Page 24 of Four Weekends and a Funeral

The sharp clink of the metal paper clip Josh flicks onto Patty’s desk breaks through her noise-canceling headphones. She finally looks up to ask, “Is Josh kicking us out?”

Josh is the HR rep for our regional office. He used to have a private room for personnel matters, but as we outgrew our cramped space, our boss, Daniella, pushed Josh into a shared office with Patty and me.

It’s an open secret within the office that we’re in desperate need of a newer, larger workspace that doesn’t have an ill-tempered bird nesting in the front entry light fixture. Nevertheless, no one’s in any real hurry to relocate.

We’re on the fourth floor of a 1920s hotel that was repurposed into mixed-use office space, retail, and high-end condominiums sometime in the nineties. Aside from the occasional use of industrial gray carpeting—no doubt covering devastatingly gorgeous hardwood—the developers mostly stayed true to the art deco design, due to its historic significance as a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald may or may not have passed out drunk a few times and possibly wrote a bit of The Beautiful and Damned.

Nearly all old buildings in Saint Paul make similar claims.

Still, there’s something inspiring about working to improve access to a city in a space that’s rich in its history. I wouldn’t want to be doing this work in a soulless office park, even if it meant Josh never again had to kick me out into the hallway when a coworker was overcome with the burning need to discuss break room food injustices.

I grab my phone and a notebook to look busy in the windowed conference room. Patty and I are team leaders who perform efficiency assessments, conduct feasibility studies, and present recommendations for improving services while cutting operational costs to our clients. Patty works primarily for our private developers on parking, traffic planning, and driveway locations, whereas I typically work on prospective government projects that rarely ever find funding.

Nothing we do can be done without our computers, but I flip a page in my Moleskine and pretend I’m doing something terribly important for the benefit of any supervisors passing our windowed room. When I was toiling away in Intro to Civil Engineering and Econ 101, no one told me how much excelling in a professional setting came down to looking the busiest.

Patty pulls out a spiral notebook and turns to a blank page. “Are you flying home for Thanksgiving?” she asks.

“Not until Christmas. I’ll probably work on Thanksgiving again.”

Patty shakes her head like this simply won’t do. “You better take an incredible vacation this year, Alison. I’m serious. You’re only young once.”

In another life, Patty might have been an inaccessible art curator with her eco-friendly dresses, cat-eye glasses, and gray-streaked dark hair. In this one, she’s the mom of our office—reminding Josh to pass around cards for birthdays and lecturing me about work-life balance.

“Sam was planning a big trip to Chile after the holidays. I was supposed to go too…” Before he realized I didn’t belong, I almost add.

Patty’s eyes go soft. She waits, giving me the space to say more about Sam, but I don’t.

“Speaking of trips,” I deflect, “how was Phoenix? You were visiting your sister, yeah? Or was it your cousin?”

Patty looks over her shoulder before leaning forward in her seat. I lean forward too, anticipating something juicy.

“I didn’t visit my family last Friday,” she starts, and I try not to let my face fall at how unscandalous this scandal is.

I’m fake-dating a dead man, Tanaka. The bar for tantalizing tidbits is set pretty high.

I stare at her in hopes she’ll rise to the occasion.

“I was interviewing for a job with the hotel chain I consulted for this summer,” she explains. “And yesterday, they made an offer.”

A luxury hotel chain hired us when they started to expand into the northern Midwest. Patty led the project and provided parking plans and layout recommendations. Clearly, the company loved her ability to make parking solutions sound somewhat interesting.

“That’s amazing, Patty!”

“Yeah?” A smile breaks free from her lips. “I thought you might be excited about one fewer desk in your office.”

“No. I’m sad about that part. I’ll have to kill time in conference rooms all on my own.”

“I’m recommending you for my job,” Patty confides. “Goodbye, government and public transit assignments.”

“But I was hired for my public works background.” I’m partially overstating it. I was hired because I revealed myself as a train geek in my urban planning freshman seminar and my professor—a transportation systems engineer and fellow rail enthusiast—volunteered himself as my advisor and connected me to an internship with this consulting firm.

I’m not a train conductor, as my six-year-old self dreamed of, but I’m providing research and insight into how expanding public transportation can serve communities who need it. Public transportation can connect people in a way that facilitates equity and community. I’m not sure I’d find the same fulfillment planning airport parking lots.

Patty sighs. “You do all of this work for these large-scale projects that never get funded. How many years did you put into that express train red-tape nightmare? With developers, you’ll get to travel outside of Minnesota. You’ll make corporate contacts. It’s a way bigger playing field.”

I can’t articulate why the positives of Patty’s job don’t sound like positives to me. After all, opportunities, travel, and connections are what most ambitious people look for in a career.

“I’ll think about it.”

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