Chapter 36: Why She Hired Me
Marisol Vega was forty-four and had run the office nineteen years.
In eleven weeks she had never once asked me a question about prison.
That is unusual.
People ask. They ask within about four minutes.
The Tuesday after I posted the housing application, she came into the back room at four-fifteen with two coffees from the place on the corner and put one on my desk.
She sat on the spare chair, which had files on it, so she moved the files to the floor first, in order, without looking at them.
The coffee was black. She had not asked how I took it, and I did not tell her, and I drank it black for two years.
She said, “Ask me your question.”
I said, “Which one?”
She said, “The one you've been carrying since June.”
So I asked it.
I said, “Why did you hire me?”
She drank some of her coffee.
She said, “How many people are in county right now?”
I said I did not know the count that week.
I said the facility holds about eleven hundred and runs above capacity most of the year.
She said, “What time does the sheriff's bus leave for the courthouse?”
I said, “Five-forty. It's back by six if the calendar's short. If there's a jury trial on the docket it's back at eight.”
She said, “Why does that matter to me?”
I said, “Because if it comes back at eight, property release is closed, and the mother who drove ninety minutes doesn't get the wallet, and she calls you at eight-fifteen angry at you for something the county did.”
Marisol put her cup on the desk.
She said, “That's why.”
Then she told me about the four people she had hired before me.
Two had lasted under a month.
One had been good and had left for a job with health insurance, which Marisol said in the tone of a person who does not blame anyone for that.
The fourth had been there fourteen months and had been, by her account, competent, polite, fast, and completely useless on the telephone.
She said, “She kept telling them it would be fine.”
I said, “It usually isn't.”
She said, “It usually isn't, and they can hear it in your voice when you don't know.”
Then she said the thing I have quoted to people ever since, and I am going to put it down flat because she said it flat.
She said, “I'm not doing you a favour. You're cheap and you can read.”
I said, “That's two reasons.”
She said, “It's three. The third is you've been on the other end of the phone.”
I asked whether it worried her, having a felony conviction on the payroll of a company licensed by the state.
She said, “I checked. There's no bar for clerical.”
She said she had called the department and asked and got it in writing before she called me in, and she had the letter in the front cabinet under V.
Of course she did. Nineteen years.
I asked to see it. She said no, and then she went and got it, and I read it standing up. Two paragraphs and a signature block.
Then she said, “My brother did four years. Aggravated assault. He was twenty-two.”
I did not ask anything.
In six years I had learned that when somebody hands you a fact about their family, you hold it and you do not turn it over.
She said, “He's fine. He's a plumber in another state and he has two kids and he does not answer my calls in the summer.”
She said, “I didn't hire you because of him. I hired you because of the bus.”
She did not look at me while she said it. She looked at the wall calendar.
I believed her. I still believe her.
It was the least sentimental thing anybody said to me that year and it was the reason I could take the job without owing anything.
Then she said, “Starting Monday you answer the phone.”
I said, “People will ask who I am.”
She said, “Tell them.”
I said, “Tell them what?”
She said, “Your name. That's who you are. If they ask the other thing, answer it and keep going.”
Then she stood up, picked the files off the floor in the order she had put them down, and set them back on the chair.
At the door she stopped.
She said, “One rule on the phone. Never say it'll be fine.”
I said, “What do I say?”
She said, “Say what happens next.”
Then she went out and put the radio on, and it was four-thirty, because it was always four-thirty.
I sat for a minute and wrote, on the index card taped to the monitor, under the number 400, four words in pencil.
Say what happens next.