Chapter 117: Notice
Brandt offered me the job in a corridor, which is where she says most things.
Intake and records specialist. Forty-three thousand five hundred. No benefits for the first six months.
It was funded out of a two-year grant.
She told me that in the first sentence, before the salary, which is how she does everything.
“When the grant ends, the post ends, unless we get the renewal. I am not going to dress that up for you.”
“How likely is the renewal.”
“Sixty per cent. Maybe. It depends on a committee in another city.”
I said I would think about it and I thought about it for four days, mostly at night.
Then, on the Friday, she said the thing she had been holding since our first meeting.
We were in the same corridor, by the photocopier that jams.
“Do you know why I took your case?”
“The date.”
“No. Everybody's got a date. Half the files in my room have a date in them.”
“Then what.”
“You turned to the last page of my retainer and read the date line before you read your own name.”
“That's just how I read.”
“I know. That is exactly the point. Nobody taught you that in a corridor. You learned it in a cell.”
Then she went to get her copies and that was the whole conversation.
I gave Marisol notice on a Monday morning at ten past seven, before we opened.
I had written it out. One page. Effective date, last working day, offer to train a replacement.
She read it standing up. It took her eleven seconds. Then she put it on the counter and squared the edges.
“Forty-three five.”
“Forty-three five.”
“They'll work you like a dog and you'll like it.”
“Probably.”
“Two weeks. And you'll do the month-end before you go, because I'm not doing it.”
“I'll do the month-end.”
That was all. She went into the back and did not come out for forty minutes.
I want to say what she did for me, because it is easy to leave out the boring parts of a debt.
She hired me when eleven other places would not.
She paid me on time, every time, for three years and two months.
She never asked me a single question about my case, and she never once looked at me as though I were a story.
She raised me twice without being asked. She gave me a key to a storage unit worth about four thousand dollars in paper.
She did not do any of it out of kindness. She has said so herself, more than once, in almost those words.
She needed somebody who understood how a jail intake works at three in the morning. I understood it.
That is a better reason than kindness. It lasts longer and it does not ask you to be grateful in a particular way.
On my last afternoon I finished the month-end at ten past four and cleaned the scanner glass.
Then I put the Schlage key with the green tape on the counter, next to the log sheet.
She came out, looked at it, and pushed a small box across to me instead.
It was the caliper. The steel one she keeps for measuring seized property.
“You'll want that,” she said. “They won't have one.”
They did not have one. They still do not have one. It is in the second drawer of my desk at the clinic.
My first week at Fulcrum I read forty-one intake applications.
I closed thirty-nine of them.
That is the job. It is not a noble job. Most of the letters are from people who did it.
The two I kept both had documents in them. That is the only thing I look for now.
In my third week I wrote a rule on the whiteboard in the intake room and nobody has rubbed it off in four years.
INDEX UNDER EVERY NUMBER THE DOCUMENT HAS.
Under it, smaller, because the students kept asking: case number, docket, plate, VIN, claim, lien, invoice, policy.
The photographs of my car sat in a shed for six years because they were filed under a lien number.
Nobody was hiding them. Nobody had to hide them. A wrong index is better than a locked drawer.
That is the thing I teach and it is the only thing I am qualified to teach.
In August a woman came in with a carrier bag of paper about her son and she would not sit down.
I stood up too, and we did the whole intake standing at the counter, which took fifty minutes.
Her son's file had two dates on the same document and one of them was impossible.
I did not tell her that it meant anything. It does not, usually. It usually means a clerk was tired.
I told her we would order the original book, and I wrote down what a notarial journal is on the back of her bus ticket.