Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,10

asleep on the new sheets he’d bought to replace the ones she’d bled into, the ones onto which she had leaked their lost child.

James watched her now, carrying in an apple-green lacquered Asian serving tray with a pot of decaf coffee, four mugs. Finn giggled while Ana poured the coffee.

“Oh, Ana, it’s always perfect here,” said Sarah, leaning back with her coffee, one hand stroking a forest green silk throw cushion.

“It really is great,” said Marcus. “It’s like a hotel.”

“Tell me about work. Tell me about the crazies,” said Sarah.

Ana pictured Christian. He was junior but she had worked with him on several cases, most recently researching a one-off on a patent infringement. He appeared at her office door far too often, breaking the silence of the fifteenth floor with its neck-bowed research lawyers clicking away. Christian brought with him his litigator chatter, his unmet high-fives and golf scores.

Ana described how Christian insisted on using a billfold instead of a wallet, and the way he demonstrated this characteristic constantly. He played off the partners’ vanities, researching their past successes and bringing them up in meetings, wide-eyed: “Oh, wow, I studied that case in first year. You killed! Oh wow!” And the men above her adored it. Even as they shushed him for his obviousness, their bodies inflated before her eyes, their cheeks reddened with pride.

Ana was surrounded by men all day, and had been for years, but she didn’t understand them, really, their shimmery foreheads, their noise, their presumption.

Sarah listened, asked Ana questions that no one else asked her about intellectual property. “What’s the infringement?”

“Oh – it’s nothing. It’s a tech company suing another tech company over storage device interfaces.” Sarah nodded lightly, her mouth pursed in listening. “I give the opinion. They ask for it, I give it.”

The men drifted off into a separate conversation about hockey. James talked from down on the rug with Finn, who attempted to pull himself along the edge of the coffee table. Every few minutes, James would grab him and making farting sounds on the baby’s belly, and the boy squealed with delight.

Ana’s certainty that she was dull was offset by the wine, which had the effect of speeding her up. So she told Sarah how there was a new young temp on her floor, a meek young woman merging documents for special projects.

“Special projects!” said Sarah. “I love that. Makes me think of birthday parties for handicapped people.”

This girl, Ruth, was off-putting. She hovered with a half-smile, hoping someone would talk to her. The other day, her cardigan was buttoned wrong, and it dangled lopsided off her torso.

“I didn’t know if I should pull her aside and tell her.”

“What did you do?” Sarah asked. “I know what I’d do.” (Only later did this aside come back to Ana. In the night, she jolted awake: What would Sarah do? Why does she know so easily?)

“I did tell her, but late in the day. Around three. She was mortified, too, and since then, she’s seemed kind of angry with me. She walked right by me yesterday, and not even the office nod.”

“That’s fucked,” said James. Ana startled. She hadn’t known he was listening.

“Is it? She’s the youngest woman on our floor, she’s not even a lawyer, and I criticize how she looks. Doesn’t that affirm a certain currency for her?” Ana frowned. “Maybe I did it because I’m threatened.”

“But you were trying to help her,” said Marcus.

“But I only drew attention to her. I didn’t help.”

No one said anything, and in that silence, Finn grew frustrated, unable to walk more than a few steps along the coffee table without falling. He sputtered: “Bababa! Ba!”

“Oh no!” said James, grabbing Finn under the armpits, jokingly waving the baby back and forth between his parents. “Who loves me more? Who loves me more?”

“Here,” said Sarah, stepping forward, blocking Marcus with her body. Ana tried to find Marcus’s face, offer a small smile to diffuse the puff of humiliation in the air, but he was looking to the side and Ana was stuck with it, this unreceived grin.

A stuffed bear and several blankets were gathered, the baby placed inside his jacket, all with great efficiency. Ana offered a Tupperware container of leftovers, which Sarah at first resisted, and then slipped into the bottom of the stroller.

At the foot of Ana and James’s walk, a group of young people appeared out of the darkness, the girls with bare legs and metallic purses. Cell phones bulged from the boys’ hip