Crane

Kline was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. The obituary had run seven years ago, tonight, twelve lines on the business page of the Plain Dealer, squeezed between a notice about a condo conversion and a coupon for winter tires, and Silas Crane had read it once, folded it in half, and filed it under R for records. The sign above the sixteenth-floor suite on Superior Avenue still said CRANE & KLINE, because new signage costs money, and Crane had never in his life spent a dollar that did not promise to come back with interest.

Crane knew Kline was dead the way he knew an account was delinquent: completely, and without grief. Aaron Kline had died at his desk on a Christmas Eve with a stylus still in his hand, mid-signature on a foreclosure order, and Crane, his partner, had taken one long look at the body and then one longer look at the untouched deal on the screen, and had signed it himself, and had closed the file, and had gone home to a dinner of instant noodles eaten standing up over the sink. Nobody ever showed up at Crane's office asking for warm words. Warm words were not in the catalog.

Oh. But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Crane. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching old sinner, cut off from every app that might have softened him: he priced grief by the hour, he timed his employees' bathroom breaks on a dashboard, he responded to every charity email with a filter that sent it straight to the archive folder marked NEVER. External heat and cold had little influence on him. No snow could make his walk to the parking garage faster or slower than profit allowed, no wind could blow through his three-thousand-dollar coat, and the people who worked for him said, behind the closed break-room door, out of the dashboard's earshot, that he carried the cold in with him and left it on every desk he passed.

The city outside his window wore its snow like something borrowed and about to be repossessed. Three days of lake-effect clouds had ground gray flakes onto the tents along Prospect Avenue, the tarps over the bus shelters, and the men who held cardboard signs at the exit ramps, and every morning from the heated seats of his car Crane sorted them, in his head, into categories of their own failure, filed under P for personal responsibility.

Inside the office it was cold too, though not on paper. The building's thermostats were networked and Crane controlled the root account, and so in the cubicle farm beyond his glass wall the air sat at sixty-two degrees, and the analysts wore their coats indoors and blew on their hands between spreadsheets, and Dale Teller, who had been there longest and so had the cubicle farthest from the window and nearest to nothing, kept a small USB heater shaped like a campfire on his desk and cupped his hands over its plastic flames below the sightline of the desk cameras.

His nephew Nate came in around noon, pink-cheeked and snow-dusted, holding a paper bag of cookies from his wife's oven, and said, "Merry Christmas, Uncle Crane. Come to dinner tomorrow. Seven o'clock, my place. The kids ask about you."

Crane looked up from a spreadsheet of judgments. "What's Christmas to me but a time for paying bills without money? A day off for everyone, so the courts close and the collections stall and every deadbeat in Cuyahoga County gets an extra day of grace. Out of my office, Nate. Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it," Nate said, quieter. "That's a strange verb for it. But come anyway. You don't have to be happy. Just come." And he set the cookies on the corner of the desk, and went out, and Crane waited until the door clicked and then dropped the cookies into the trash, liner and all, so that no one would think he had accepted anything.

At three it was the fundraisers, two women from a housing clinic, coats unzipped, lanyards swinging, a tablet held out with a donation form already loaded. "Mr. Crane, we're raising for the eviction defense fund — hundreds of families in this county get filed on every month, and most of them show up to court with no lawyer at all."

"Are there no emergency shelters?"

"Plenty, and all of them full by four in the afternoon."

"And the county jail," Crane said, tapping his desk. "Is it still in operation? And the shelters have waitlists, and the courts have dockets. I wish to be left alone. That is what I have bought with forty years of work, and it is not for sale." The women looked at him the way people look at a wound they cannot dress, and left, and the tablet's donation form timed out and reset to zero.

When the last light in the cubicle farm went out — Teller, zipping his coat with his gloves already on, waiting at the door for the one sentence that would end his day — Crane unlocked the time clock and said, "You'll want the day off tomorrow, no doubt."

"If it's convenient, sir. It's only once a year."

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December. Fine. But you'll take it unpaid, and the quarterly report is due the day after, and I expect it done." Teller said thank you, because he had two sons and a daughter and rent that arrived like weather, and went down into the snow, and Crane worked until nine, and the carolers outside the garage, three teenagers with out-of-tune voices and a battery-powered speaker, sang about peace on earth to a man who tipped their open guitar case with a motion to move along.

At home, his brownstone on a street where every other house had been flipped and lit with inflatables, Crane dismissed the door camera's face-recognition chime, ate standing over the sink again, and was locking his own front door, his own door, when he saw Kline's face.