“HOW WAS YOUR parole visit?” asked Linda when he returned home. Sometimes Kevin thought she was hopeful that he would be carted off back to jail, and the house would be all hers again. There had been so many changes in the decorating scheme when he had returned from his ninety-day stint that he was unsure if he had been welcome back in his own home. Linda was sitting at her desk and going over bills, a pose in which Kevin had learned conversation was unwelcome unless she initiated it, and even then it should be kept brief.

“Fine. I don’t have to go back. I’m cured.” He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his soaked jeans and underwear, and took a towel from the hall closet. Standing naked from the waist down, he began toweling himself vigorously, careful not to rub his raw, burned scrotum.

“What happened to you?” Linda asked. The shock in her voice made Kevin look down and he noticed that his pubic hair had turned white.

“Oh Christ,” he mumbled. He stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Linda burst out laughing. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time. He set the water to cold and stood under the stream, shivering at first. Then the coolness of the water began to soothe his steaming crotch, and he gasped in relief.

Linda banged on the door, still laughing. “What the hell is going on with you? Why are you all white?”

“I’ll be out in a minute,” he yelled, irritated at the interruption.

There was silence. Ten minutes later, when Kevin emerged from the bathroom, Linda was back at her desk, looking at the bills. He felt better now, physically and mentally, and he watched her as she wrote a check, hoping she was still as lighthearted as she had been a few moments earlier. It had been a long time since he had seen her amused. It had been a long time since he had been free from the court system, too, and he felt like it would be a good day to go out and celebrate.

“I’m free,” he said to her back. “They let me off parole today.”

“Yeah, I heard you,” Linda said, not looking up. “Am I supposed to say congratulations?”

“Shit,” he said, annoyed. “I thought maybe we could go out and celebrate tonight, but I guess not.”

“Celebrate?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yeah, celebrate. But fuck it.”

“Celebrate.” She shook her head in awe and laughed coarsely, not happily, the way she had been laughing earlier. “What should we tell the waiter when he asks what we’re celebrating?”

“Is that what bothers you? How it looks to the waiter?”

“Where would we even get a sitter this late? And we can’t afford to go out, not this month. Have you looked at the bills lately? Do you even live on the same planet I’m on?” She turned back to the paperwork dismissively.

Kevin put on clean underwear and some loose-fitting shorts, in a hurry to leave. He had thought from her reaction to his bleaching that she might be in a lighter mood today, that he could share a moment with her. Clearly, it wasn’t the case, and now he just wanted to get away as fast as possible. He had a round of dogs to walk at four thirty, and even though it was barely three o’ clock, he grabbed his keys and headed for the stairs.

“I’m not the one who told you to grow pot in the basement, Kevin,” she called after him. Kevin wasn’t able to slam the door before she finished the sentence.

“BOB SUTHERLAND WANTS to see you in his office,” said Melissa, the office manager. She sounded mad, and Mitch knew right away he was in trouble. It was odd, the way secretaries adopted their boss’s anger as if it were their own. What the fuck had he done now? Mislabeled a display of lug nuts, perhaps? Permitted Charles to work seven minutes of overtime? Melissa was gone before he could even acknowledge her and he figured it was bad. Oh, shit, maybe they had found the missing invoices for the high-def TVs.

“Ooooh, that no sound good,” said Charles.

Mitch stood up and stretched. He and Charles had just finished an entire load of inventory. They had lifted, sorted, and stacked a tractor trailer’s worth of Accu-mart’s crap, and Mitch was in the mood for a break, not an interrogation. He sighed and handed Charles the clipboard.

“I might not see you again,” he said, suddenly aware that being fired was a possibility. He waved a hand at the dirty, oil-stained warehouse with candy and potato chip wrappers scattered across the vast floor. “Maybe tomorrow, all this will be yours.”

Charles looked concerned. “Why? What you do, man?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Mitch said, practicing his excuse. “I might have made some inventory mistakes.”

Charles said nothing and Mitch realized he would have to do better. Inventory mistakes? Didn’t sound right; too political, too guilty. It was something a congressman would have come up with. I have no idea what happened to those invoices… I never saw them. Better. That would be his lie, and he would stick to it, then throw the invoices out when he got home and bag the whole stupid TV-stealing idea, and maybe this thing would blow over.

Melissa was in Bob Sutherland’s office when Mitch got there, with a tape recorder and a microphone, which Mitch found odd. She was staring right into the microphone, not making eye contact with Mitch. Sutherland was reading a file, pretending not to notice Mitch had entered the room. This was not going to be a happy-smiley type of meeting.

Melissa, a stiff-haired and efficient woman in her fifties who in the past had bonded with Mitch over their only earthly connection, a nicotine addiction, and who was now pretending not to know him, turned to Bob and said, “OK, it’s ready.” She hit a button on the tape recorder.

“You’re being taped,” said Bob Sutherland.

“I’m being taped?”

Mitch turned to close the door, and Sutherland said, “No, leave it open.” Mitch saw rage and hurt and offense in his face and put on the mystified expression which he had decided would be his best defense. That and, of course, continually repeating that he was not good with detail-oriented tasks and he maybe might have made a mistake.

“You’re a real piece of work aren’t you, Mitch?” Sutherland said.

How did one answer that? Neither denial nor admission really moved things along. Mitch just stared.

“Can you explain this?” Sutherland asked. He handed Mitch a sheet of paper with thousands of tiny numbers written on it. About halfway down, one ten-digit number was highlighted, and Mitch immediately recognized it as the telephone number of Dave Rice, the guy he had called about pretending to be the Webmaster general. He tried to piece together how Sutherland had started with this and somehow wound up with knowledge of the stolen TV invoices. How did this incriminate him? Best to just act ignorant.

“What is it? It looks like a sheet with phone numbers on it.”

“Quit playing around, Mitch,” Sutherland snapped. “You know what it is.” Sutherland leaned back in his chair, and Mitch noticed Melissa was staring at him with what appeared to be hate. He smiled at her and her expression did not change. He might still be able to save his job if he gave the right answers.

“There’s a number highlighted,” Mitch said, trying to sound helpful. His brain was firing in every direction, trying to figure how Sutherland, the world’s stupidest man, had been able to find the missing invoices from Mitch’s conversation with Dave Rice. What was going on?

“Why don’t you tell me about that?”

“About this number?” Mitch stalled.

“Yes. About that number.” Sutherland leaned farther back and glared at Mitch malevolently. It was intimidating, all the hate in the room. “About how that number got called from Karl’s office, on his day off.”