Flex Read Free

heartwarming, but then she added, “You don’t even have good TV.”
    Paul felt guilty about the lack of kids’ entertainment. The handful of Dora the Explorer DVDs he’d brought were stacked in boxes along the living room walls, packed up along with the TV. Back at Imani’s house, Aliyah had all the toys in the world, but Paul had been sufficiently stunned by the affair-and-divorce that he hadn’t even thought to get some stuffed animals for Aliyah’s room.
    “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said, rubbing grit from his eyes. “I’ll unpack the DVDs tomorrow.”
    “I don’t want DVDs!” she yelled. “I want to play with you .”
    Ironically, Paul had nodded off because he’d been up too late playing. Paul remembered experimenting with the manila envelopes last night; they’d crumpled and expanded, breathing like living creatures, as he filled out forms asking for CIA surveillance data. To his delight, the envelopes had unfolded themselves shyly, like a bride lifting her veil, to reveal classified reports meant for the President’s eyes only…
    Paul was just an insurance claims investigator.
    That was when Paul realized he was able to do ’mancy.
    “You’re sleeping and it’s not even bedtime! ” Aliyah hugged Paul’s foot and retreated farther into her bedroom. “I had a jigsaw puzzle saved for us to do! But you worked late again and now you’re sleepy!”
    Aliyah had inherited her mother’s ability to target his weak spots. “Sweetie, I have to work late; that’s how I help people–”
    “Help me with puzzles!”
    He winced. Imani had yelled at Paul for similar reasons – Why do you spend all your free time at that damned insurance company ? And Paul had shot back, Maybe because nobody yells at me in my office . But that wasn’t quite true. When his marriage had deteriorated to the point when the most innocent remark risked inciting hour-long arguments, arguments he refused to have in front of Aliyah, Paul could have retreated to the bar for safety.
    Instead, he went to the office, because he loved filling out forms.
    “Aliyah, I–” he started to say, then foundered.
    It was ludicrous, losing an argument with a six year-old girl. Paul remembered something his co-worker Lenny had told him once, back on the force: You’d be a damned fine cop, Paul, if only you had any people instincts .
    And it was true. Whenever he asked how she felt about the divorce, Aliyah pursed her lips as if to say None of your business , falling silent until Daddy changed the subject. He’d tried everything to get her to open up, but Aliyah kept her secrets tight. Not that he’d have been able to explain why Mommy and Daddy’s marriage had ended anyway; he’d naively thought that they were going through a bad patch, albeit a long one, and things would clear up once he just figured out how to explain to Imani what had really upset him about that ’mancer crushing his foot.
    But even when he was baffled as to why his marriage was crumbling, Paul knew his day was done once he’d checked every box on his Samaritan Mutual case files. He was effective there, quietly correcting clients’ mistakes, ensuring Samaritan’s notoriously stingy claims department couldn’t refuse them. If he couldn’t fix his marriage, at least he could fix other people’s problems.
    Paul loved the justice of paperwork. Bureaucracy knitted humanity together – imperfectly, perhaps, but it was mankind’s rough attempt at a hive mind. When human memory failed and you needed to know where your neighbor’s property ended or how much money was in the bank, where did you turn? The paperwork. People were sloppy, forgetful, occasionally evil; good records kept the corrupt from lying, arm-wrestled tight-pursed bureaucracies into handing out cash, left trails to track down stolen goods.
    So Paul had holed up late at the office to avoid fights, devising increasingly elaborate rituals for his paperwork, pretending he needed to fill out each form in