Gosh, wow, Brenda said, it seems crazy that they watched your time card so close and yet look at all these coffee thingies on the counter a person could just take and who’d ever know? Were those coffee thingies cheap? She doubted it! Why not make people write it down whenever they put in a fresh coffee thingie? Ever heard of cost control? Not that anybody here would sink so low. As to steal coffee. They got paid good. Pretty good. Some better than others. Ha! But same with the paper towels on top of the fridge, though: why not just hang a sign up there saying, please take?

Brenda was small, round, sweet, standing there in one of those too-short blouses she was always tugging down over her toddleresque belly: elfin, if you were feeling generous.

Greggie and Bethie were both, sadly, yeah, living with her now, again, in her same old crappo two-bedroom, she said. Although how cool was that, to have your two grown kiddos so close at hand? Although how about cooking something once in a while, dudes? Even a grilled cheese once a week would be the bomb. Lately she’d been taking the bus to work, because the car was in that frigging rip-off of a shop again, yeah, so soon as she got home she’d have to fry something up for her two little deadbeats while they sat on the couch looking over at her like (and here she made a deadbeat face: dropping her jaw, crossing her eyes).

Gen glanced longingly back at the hallway.

Brenda had more to share.

Well, the people you loved in this world were all that mattered. That’s what she thought, anyway. Some people didn’t get that. She could do with a little less stupid, though! Like, last week, she’d had to stay until midnight, unbinding eight hundred frigging reports. Because a certain dodo hadn’t liked Figure 6b. Did it ever occur to him to maybe order pizza for the lady (her) staying late, the worker bee, the big nobody? Ha. She’d sat there cross-legged on that thin carpet they had in the copy room over that hard cement floor, unbinding, totally starving, while the certain dodo was over at his kid’s cello recital, and after that they’d probably all gone for a big feed somewhere nice, unlike her, who, all she’d had was three bags of chips for dinner from the vending machine in the frigging atrium and that was it. Bon appétit, right?

Tim Rupp stepped in. The certain dodo. Yikes. Had Tim heard all that?

Brenda blushed, did a strange little bow, backed out.

“Whoa,” Gen said to Tim in an undertone, meaning, That Brenda, right? What a hoot.

Expecting a look of collegial commiseration, she instead found herself receiving a judgment-laced sadness-wince.

“Well,” Tim said. “She’s had a tough row to hoe.”