Twenty-Four
After a delightful dinner of chicken and steak kabobs, the boys are excused to the living room and Tina starts to clear the table. I stand to help her but she shakes her head and tilts her chin toward Ryan.
“You’re going with him.”
Ryan leads me into his den, which is nothing more than a spare bedroom filled with bookcases and filing cabinets and a desk with a computer on top. He pulls up a chair beside the one already behind the desk, tells me to sit down.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” he asks as he moves the cursor around on the screen and brings up a program.
“No,” I tell him, but I don’t think I’m very convincing.
“Don’t worry, you’ll do fine. Just be yourself.”
That’s easy for you to say, I think. At least you know who you are.
“Okay,” Ryan says, sitting back and exposing the beginnings of a gut. I’ve teased Tina about this growing gut, saying how her husband is getting fat. Now for some reason I wish I could go back and keep my mouth shut, instead tell Tina just how lucky she is to have a guy like Ryan in her life. “This right here is an outline of your basic résumé. All we need to do is fill in the information. Like here”—he starts typing—“your full name and address and phone number.”
He gets the address and phone number wrong—both off by a couple numbers—so I tell him and he corrects them.
“Now,” he says, “we do the objective.”
“What’s the objective?”
“That you’re interested in an entry-level position at a thriving and up-and-coming law firm.”
“Thriving and up-and-coming?”
He smiles as he types a paraphrase of what he just said and then he sits back again, folds his hands back over his gut.
“Next are your qualifications for the job.”
I take a moment to think it over, a very long moment, then say, “I know how to type.”
“Do you know how to type well?”
“I can get by.”
“They’re going to be expecting at least sixty words a minute. Preferably more.”
“I’m pretty sure I can do that.”
“What about ten key?”
“What the hell is ten key?”
He nods once, takes a breath. “That’s what I was afraid of. Look on the keyboard here—see the square of number keys? That’s called the ten key. They’ll probably test you on that too.”
“I’m going to be tested?”
Ryan gives me a long look. After a moment he says, “Holly, are you sure this is what you really want to do?”
Of course it’s not what I really want to do. It’s the very last thing in the world I want to do. But still I nod and tell him yes.
He studies my face for another moment, then leans forward and places his fingers on the keyboard. He doesn’t type anything but just keeps his fingers there, the tips grazing the tops of the keys.
“Qualifications,” he says, staring at the computer screen, and it takes me a couple seconds to realize he’s waiting for me to list them. I even open my mouth, wanting to start listing off one qualification after another, but the résumé that would make is one Ryan is not prepared to see. Nobody in my family would be prepared to see a résumé that lists hand-to-hand combat and weapons training and expert driving, let alone knowledge in explosives and poisons and how to hot-wire a car and how to break into a safe.
“I have a good personality,” I say.
“Let’s skip this for now and go to education.”
“You mean all the schools I’ve attended, even in elementary?”
As my dad was moved from army base to army base, I’d been in at least a half-dozen schools before finally settling down just outside of Washington, D.C.
“High school and college is sufficient.”
“You know I never went to college.”
“Your high school then. We’ll even add your four years in the Army. It’ll look good.”
Right after high school I’d joined the Army and stayed for only four years. Or at least that’s what my family believes.
I tell him the name and he types it into the form, then asks me about any clubs or extracurricular activities I’d been involved in.
“None.”
He glances at me, almost warily, then says, “Okay. How about relevant experience?”
“Ryan, you don’t have to do this.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is a waste of time.”
“No, it isn’t.”
But as I stare at the computer screen and the very little typed there, I can see it is. As far as everyone else in the world is concerned, those few words sum up my life. Not how many languages I speak, how many countries I’ve been to, how many missions I’ve gone on, or how many people I’ve killed and hopefully saved. All that matters in the real world are objectives and qualifications and education and experience, and in the real world I have none.
Ryan doesn’t move from his place in his chair. He keeps the tips of his fingers on the keys of the keyboard and stares at the screen. I know he’s waiting for me but I don’t have anything to say so I glance away, up at one of the bookcases that contains a few of his trophies. In high school and college he had played lacrosse, which has always been hard for me to picture, but apparently he was pretty good and had constantly been in training. Now years have passed and he is married with two children and working a nine-to-five. He has let his body go, so much so that the gut he now tries to hide will someday double and then maybe triple and every time he looks at those trophies he’ll think about the days when he had his entire future open in front of him. Now after just another dinner with his wife and children he sits in his den with his sister-in-law and tries to help her find work.
“Relevant experience,” he says after a long time has passed, after the silence has become so palpable it’s like an invisible
