idk what else so why not...im so evil-

It's still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it's early. How early he isn't sure, but he won't be able to fall back asleep, so it doesn't matter. He pulls the extra pillow over his head, tries to smother the sound, but it's still there, the distant siren of the boy crying in the other room.

The boy is wedged under the machine when Mather goes in. The machine has run dry again, streaks of pink fluid smeared inside the hose, the tank in the crib issuing an exhausted wheeze. It's a terrible design. Under the clouded tank is a cavity just large enough to conceal the boy if he crawls in, which is what he does when he wakes up too early and no one comes for him. So Mather has to wedge his fingers beneath the thing, which barely fits in the crib, anyway, and lift it just enough to grab the boy and pull him out.

Of course the boy has been crying. Crying isn't really the right word for it. He has been explosively weeping, maybe for a long time, and when Mather picks him up and holds him close the weeping escalates, the boy breaking down in Mather's arms.

Mather tries to set the boy down in the dark kitchen so that he can make coffee, but as soon as the boy is released he bursts into sobs again. As usual, Mather talks to him, tries to calmly reassure him, but the boy's crying is so loud that Mather cannot even hear his own voice. He sits on the dirty kitchen floor and gathers the boy in to try to soothe him, but the boy squirms from his grasp and goes on wailing, so Mather leaves the kitchen and shuts himself in the bathroom, triggering even higher-pitched cries from the boy.

When the doorbell rings to signal that Mather's ride to work is here, he isn't ready to go. The boy's diaper was dry when he got up, which meant that he hadn't had enough water, but Mather could not get him to drink anything. The boy twisted his head away when offered a bottle, so Mather tried to interest him in different cups, even his own coffee mug, which the boy usually tried to pry from his hands. Finally, the boy took a few greedy gulps from the mug, with most of the water running down his chest. He wouldn't eat the egg that Mather had prepared for him, but he did steal Mather's toast, which he clutched into a gummy mass in his fist while wandering around the living room, still half crying.

Now Mather has to quickly force the boy into his clothing as he struggles to get away. From the hallway, he grabs the same day bag he used yesterday, and the day before, packed with the same spare clothes for the boy and the same dry snacks that he never seems to want.

No one says hello when Mather opens the door of the car-pool vehicle. They have had to wait for him in the unlit garage, and he can tell that they've lost patience. There's no car seat installed today, no space reserved for the boy, and he won't hold still in Mather's lap. The woman next to Mather is not amused when the boy throws himself across her legs, trying to crawl toward the window. She sits back, hands up, indicating that Mather must remove the boy himself. Mather apologizes and pulls the boy back, squeezing him tightly so that he can't escape. This makes the boy shriek and squirm with surprising strength. But Mather does not relent. He has no real choice.

They pass the old bald hill and the spire, then get waved through at the Faraday gate, where they join the line of cars that form a single file to climb to the top. The little trees out the window are bare and the grass is colorless this time of year, but it's a bright, clear day. Mather wishes there were a window open, but he doesn't feel that he can ask. No doubt someone decided, before they picked him up, that they'd ride to work with the windows closed, breathing one another's stale air.

In the parking lot, overlooking the valley, the boy wants to walk under his own power, but there are cars pulling in and it's too dangerous. Mather finds a little patch of grass for the boy to run around in. It isn't much, and it quickly drops off into a steep decline, so he stations himself to keep the boy from running down the cliff. For a while the boy staggers around, reaching over to clutch at little sticks, which he holds up to his father with pride.

When the work bell sounds, Mather lines up at the service entrance and waits his turn for the security check. The boy tenses in Mather's arms as they approach the nursery, but when Mather hands him off to the caregiver the boy does not let himself cry. Even at this age, he is trying to be brave. Mather watches through the high window as the boy is quickly placed on the floor of the playroom, in front of a bucket of foam blocks. The caregiver disappears into an office, but the boy does not seem to notice. He picks something out of the bucket and puts it in his mouth. Mather gives him a last look, then heads up the ramp to the elevator.

The boy is one and a half years old and his name is Alan Mather, and already he has dense black hair on his head. To Mather, Alan is a name not for a baby but for a grown man. When they were naming him, he had let the boy's mother choose, thinking that he should pick his battles. She had been so sure about it, and Mather had found that he could not think of a single name that didn't make him feel uneasy when he said it out loud. Mather has tried to call the boy "honey" instead, and maybe if he keeps doing so it will come to feel more natural. The boy has a quiet, wet cough and pink-rimmed eyes, and he's already capable of a sustained, piercing eye contact that his father can never quite match.

At his lunch hour, Mather takes his thermos and sandwich down to the nursery. The boy is in a crib, but he is not asleep. He has the same little foam object clutched in his hand, and it's been chewed to shreds. When the boy sees Mather, he starts to cry, but softly, as if he had already cried himself hoarse. The respirator in the nursery hasn't been turned on, and when Mather checks the log to see if the boy has received his asthma medication there are no entries for today. The boy has the kind of asthma that keeps his lungs from properly lubricating, so he has to inhale moisture through a mask every four hours or his lungs will start to dry out. It's not serious, the doctor told Mather, but he should try not to miss a treatment. The director of the nursery seemed to be concealing a smirk when Mather first introduced him to the equipment, as if Mather had simply brought in one of Alan's favorite toys.

After Mather holds the mask to the boy's face and the boy obediently inhales the wet air, his little brow wrinkled in concentration, they return to the patch of grass outside. Mather tries to eat while the boy sits in his lap, facing downhill. The boy wants to hold Mather's sandwich, but when Mather lets him he won't eat any of it, and when Mather tries to rescue the sandwich the boy clutches it into a ball. Mather isn't hungry for the sandwich, anyway. When he hasn't slept well, he wants only a sugared muffin with a Coke. His sandwich is cucumbers with olive spread, between slices of thin, black toast, and it smells like potting soil.

It's a bright, clear day, and Mather can see all the way down to Rollingwood, the neighborhood where he grew up. He can't see his old house, but he can see the street where it would be, behind a hooked cul-de-sac of narrow homes. His old elementary school's clock tower rises high out of the trees. The clock stopped at three-fifteen a long time ago, and unless you stand beneath the tower you'd think the little hand had fallen off, because it's perfectly hidden beneath the big hand.

Mather's son won't go to school there, because they live far away from Rollingwood now. Mather doesn't even know where the public schools are in his new neighborhood. It's not so much a neighborhood as an exit off the freeway, but it's pretty, in its way, with circular grass parks and housing staggered down the middle. In the spring, it's one of his favorite parts of town. Something about the absence of trees makes the light seem perfect. It's hard to imagine that he'll still be in the same apartment, at the same job, in the same city, when the boy starts kindergarten in a few years. But of course the boy will attend kindergarten wherever his mother is living at the time, so Mather isn't even sure why he's thinking about the schools in his neighborhood.

Mather points out landmarks to the boy—the old Rotterman Dam and the shipping depot built of natural black bricks—but the boy doesn't look. He hangs on Mather's outstretched arm and tries to swing from it. Mather stands up and swings him around and the boy laughs, but the laugh turns into a whimper, and Mather isn't sure if the boy is frightened or happy.

After work, they take the bus to the boy's mother's apartment, but she isn't home. She has repeatedly asked Mather to return his key, but it's times like this that persuade him to hang on to it. Otherwise he'd be waiting forever on the narrow balcony of her building and the boy would be imperilling himself by trying to squeeze through the bars.

Mather lets himself inside and medicates the boy with the old ventilator in the living room, then looks for something to give him for dinner. There is only a chicken salad, so Mather spreads it on a cutting board and begins chopping it fine. The boy refuses the first spoonful, but Mather leaves the bowl on the low coffee table, and after the boy has finished running around the apartment he discovers the bowl of mashed chicken and starts to awkwardly feed himself while Mather watches from his chair.

It's late and dark when the boy's mother comes home. She's with her boyfriend, who excuses himself to the bedroom without even taking off his coat. Mather has done his best to accept the boyfriend, has always been cordial and said hello, but the boyfriend won't look Mather in the eye and never stops to talk.

At these dropoffs, Mather and the boy's mother, Maureen, do not say much. They confirm the next exchange of the boy and discuss his medication, what he's eaten, how he's been sleeping. They stick to factual matters and flatten their tone of voice as much as possible, disguising all feeling. But today Maureen says that she needs to talk to him and asks him to sit down.

Mather hides his excitement. Maureen never wants to talk to him. Usually she seems disgusted by his presence, critical of how he fathers the boy, indifferent to anything Mather says that is unrelated to the boy's care. It is as if she had stored up disappointment that she is determined to show him during the ten minutes they see each other twice a week. So for a moment Mather imagines that Maureen has grown suddenly tender toward him, even with the boyfriend lurking in the bedroom. She misses Mather, maybe, and would like to talk to someone who really knows her. Someone who understands, because they once went through a lot together.

Except that's not it. Maureen needs a favor. She tells him that she can't take the boy right now. She's going away.

"O.K.," Mather says carefully, wanting to sound coöperative. He'd love to do her a favor, because she thinks he never does. If he shows resistance, she'll be upset and then they'll have another fight.

"Thanks for understanding," Maureen says. "I appreciate it." She gets up as if that were all they needed to discuss.

But Mather doesn't understand. What is she telling him?

"I guess we need to wake up Alan," Maureen says, and she heads for the curtained-off hallway where Mather put him to sleep in the portable crib.

"Where are you going, can I ask?" Mather says. He's not sure why he sounds apologetic.

"To Robert's home town."

Robert is the boyfriend. Mather thinks that Robert is lucky to be alone in a dark room right now. Maybe Robert is standing at the door, still wearing his winter coat, listening to them.

"Why can't you take Alan? It's your turn. He can't go with you?"

"No. Alan can't come."

"Well, when are you coming back?"

"Really soon. I'll call you. I'll make up the days."

"So you're just going off in the middle of the workweek?"

Maureen looks at him sharply, and it's clear that she doesn't think she needs to explain herself. She picks up the boy and starts whispering to him, her voice losing its scolding tone, dissolving into singsong. She bounces and hushes him, even though he's not crying.

The boy clings to his mother. When she bends over the couch to change him, he clutches her as if he were a baby animal, and she has to peel him away. She tells the boy that he will be staying with his daddy for a little while longer, and that she will miss him so much. She will see him soon, and then they will do fun things and she will give him lots of kisses because he's her little boy, isn't he, and all she wants to do is kiss him all the time. Should they go on a boat ride when she comes home? Does he remember the boat ride they once took? Would he like to do that again? That's what they'll do. She'll come home and they'll go down to the river and take a nice boat ride.

Mather stands there in the dark living room. There won't be a boat ride. He knows that. She's showering so much love on the boy that he will become dazed by it, then Mather will have to take over and the boy will be bitterly disappointed again. To Mather, these intense displays of love are what he must help the boy recover from. Fatherhood has somehow become about helping the boy not love his mother too painfully.

Maureen hands the boy off to Mather, and the boy registers the change for one perfectly quiet second, then screams. He's never liked parting from his mother, and now they've woken him up late at night only to make him suffer a sudden separation. Mather closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. There's nothing he can do. He'd like Maureen to seem more obviously guilty, but she shows no sign of having done anything wrong. It is, apparently, Mather's fault that the boy does not love him with the same desperation.

There's no one else at the bus stop, and from what Mather can tell, after reading the posted schedule, the next bus will come in one minute, which is lucky for him, because the boy is not pleased, outside in the early winter at night. Except when one minute passes, then two, then five, it becomes clear that the bus must have come already and now the next one isn't due for half an hour.

Alone, which is what he was supposed to be tonight, Mather wouldn't care. He'd sit on the bench and read, enjoying the cold night. But he has the boy with him, and the boy is fully awake after all his screaming and will be cold soon. This isn't the sort of area where empty taxicabs drive around looking for fares. Mather calls information and gets the number for a car service, then speaks to a dispatcher. They can send a driver in forty-five minutes. Mather tells the man that it's late and his baby is tired and hungry, and the man repeats that he can send a car in forty-five minutes. More like an hour, actually, to be honest—as if he were doing Mather a favor by lengthening the estimate.

Mather starts to walk home, carrying the boy, along the bus route, even though it's less direct. He figures that the bus, when it comes, won't cruelly pass him by if he stands in the road and waves. The roads are so empty that Mather wonders for a moment if something terrible has happened, and everyone is at home watching the news, knowing better than to go outside. He stops walking and listens. It's the quietest he's ever heard his city. The boy, too, seems transfixed, staring into the darkness. But then a bus rolls into sight and Mather stands right over the white line, waving. He doesn't want to take any chances.

Maureen doesn't call the next day, or the day after that, and then it's the weekend. On Sunday, Mather's parents visit, but they're so tired they don't leave their chairs. Mather's parents have been to Lisbon, and they tell him of eating fish seared on the rocks at the harbor. The flat rocks are heated by torches overnight, and when the morning's catch comes in a man cleans whole fish to order and lays them out, butterflied, on the hot stone, which is black and oily from the cooking. When you salt this fish, it's the best thing you've ever eaten. You eat it with your fingers. Even the locals eat it, which, of course, is the best endorsement.

Mather's father studies him for signs of enthusiasm.

Mather nods his approval and says that he'd love to try it sometime.

The boy goes to the front hallway and grabs his little white shoes, then brings them over to Mather. Then he carries first one, then the other, of Mather's old maroon work shoes, dumping them loudly at Mather's feet.

"He wants to go out," Mather mumbles.

Mather's parents smile with abstract pleasure but do not move.

When he doesn't hear from Maureen by Monday afternoon, Mather calls and gets her voice mail. He would like to know her plans. The boy is doing fine, he tells her. He's actually eating, and he gets up twice at night, but Mather downgrades this to once in his message, because somehow the extra night wakings might seem like a failure of his. He asks Maureen to get back to him so that he knows when to drop Alan off.

He gets no call the next day. The day after that, at work, the nursery is closed. The lights are off and the door is locked when Mather carries the boy over in the morning. Mather waits outside while his colleagues head upstairs. He calls the nursery number and gets no answer. He bangs on the dark glass. Finally, when he is going to be late for work, he takes the boy up the ramp to the elevators and brings him into the suite of offices.

Mather asks someone named Drew what's going on with the nursery today. Drew has pictures of kids on his desk. He must have used the nursery at some point. But Drew just shrugs and looks at Alan in Mather's arms as if Mather had smuggled contraband into work.

"I'll go see Ferguson, I guess," Mather says.

Ferguson is the supervisor and maybe he'll understand.

"He's not coming in this morning," Drew says, his face arranged in an unconvincing look of concern.

Mather heads to Ferguson's office, anyway, and asks his assistant if he can see him.

"And you are?" the assistant asks.

"It's just for a moment," Mather says. "It's an emergency." He holds up the boy as proof. See my emergency.

The assistant doesn't look. "Your name?" he asks.

"Mather," Mather says. "I work over there." He gestures at the cubicle with his head. There's a young woman writing something at his desk. Sometimes temps from the night shift set up at empty desks for their red-eye collation projects and have to move when the full-timers come in. He's going to have to ask her to leave and she's going to be annoyed, even though it's his desk.

"How's Friday at eleven?" the assistant asks.

"The day after tomorrow?"

The assistant is irritated. "That would be Friday, yes."

"Could you please just let him know I've had an emergency and need a personal day?"

The assistant eyes him carefully. "You'd better write that out yourself to be sure the message is how you want it."

But Mather says that he trusts the assistant to get it right. It's not very complicated.

At home, he phones Maureen's office and the call is routed to a receptionist. Maureen is not available. But he'd like to know if she's there, if she's actually at work today. The receptionist repeats that she's not available to come to the phone and would Mather like to leave a message?

He says that it's about her son and would she please call him.

The boy won't nap, but he doesn't cry. He sits in his crib quietly, and Mather notices that his breath is coming heavily, with a faint whistling sound. Under the boy's dark hair, Mather thinks, the scalp looks unusually red, and when he touches it the boy flinches. He gives him the humidifier mask and the boy takes hungry gulps of the wet air. When Mather tries to remove him from the crib, the boy protests, points back to his mattress, so Mather leaves him there, and the boy crawls under the tank of the humidifier.

Mather checks on him later and he is still awake, but he cries when Mather tries to pick him up. The tank is empty, so Mather rinses it out and fills it with more distilled water. The boy returns the mask to his face and Mather can hear a whinny in his breath now. Is he getting better or worse? The redness on the boy's scalp has spread beyond his hairline, down his face.

Mather's mother, before she retired, was a nurse, so he calls her.

"Just wait till you walk in the front door—you'll find out if I have a death ray or not."

"You worry too much," she says. "Leave him alone. Children are remarkably strong. They're much stronger than us. You never got sick, never once. You never caused us any problems."

The next morning the car-pool vehicle does not come. Mather has been up for hours and is packed and ready to go. He's lost track of whose turn it is to drive today, so he can't even make a phone call. He's been so grateful to be part of the car pool, since he has no car of his own, that he's paid more than his share of the gas, just to be sure that nothing goes wrong. He tries not to make trouble, particularly on days when he has the boy. But there's no car today, and if he doesn't leave right away he will be late for work.

On the bus there are no empty seats, so Mather stakes out a position for himself against a pole. The boy is pale inside his snowsuit. His face is dry and peeling. His skin seems nearly translucent. His cough is small and weak, and it could just be that he's dehydrated.

The bus lets them off downhill from the Faraday gate. With the boy in his arms, Mather hikes up the side of the road as a stream of cars pass them on the way to work. He sees some people he knows, but no one stops. He's never hiked this road, and it's much steeper than he would have thought. He's drenched inside his winter coat, and the boy's face is flushed, even though he's not exerting himself. At the gate, Mather has to show his credentials and they ask to pat down the boy, who goes with one of the guards without complaint. He doesn't even seem to notice that someone else is carrying him.

The nursery is closed again this morning. Someone has taped a piece of paper to the door, but it's since been ripped down, leaving just the clear tape fastened over a shred of blank paper. Mather brings the boy up to his office and there are two temps sharing his desk. He stands there holding the boy, needing to put him down so that he can figure out what to do.

"All right," he says to the temps, trying to sound cheerful. "I guess I have to get in here."

He has no idea what he's going to do with Alan today, but at least if he gets his desk back he can settle in and maybe make a play area for him on the floor.

The temps look up at him and blink. "We're here until noon," the young man says. Probably he's in his early twenties, but he looks like a boy.

"Well," Mather says, "you need to move to the conference room or somewhere else, because this is my desk."

He shouldn't have to articulate this.

"Mr. Ferguson told us to work here," the other temp says impatiently, a young woman who is so striking he's afraid to look at her.

The boy wriggles out of Mather's grasp and sets off away from him, not even looking back, so Mather excuses himself to follow him, until they bump into Ferguson, who is speaking with some executives outside the conference room.

"Well, who do we have here?" Ferguson says, addressing the boy.

Mather leans over the boy, as if he needed to formally present him to his supervisor. "This is Alan," he says.

"Alan. Is that right? Are you helping your father get his stuff, Alan?"

"My stuff?" Mather asks. "What do you mean?"

"I had a note that you were leaving."

The executives standing with Ferguson smile at Mather. Ferguson smiles, too.

"No, no, no," Mather protests. "I had to take a personal day yesterday, that's all. His mother is supposed to have him and the nursery was closed. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not leaving at all."

"Well, that is a misunderstanding," Ferguson says. "That contradicts the note I received."

His face has clouded over. When someone like Ferguson exceeds the allotted time for encounters with employees in the hallway, he does not try to hide it.

"No," Mather says. "I'm here, I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

"O.K.," Ferguson says, and he looks down at the boy, who's still in his snowsuit, pressed against the glass of the conference room. "But what about today?" Ferguson wants to know. "What's your plan today?"

What he's going to do is check the nursery again, Mather tells Ferguson, because maybe they've opened it by now, and then he'll be right back. But of course the nursery is still closed when he gets there, locked and dark, with no note on the window. He asks the security guards if they know anything, but they don't. From the guard booth, they look over at the unlit nursery room as if they'd never seen it before. So Mather has no choice but to go home with the boy in his arms, who is so light it feels to Mather that he is carrying an empty snowsuit.

At home, he calls Maureen again, but her voice mail is full and she's not picking up. Mather would try Robert, just to reach Maureen, but if he was ever told Robert's last name he can't remember it now. Mather knows nothing about him, let alone where his home town is.

There are a few of Maureen's friends to try, but Alma is the obvious one, the loyalist, whose negative forecasts about Mather were always, according to Maureen, a hundred per cent accurate.

"If Alma is so smart," Mather once asked, "then why is she fat and alone?" He wanted to think that this was an innocent question, prompted by irreconcilable pieces of information.

"Of course you'd ask that," Maureen said, smiling. "Of course." She always seemed genuinely happy when Mather was at his worst.

And of course you'd have no answer, Mather thought, back at her, in the unspoken way he often fought with her, but then Maureen did have an answer, at least about Alma's weight. A gland or a duct or perhaps an entire organ had begun to work overtime, could not stop laboring inside Alma, as if there were always unfinished work to do. And the result was that incredibly pale skin Alma had and, yes, it was true, some extra weight. A depressed metabolism, because Alma actually ate less than the rest of us. But Mather didn't even deserve to know that, Maureen assured him. He wasn't even worthy of knowing that about Alma.

She picks up on the first ring, stating her full name, Alma Ryan, which everyone does at her office, a publishing house that specializes in children's books. Mather quickly says that it is him, and that she shouldn't hang up, because this is about Alan, and does Alma know where Maureen is?

"What's happened to Alan?" Alma asks in a careful voice.

Mather explains that nothing has, but Maureen is still not back and this isn't like her and it's causing problems for him. He's home with the boy now when he needs to be at work. He might even lose his job because of this.

"I'm sorry to hear that your child is an inconvenience to you," Alma says.

Mather curses at her, freely and at length, and Alma hangs up. Then he calls her right back.

"Alma Ryan."

Mather explains that he is sorry and he needs her help. Alan is no inconvenience to him. Alan is his son and he loves him. Alma has to believe that, no matter what she thinks of him. But the boy needs his mother, too. Mather explains that Alan is just too little to be away from his mother for this long, with Mather not even knowing where she is or when she's coming back. Maybe Alma does not know all the details, but Alan is not well. His asthma. This is not fair to Alan.

He explains all this to Alma, but when he waits for her to respond she isn't there. The line is dead. It is possible that Alma hung up as soon as she heard Mather's voice. She doesn't pick up again.

In the late afternoon, the boy won't breathe through his mask. He covers his mouth with his hands and turns his head away. Mather tries to listen to his breath, but the boy won't stay put. Still, Mather hears a whistle in the boy's lungs, and he pictures them shrivelling inside the boy's small chest, as dry as two little pieces of paper curling up in the heat. He knows that if the boy would inhale the vapors from the mask his lungs would lubricate and he would feel better, but the boy is stubborn and the more Mather tries to press the mask over his face the more he twists out of reach.

Mather reminds himself that it isn't serious. The treatments are supposedly optional, meant to increase the boy's comfort. It is only asthma. But the boy is pale and certainly too little for his age, and he sits listlessly on the rug after his nap, uninterested in the toy cars that Mather has arranged around him.

Mather schedules a sitter, and the next morning he shows her around the apartment while the boy clings to him. Mather demonstrates the ventilator to the sitter, but it is clear that she has already decided that it is too complicated for her to operate.

Mather was going to leave early for the bus stop, to be sure that he wasn't late for work, but then his doorbell rings, and he runs downstairs to the car-pool vehicle, the boy crying behind him in the sitter's arms. A proper goodbye would only have made it worse, and the boy will recover faster this way. In any case, Mather needs to go to work. This is how it has to be.

In the dark car, no one so much as looks his way. Mather wonders what happens day after day in this car before he is picked up that makes for such grim silence. They stare ahead while he settles in and buckles his seat belt, and for a moment Mather feels the enormous relief of travelling alone, even if there are mute co-workers pressed against him. He has no one to take care of and he can relax.

Mather lowers his window when they pull out of the garage, and the woman beside him huffs. He'll consider himself justly scolded. They turn onto the Hills Parkway and the car picks up speed. Outside, it's a flat, gray morning, but the air is warm, and Mather lets the wind cover his face. There are sweet, smoky streaks in the sky, the kind of clouds that scatter if a bird so much as flies through them. Mather almost feels that he could sleep, and he wishes the ride were much longer. He'd love to stay in the car like this all day, just driving around town, sleeping a little, looking out the window, doing nothing, while someone else keeps the boy busy at home.

The temps are at his desk when he gets to work.

"O.K., guys, break it up," he says, wanting to sound jovial about it.

They're completely engrossed in their work and don't look up. It's the same two temps from yesterday, and a third one leans over them, staring at the computer screen. They have coffees and food wrappers cluttering the desk, and Mather's own in-box is nowhere to be seen. There's hardly room for him to put down his briefcase.

"I'm back," Mather says, this time more softly.

"We're pretty hunkered down," the young man from yesterday says. Mather isn't sure, but the young man's hand motion may be waving him away.

Mather says, "I can see that." It's important to stay friendly, extend an olive branch. He was a temp once. There's no reason to lord his rank over them. "Would you guys like to take a minute to find another place to work?"

The young man seems to consider this but mentions their deadline and how settled in they are at Mather's desk. He says that they're good where they are, but thanks for the offer.

Of course it's a misunderstanding, and a small one, but Mather feels that he hasn't been at his desk in ages and he'd like things to return to normal. How long has it been since he's had a normal workday? He looks around for some sort of backup, commiseration from the other full-timers, but his colleagues are all hopelessly tuned in to their computers. Unfortunately, he has to go higher up on this one. He'd have liked to avoid that, but the temps have given him no choice.

Ferguson's assistant tells Mather that his appointment isn't until eleven.

Mather says, "I didn't make that appointment. Remember? I need to see him now. The temps are at my desk and I have to get to work. It's already after nine."

"So are you cancelling the eleven o'clock?" the assistant asks, crossing something out in his book.

"No," Mather says quietly, "because I never made it."

"Never made what?" a voice booms behind him.

It's Ferguson, just walking in, acting as though he'd missed the beginning of a joke. Mather wonders if Ferguson ever gets exhausted, smiling like that. The assistant disengages, returns to his work.

"I never made an appointment with you," Mather explains, realizing that this will only confuse Ferguson, but Ferguson has the ability not to show confusion, perhaps not to even experience it. A man like Ferguson can remain impervious to all messages beyond his own internal script, which drives him with purpose from room to room.

Ferguson pats Mather on the back.

"So you got rid of him, huh?" he asks.

"Who?" Mather says.

"Who!" Ferguson laughs. "The kid! You finally fobbed him off! Good work!"

"Oh," Mather says. "I did. Yeah."

"Just a quick thing," he says to Ferguson, using a serious, professional tone.

He would like Ferguson, if possible, to resolve this situation with the temps, he says, because he needs to get back to work, and why does he always have to vacate people from his desk every morning? It's stressful, if Ferguson wants to know the truth, and Ferguson nods with sympathy. The temps should have marching orders and time frames before they even sit down at someone else's desk. Mather explains that it creates tension and it's maybe not a great idea for office morale.

"The temps left at eight today," Ferguson says, "as usual. But let me introduce you to our new team. We've just made some pretty killer hires. Morale couldn't be better."

At Mather's desk, Ferguson presents the three new hotshot employees, but Mather doesn't listen to their names. Ferguson is boasting about the marketing initiative they took as temps and how they're the first temps in a year to move up the ladder like this. Straight up the ladder. Fire at their heels.

The three of them, still caught up in the seriousness flowing from Mather's computer, are flushed with Ferguson's praise, as if they believed that soon they'd be running the company. And somehow Mather is supposed to feel happy for them, which he tells Ferguson he is, but of course this is his desk, where his unfinished projects remain and can't the new team work somewhere else?

Ferguson says that he and Mather should go talk at the elevator. His voice is soft, and he tries to shepherd Mather that way, placing an arm around him.

Walk employee to quiet place. Present news in positive terms.

About the only way that Mather can have an edge on Ferguson is to hold his ground and force this conversation to happen right here. He can feel his co-workers pretending not to look at him.

Ferguson says, "I think the next step is a good strategy talk down in H.R. They'll have a really tactical perspective on what might be next for you. It's never a bad time to talk strategy. You think you've considered all your options and possibilities, but you never have. There's always something you haven't thought of."

Mather's cell phone rings and he doesn't recognize the number, but he feels he must pick up, even though the timing is bad. It could be Maureen calling from someone else's phone. Maybe she lost her phone, which is why she hasn't picked up for so long. Maybe she's calling to say she's sorry, and how is baby Alan, and can she see him soon?

Except it's not Maureen, it's someone with poor English, on a poor connection, who asks several times for Mr. Mather.

"This is he," Mather says, as Ferguson and the new employees look at him with polite curiosity.

The caller asks again for Mather, and again he says "This is he," until it occurs to him that she doesn't understand the expression.

"This is Mr. Mather. Who's calling, please?" Without people watching him, he might have hung up already.

Mather figures out that it's the sitter, and what she's saying to him, over and over, is the name of his boy. She's saying "Alan," except with her accent it sounds like "Allah." She has little ability to elaborate. Something is wrong with the boy. She needs him to come home right away.

Mather stays calm.

"I have to go. It's my son."

"I guess you can't get rid of him that easy!" Ferguson laughs.

Mather rushes to the elevator, and behind him Ferguson calls out that business about H.R. again and scheduling an appointment.

"Strategy!" Ferguson shouts, as the elevator doors close.

It's not until Mather gets on the bus that he realizes precisely what has happened. This is how it's done. No doubt Ferguson took a workshop to learn just that language. Perhaps he was excited to practice it on Mather. Firing is an opportunity, the start of something wonderful and new.

While Mather is on the bus, the sitter calls again, but there's nothing he can do. He's on his way, she has to hold tight, and he will be there as soon as he can.

His phone rings again as he approaches the back of his building. This time it's Maureen.

"Finally," he says. It's as if the whole crisis were over, simply because she has called. He's not even mad, just relieved.

"Where are you," Maureen demands.

"Where am I? Where am I?" Mather can't believe it. "Are you kidding me? Where the fuck are you?"

Then he sees, across the parking lot, at the entrance to his building, Maureen, talking on her phone. Robert is with her, and he's got the boy. Next to them is the sitter, and even from here Mather can see that she's crying hysterically.

"You left him with a stranger," Maureen hisses into the phone. "I can't go away for one minute. I can't leave him with you for a single second. A stranger who knows nothing about children."

Mather sees the full hatred in her body, how she'd like to crawl into her phone and kill him as she stalks around the parking lot.

"I'm right here," Mather says. "Look up," and he watches her uncoil.

Maureen sees Mather and takes the boy from Robert. They've got him all wrapped up in his snowsuit, and he's wearing one of those white stocking caps they give to babies at the hospital. Somehow it still fits him.

"We're leaving," she announces, and Robert instantly falls into step behind her.

Mather approaches and the sitter rushes at him, frantic.

"I don't give them Allah. They take Allah. It's O.K. they take Allah?"

Mather tells Maureen to wait, to hold on, there's a lot to talk about. She can't just barge over and take Alan like that. She has a lot to account for.

"Really?" Maureen says, and she looks almost excited, as if she can't wait to tear into Mather over this.

Mather wants at least to see the boy, and, when he approaches, Alan looks at him with his pink-rimmed eyes, crusty and dry in the corners, and his skin not so much pale as yellow. Mather goes to touch the boy gently—this is his little son, he would like to give him a kiss—and the boy cringes, nestling further into his mother.

Mather backs away.

"It's O.K., Mr. Mather?" the sitter says. "It's O.K. they take him?" She's acting like Mather's only friend.

"You're asking the wrong person, you bitch," Maureen says. But Mather calms the sitter down and says, "Yes, it's O.K., don't worry."

"Leave my friends alone," Maureen spits. "Don't call my work. Don't call us."

Robert looks at Mather, and there's not even malice in his eyes. Just boredom.

Mather watches them drive away and he goes upstairs, alone, to his apartment. It's not even noon. He'll start by doing laundry, all the boy's clothes. He takes everything down to the machines in the basement, then upstairs he vacuums, opens the windows for air.

From the boy's crib he removes the humidifier. What Mather will do is take off the tubes and soak them in a good, hot solution. The plastic water tank has to be soaked, too. The mask pulls easily from the hose and it still smells a little bit of the boy, his sleeping breath. When Mather puts it back together it will be as clean as new.

Later, Mather will go shopping and he'll buy the boy's favorite foods. He'll stock up on distilled water for the tank. He'll even lay in some candy, for those times when nothing else works. If it's not too late after that and he has the energy, Mather will take the bus down to Rollingwood to the toy store he loved when he was young, if it's even still there, and he will pick up something fun for the boy. There has to be something that Alan will just love to play with, maybe a train table, which he's too young for at the moment, but not really for long. He's growing up. It's not a bad idea at all to start thinking about getting just the right train table built up in the living room.

At home tonight, Mather will lay the pieces out on the floor, and he'll start building, because it could take a few days to get it done, and this way he'll have a head start. He wants to be ready for next time. He wants to bring the boy in and present it to him and see the look in the boy's eyes when he lowers him into place and pushes that very first train into view. ♦