We Are Pirates: A Novel Read Free Page B

contained just a short list of hobbies. This was possibly the fault of the printer, which Phil Needle hoped never to use, once he had a new girl. She would print it for him. He had assumed her name rhymed with mine , but she’d said mean. “Alma,” he said.
    “Spanish for soul , Hebrew for virgin ,” Alma Levine said, for clearly the millionth time.
    Phil Needle blinked. “Virgin?”
    “None of your business,” said Alma Levine, the millionth punch line. “I don’t like it either. Everyone calls me Levine.”
    “Levine.”
    “Right.” Sticking out of her bag was the tube of a rolled-up magazine, and Phil Needle wondered what magazine she read on the streetcar. But he had a first question planned out already. “It’s quiet here today,” she said.
    “It’s the holiday,” Phil Needle said.
    “Did you forget it was Memorial Day when you scheduled me?” she asked. “I wondered about that.”
    Phil Needle flipped over Alma Levine’s hobbies so he could cover Belly Jefferson’s face. It was best not to think of his destiny at this moment. “Yes,” he said, more sharply than he’d planned.
    She frowned at him, but it was a sympathetic frown, as if he’d spilled something but she was going to wash the shirt. “You’re the boss,” she said. “You shouldn’t be doing the calendar.”
    “That’s right,” Phil Needle said in slow amazement, looking at his desk. He had a list prepared but could not find it in front of him, only another list, from a brainstorming session with Leonard Steed. Perhaps this proved his point. “Managing the calendar is not the half of it,” he said. “Much, much less than half. There’s administrative duties, the phones and the mail and scheduling our engineers—we have three engineers, Allan, Ezra, who we call EZ, and Barry. But all those things aren’t the half of it.”
    “The mail, things like that?”
    “Yes, but that’s not the half of it,” Phil Needle said again. His first question was supposed to be about the applicant’s most unforgettable experience, but they had veered off topic and were talking about the job. The conversation they were supposed to be having was like some landmark that had just bobbed out of sight, and for a second Phil Needle felt a little dizzied. “If the position is offered you, you can think of yourself as a bouncing board, or a kind of shadow. I’d need you by my side.” He paused for a moment and felt like he’d said something creepy, but Alma Levine was nodding and he could detect no trace of sarcasm. Dear Renée, look at this girl’s face. This is how you nod at a boss.
    Phil Needle clapped his hands together and fingered his fingers, his wedding ring a tiny ripple in the room. “Tell me something about yourself.”
    There was a pause, and during the pause Phil Needle thought, Now she’ll say “What do you want to know?”
    “I graduated from college two years ago,” she said. “I majored in philosophy. I took ethics for so long that I got tired of it, so I’m done with that. Right out of college I met a guy at a show, Ray Droke.”
    “Ray Droke?”
    “Why, do you know him?”
    “No.”
    “He ran this marketing agency, Ray Droke Marketing. He moved offices and I started answering phones, but then a few months ago I quit.”
    “Why did you quit?”
    Levine paused and then sighed and then paused again. “I had a problem with the boss.”
    This was probably the worst thing you could say in an interview. Phil Needle looked down at her résumé and saw that Ray Droke was listed as a reference. But below the résumé, there was another item that should not have been in front of him: the printed invitations for the barbecue he and Marina were throwing on July 4. They did it every year, but this year, because there was no girl, Phil Needle was supposed to look at the invitations before Marina had them printed, but he hadn’t had time to look at them, and so nobody had noticed that the invitations left off Gwen’s