Joseph Grantham

WASTE BINS

I don’t have anything mean or clever to say.

I sell air conditioning units.

It’s winter now and business is slow.

There was a time when I tried to write stories.

But I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t about a man in an office selling air conditioning units.

And even writing about that was too difficult.

I sell the things but I don’t know how they work and I don’t know enough about my life to write about it.

And I’m too nice.

I live alone and I don’t like it.

Bernadette is gone because I kept opening her mail.

She said the worst thing she’d ever seen was when she watched me from the window, tearing into her envelopes as I walked up the steps to our apartment.

I can understand why she didn’t like that.

But she let it sit around for weeks, didn’t look at it, and I’m not the kind of person who can not know what’s coming to him.

Or to anyone else.

Even if it’s only a bill.

I can’t stand that.

The place where I work is called Vern Air Supply.

Vern worked for another man named Mort back when the company was called Mort Air Supply.

But Mort was diagnosed with stage four cancer and he sold the company to Vern.

I never knew Mort and there’s no way for me to know him now because he’s dead or he may be alive somewhere but why would I need to know him?

And maybe one day Vern will be diagnosed with stage four cancer and he’ll sell the company to me and I will rename it Eric Air Supply and the cycle will continue.

No, but I don’t want that.

My name is Eric Wenderman and I don’t want any of that.

But maybe I’ll live long enough to want that.

I’ve got years left in me.

I’m in this thing and anything could happen.

But I’ll tell you why I don’t like work.

A couple years ago Vern gave us these personal waste bins for Christmas, our first and last initials stickered onto the sides.

I thought it was a joke the first time I saw mine.

I came into the office early the day before Christmas Eve and saw a baby blue bin sitting on my desk, EW stickered onto the side.

I thought Vern must be having some fun.

But I looked at the bins on all of the other desks.

VA on Valerie Anderson’s desk.

AS on Anita Somers’s desk.

NS on Ned Smint’s desk.

EE on Ethan Ecker’s desk.

SN on Sonesh Naidu’s desk.

SA on Susan Alcott’s desk.

AV on Alexi Vandal’s desk.

Everybody’s initials.

Roger started with us about a year ago.

His waste bin isn’t personalized with stickered initials—if it was it’d say RA—but he does have a waste bin.

Vern gave him one after his first week when he noticed crumpled papers and empty chip bags collecting around his desk.

And I guess all of this waste bin business is my fault.

I’d sent out an email to the office referencing the office waste bin, how we could all do a better job of keeping the office clean if we each had individual waste bins rather than the one communal waste bin by the door, and how if the office was tidier we could probably get a lot more done.

We could sell more air conditioning units.

Vern replied to my email.

He agreed that we should each of us have our own garbage receptacles, that he’d originally gone with the communal waste bin in an effort to reduce office waste—he’d thought if there was only one waste bin we’d be less inclined to recklessly dispose of paper products and other detritus—but with the growth of the office—there were nine of us in all, if you counted Vern, and this was before Roger joined the team—he recognized his naivete and said he would take the necessary action.

And the necessary action became our holiday gift.

But all of this is beside the point.

Or I thought it was.

It can be hard to tell sometimes.

One night I stayed late at the office.

I was on a call.

And the janitor came in and he took all of our waste bins and he lined them up on the table against the wall by the door.

He did this so he could vacuum the carpet.

But he didn’t take my waste bin.

He left it next to my desk, next to me.

Maybe he thought I was using it or maybe he didn’t want to talk to me.

But I’d never seen the waste bins lined up like that.

I’d stayed late before and I’d never seen the janitor line them up like that.

And I saw that everybody’s initials spelled out VANESSA.

And I thought it was a coincidence but then I noticed if you started at the end, looking at the last name initials, from right to left, from Vandal to Anderson, well, that spelled VANESSA too.

I got off my call.

It had been a long call because the customer had a question about his air conditioning unit and I had to learn about air conditioners while I was on the phone with the man, scrambling, telling him it would be okay, it was a common problem, it could be fixed.

His unit was running low on refrigerant and what I learned while he spoke to me on the phone—and I researched on the computer—was that refrigerant runs on a closed loop.

And the only explanation was that he had a leak and we’d have to send someone out to him tomorrow or else he’d try to fix the leak himself and get electrocuted and his wife would contact her lawyer.

But the waste bins.

I thought they were telling me something.

But if that were the case they would’ve spelled out BERNADETTE or DON’T OPEN

HER MAIL.

Something like that.

But no one at work has a first or last name that begins with B, R, D, T, O, P, H, M, I, or L.

So they couldn’t have spelled out anything like that.

And if it was a sign for me, my waste bin probably would have been up on that table too.

But it wasn’t.

So it wasn’t a sign for me.

And it wasn’t a sign for Vern either because his waste bin stays in his office, behind the glass.

But I know it was a sign.

Not because there’s no such thing as coincidence.

There is.

Last Wednesday, driving to the office, I heard Bernadette’s favorite piece of music on the radio and it made me upset.

“Gymnopédie No. 1.”

But I was listening to WBJC, the classical station, and for a piece of classical music it’s a popular composition and I can understand the difference between a coincidence and a sign and I know that waste bins, when lined up against a wall, aren’t supposed to spell anything out.

They’re not supposed to tell us anything.

But these ones did.

So it was a sign for Vanessa.

Whoever she was.

Or it was a sign for someone else.

Someone who needed to talk to Vanessa.

Whoever they were.

I went home.

At a certain point you have to go home.

I ran a bath.

Bernadette’s cats did figure-eights through my legs.

And when I was in the water, the one I liked, the gray one, walked around the rim of the tub.