse on any of this. I’m genuinely exhausted on a permanent basis now, and Kate has become more determined than ever to turn her coding MOOC into a job opportunity, so we are busy, we are preoccupied, we do have these brutal demands on our time – but how sustainable is all this over the long term? How compatible is it with the notion of our being in a serious relationship? And how corrosive is it to our periodically expressed desire to have a baby together?
    *
    As it turns out, things aren’t that much better at work. If I had a honeymoon period at Barcadero, I suppose it was just that first shift – those ten hours when I wasn’t the guy who was replacing the guy who died. But ever since then no one has been willing to see my presence in the kitchen as anything other than bad juju – snippy comments are routinely made, looks are exchanged, cooperation is withheld. This makes for a shitty environment. The work still has to get done, though, orders have to be filled. For my part, I can lock into an intense rhythm and hit a flow state.
    There is one thing that helps. It’s the partial but clear line of sight I have from my prep station out into the dining area. During service, when the atmosphere in the kitchen gets too weird or toxic, I’ll glance through the pick-up to see who’s out there. I’ll go around the table, rotating my attention, filling in imaginary details, names, job titles. I’ve done it once already this evening, and now, with service in full swing and tempers fraying all around me, I do it again. I glance out and this time see just two people sitting there – a youngish-looking couple. The guy, from what I can make out, is a business type in an expensive suit, but it’s she who catches my eye. Most of the women who come to this place have that brittle, moneyed look, too tanned and coiffed, too much work done. This woman isn’t anything like that. Even from a distance, I can see that she has an ethereal quality, a natural beauty so intense that she looks unreal, out of place, almost like an alien.
    In fact, I’m so distracted by her that at one point, chopping asparagus tips, I nearly slice off the top of my left index finger. There’s a tiny spurt of blood, but I manage to conceal it. I go over to one of the fridges where we keep a tin of Band-Aids. Taking cover behind the open door, I quickly stick two on my finger in an x-formation. On the way back, avoiding eye contact, I decide I’m an idiot and should just keep my head down in future.