Nicholas had picked me up along with my pomegranate-and-poppy-seed-dressed salad. I brought the same salad every year, and took it home every year barely eaten, since most of the office avoided salad like a toxin. Still, Mark insisted that I bring it because his wife, Shelley, once remarked that she liked it. I had since concluded that she was only being polite since she hadn’t eaten any of it for the last two years.

Nicholas parked his BMW across the street from the house, and I carried my bowl up to the door.

“Shall I ring the bell?” Nicholas asked.

“No. They won’t answer; just walk in.”

He opened the door. As I anticipated, there was no one to greet us, and the only sounds came from the television in the family room.

“I’ll take your coat,” Nicholas said.

I set my salad on the floor, then took off my coat and handed it to him. “They put them in the living room,” I said.

Nicholas added our coats to a pile of outerwear already covering the crushed-velvet sofa. Then we walked into the kitchen. No one noticed (or cared) as I lay my salad on the counter.

My boss, Mark Engeman, was notoriously tightfisted, and the party’s food was grocery store platters of meat and cheese laid out next to plates of Ritz and saltine crackers dressed with cheese from a can. There were also jalapeño poppers, store-bought rolls to make sandwiches, and a large bowl of carrot-raisin salad, which was always Cathy’s contribution.

The one place Mark splurged was on beer. His refrigerator was stocked with all the Budweiser it could hold. There was also a plastic cooler filled with beer. I think he caught on that his guests rated the party by the level of intoxication they achieved, which was just one of many reasons that I was always the first to leave.

Everyone else was already there. Mark and his wife, Shelley; Cathy, who brought Maureen, her snarky sister. And Brent and Margaret, our two group escorts, whom we rarely saw because they were on the road more than two hundred days out of the year, with their spouses.

Closest to the kitchen were Zoey and her date. As usual, Zoey had brought someone none of us had ever seen and would likely never see again, which made introductory conversation pointless. Her boy du jour was tall and muscular, handsome but not especially bright-looking. He wore a sleeveless Utah Jazz jersey, which emphasized his biceps and myriad tattoos but seemed out of place considering the abundance of snow outside.