Brian felt his temper rise. “He sounds confident in your relationship.”
“Okay, sure.” She stood, walked off, her heart-shaped ass taunting him with every step.
* * *
That night in bed he started to tell Rebecca the story. Then stopped. He had a sinking feeling the joke was on him. Anyway, Rebecca was crankier than usual.
“My mom’s bugging me about coming up. They haven’t seen the kids in like six months.”
“They can come down.”
“They came down last time, and the time before that.”
“Drag the kids up there?” In truth, as both he and Becks knew, the real problem was that round-trip tickets from Birmingham to Boston ran five hundred bucks. Even if they drove to Atlanta they’d spend about three hundred each, and both kids needed seats now. Twelve, thirteen hundred bucks to see her crappy parents. And he knew better than to ask them to pay.
“You need to get a job, Bri.”
He flashed to Kaylee’s red lips. That your boy? A man who didn’t have a job in Birmingham wasn’t a man. Tony would be in pre-K next year, and then Brian would have no excuse at all.
Rebecca pulled a folded piece of paper from the bedside table, handed it over. A posting for a part-time job in the information technology department at the university. She was his guidance counselor now? Looking for work for him? But…
How could he argue? “Think they’ll hire me?”
“Why not?”
That fast, he knew she’d already greased the skids. Talked to somebody. Easy enough for her. Down here they loved the bureau.
For the first time in their lives together, he hated her a little. But he took the job.
Truth was, he liked it better than he expected. The questions had obvious answers most of the time—I can’t send email, my computer is frozen, my dissertation is gone. When they weren’t, Brian had a knack for figuring out where problems lay, mostly in the intersection of hardware and software that different admins had added over the years.
What people who didn’t work in information technology didn’t understand was that although the theoretical core of modern computing was incredibly complex, the way the devices themselves fit together—or didn’t—was simpler. Mechanics didn’t need to understand the laws of thermodynamics to handle a grease gun. And Brian didn’t need to know how to write code that could pass the Turing test to figure out why the English department’s email system had gone down.
He kept that fact to himself. Most people thought computers were impossibly complicated and anyone who could handle them as a genius. Even Becks seemed to respect him more after he took the job, though she was so focused on this big case she was working that he couldn’t really tell.
Becks and her case. Becks and the FBI. The bureau ate their lives day by day, night by night. Becks didn’t have to stay up until 1 a.m. three nights a week reading backgrounders on the targets of her investigations. No one did. These were government jobs. Wasn’t like she was putting in for overtime, either. When Brian asked why, she told him: ask for an extra buck, your FBI career was over. You were headed for a back-office job in human resources. The bureau had always considered working for it a privilege. Getting rich was not in the job description.
Fine. No overtime. But she didn’t have to work seventy hours a week either. One week, he counted up the hours she worked at home: four Monday, three and a half Tuesday…
When he told her what he’d done, she wasn’t happy. They were hanging out on the couch at the time. Brian was watching ESPN on mute, Sunday Night Baseball. She was poring over a manual on entrapment in undercover investigations, what was legal and what wasn’t, how far you could go in stringing along the target.
She put down the manual, gave him the stare. The one she gave to anyone who cut her off in traffic. To the preschool teacher who told them Kira had pulled another girl’s hair on the playground and then admitted that the other girl had yelled at Kira first. Her black eyes as flat as sunset in January with the snow already falling and a long night ahead.
Brian didn’t know if she’d stared at him that way before she’d joined the FBI. Maybe she had, and he just hadn’t noticed. Or maybe the bureau had brought out this righteous aggressiveness, or aggressive righteousness, whatever.
“Counting hours? I work twice as hard as every guy in