growing necessity, I never put peeing on my list.

The “list” arrived in our in-boxes each morning in response to a bullet-pointed e-mail we sent at the end of each day with the subject line “update.” In it were punchy action verbs that justified our presence in her home:

UPDATE MAY 30, 2002

Called Savafieh at 12:55 p.m. and the rug should arrive by 4 p.m. on July 9th

Received Farrow & Ball samples via FedEx and placed them in your box

Made reservations at Ouest for three at 8:30 p.m.

Wrote responses for the Japanese article and placed them in your box for review

Your mother called at 3:53 p.m. and she would like for you to call her back

The trick was to write things down as soon as you did them, no matter how dumb it felt. Otherwise you might forget and then end up scrounging for bullet points at around 4:58 p.m. and have only four or five on there. Ten was ideal. We saved each of our “updates” in a desktop file labeled by the month and year. After She got our update, she’d e-mail us back the “list,” which laid out all our to-dos for the day and made it possible for the four of us to never have to speak to her directly. AOL was the Great Oz of our office.

Adding to the office intrigue was “the box.” We each had one, and in it She placed the still-bleeding documents we’d offered up as sacrifice. This is how it went—send update, get list, write out some rando fax cover sheet from list, place in her box, e-mail her that cover sheet had been placed in her box, wait ten minutes, IM Jeanne about how stupid this is, get e-mail that revised sheet is back in your box, walk three feet to box, pick up sheet with red marker seeping through to the back, and start at go.

It’s no surprise then that we became totally obsessed with her personal life. Someone that automatic couldn’t just switch it off at quitting time. What were her friends like? Could we have been friends if we didn’t know her secret identity? One of us heard She was dating a landscaper, and the rest immediately got busy imagining their life together. Right when I was Googling his name, She appeared at my shoulder, handing over her Palm for syncing. She never said anything about it, so obviously it was true. We figured they’d make great lawn-mowing babies. Also, She filed her family photos with the rest of the business stuff, which we thought was weird until her mom called and Jeanne picked up the phone. They chatted for a few seconds about how things were going. The old lady ended with what we thought was advice: “Remember, everything that glitters isn’t gold.” Now we’d found at least one piece of the puzzle, even after we each got this:

“As you know, I always call in several times a day for my phone messages, even while I’m in production. Yesterday afternoon my mother called the office to let me know that she and my father had arrived safely home from their trip. Who spoke to her and why didn’t I get the message? I didn’t get this message when I called in at five or five thirty p.m., and it was not included in anyone’s updates.”

Your mother hates you! Why do you care whether or not she made it back okay? And who even cares about stuff like that? This isn’t the 1800s. Cruise ships don’t get lost at sea. Plus, it wasn’t me who took the message.

The filing cabinet became our own private rabbit hole—we’d jump in whenever we got bored with the tedium of message-taking and try to make sense out of a world of hot air. Legend had it that Jeanne once found a letter in an unmarked folder from a famous black actor She dated—briefly. Simply put, according to Jeanne, it was a Dear John letter in reverse. I felt sorry for her sometimes, wondering if all She really needed was someone to love. If a strong black woman just couldn’t catch a break. I was twenty-two, dating a West Point grad, and feeling authoritative in my head. She was thirty-seven, running out of time, and filing her dates. But sympathy was way too close to forgiveness. So I clung to that story like a threadbare security blanket, desperate for confirmation that the slights we felt were real.

Take the morning routine, for instance. There