She looked up from her shoes, her good polished pumps, not her nurse shoes, and saw a pink conch shell on Mr. Cortland’s desk. It occurred to her it must be one of the things that made him happy. Other people were made happy by music or flowers or bowls of ice cream-enchanted, familiar things. Some people collected china, and when they found a long-sought piece, that made them happy. What made her happy was the obliteration of time, burning it away so cleanly she hardly noticed it. Not that she said so to Mr. Cortland. She said, in fact, very little, though some dragging filament of intuition urged her to accept tea rather than coffee, to forgo milk, to shake her head sadly over the proffered sugar.

“We are more delighted than I can say with your sales performance,” Mr. Cortland said. “We are a small but growing firm and, as you know”-Hazel did not know, how could she?-“we are a family concern. My maternal grandfather studied commerce at McGill and started this business as a kind of hobby. Our aim, the family’s aim, is a reliable product, but not a hard sell. I can’t stress this enough to our sales people. We are anxious to avoid a crude hectoring approach or tactics that are in any way manipulative, and we are in the process of developing a quality sales force that matches the quality of our product line. This may surprise you, but it is difficult to find people like yourself who possess, if I may say so, your gentleness of manner. People like yourself transmit a sense of trust to the consumer. We’ve heard very fine things about you, and we have decided, Hazel—I do hope I may call you Hazel-to put you on regular salary, in addition of course to an adjusted commission. And I would like also to present you with this small brooch, a glazed ceramic K for Kitchen Kult, which we give each quarter to our top sales person.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Peter Lemmon asked later that afternoon over a celebratory drink at Mr. Duck’s Happy Hour. “Salary means you’re on the team, you’re a Kitchen Kult player. Salary equals professional, Hazel. You’ve arrived, and I don’t think you even realize it.”

Hazel thought she saw flickering across Peter’s guarded, eager face, like a blade of sunlight through a thick curtain, the suggestion that some privilege had been carelessly allocated. She pinned the brooch on the lapel of her good spring coat with an air of bafflement. Beyond the simple smoothness of her pay check, she perceived dark squadrons of planners and decision makers who had brought this teasing irony forward. She was being rewarded-a bewildering turn of events-for her timidity, her self-effacement, for what Maxine called her knack for looking the other way. She was a shy, ineffectual, untrained, neutral looking woman, and for this she was being kicked upstairs, or at least this was how Peter translated her move from commission to salary. He scratched his neck, took a long drink of his beer, and said it a third time, with a touch of belligerence it seemed to Hazel, “a kick upstairs.” He insisted on paying for the drinks, even though Hazel pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand. He shook it off.