She’d broken things off with Ed, she said. There had never been any big forthcoming project; that was just something they’d cooked up between the two of them. When she broke it off, he went a little nuts and proposed to her, and when she turned him down, he called Rob, and told Rob all, and Rob, in spite of the fact that they had an open thing going on, went ballistic, and at one point last night had literally been up on the roof screaming. Then Ed, crazy Ed, had called at two a.m. and said he’d shaved his head and was thinking of quitting Kodak and moving up to Alaska. Did she want to come? He’d already bought her some top-rated mittens.

Anyway, they were okay now, they were all okay, they were working it out.

Then she thanked Tim for “calling her on her shit” and elevating her into a “state of higher honesty,” which was causing good things to happen, even at home, especially at home, even in terms of the you-know-what, with Rob, which, weirdly, had never been better, or lasted longer, or been more in earnest, if she could put it that way, based, anyhow, on (late, late) last night, after he came down off the roof, which: wow.

Lady, who are you? he thought. How is it that you feel so comfortable telling me all of this? Why are you not mortified? Where do you get your insane confidence?

She knew she’d been a pain in the ass to him in the past, she said, and she’d done some real soul-searching and could see that a lot of this was due to the insecurity of being a woman in a working world dominated by men, and also some stuff from her childhood, with her mom, who was always denying her use of the superior telescope, but anyway, she wanted Tim to know that she’d resolved to try to be more helpful to him in the future, for real. She’d brought him this truck, this little garbage truck, to symbolize, well, her cleaning up her act, or whatever.

She put the little garbage truck down on the desk, so he could see how cool it was. See? The tiny bag of fake garbage on the back popped right out.

Then she rolled the truck over to him and he caught it.

Sparrow

SPARROW

She was small and slight and her eyes were dark beads on either side of a beaklike nose. She moved quickly, head down, as if, we sometimes joked, scanning for seeds. She had a way of seeming to dart from place to place. She had a way, too, of saying the most predictable things. When a truck went off the road in front of the little store where she worked, she said, “That’s too bad. I hope no one was hurt.” When it started to rain, whether drizzling or pouring, she’d say, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” When someone said the sandwich she was eating looked good, she’d say, “It’s a good sandwich.” If someone said the sandwich didn’t look good, she’d say, “Yeah, not great.”