Lunch

"You've been eating lunch."

He looks up. "What?"

"Every day this week. At a table, like a person." His coworker sits down across from him. "You used to eat standing over the sink at four in the afternoon."

"Yeah." He goes back to his food, unbothered. "That's true."

"So what happened?"

He takes a second. Not stalling, just deciding how much to say.

"Somebody asks me now."

"Asks you what?"

"Whether I've eaten." He says it plainly. "And whether I slept, and whether I've had water. Every day. And She wants the real answer, not the one where I say I'm fine."

His coworker waits for the rest of it. There isn't any more.

"That's it? Somebody asks you if you've eaten?"

"You'd think it'd be a small thing." He shrugs. "It isn't."

"Okay, so who is She."

He smiles at that, a little. "You're going to have opinions."

"I already have opinions. Go."

"She tells me what to do." He says it without any embarrassment at all. "Not suggestions. She says a thing once and I do it. If I don't, She notices, and it's not a pleasant conversation."

"That sounds like a job."

"It's the opposite of a job." He puts his fork down. "At work I decide two hundred things a day and half of them are wrong and nobody tells me either way. With Her I know exactly where I stand at all times. She says good, or She says do it again. That's the whole thing."

"And you like that."

"I sleep now," he says. "I hadn't slept properly in about four years."

His coworker leans back, studying him. "Alright, but what does She get out of this."

"Money." Easy, like it's the least interesting part. "Before anything. Before I tell Her what's wrong, before She tells me what to do, before any of it."

"You're paying somebody to ask if you've eaten."

"I'm paying for Her attention." He picks the fork back up. "The asking is what She does with it."

"Man."

"I know how it sounds."

"No, I'm not being a dick about it. I'm just." He stops. "I don't know anybody who'd ask me that."

Neither of them says anything for a second.

"Yeah," he says.

His coworker turns his cup around on the table. "Is She, like. Nice?"

"No." He thinks about it. "She's kind. Those aren't the same. She'll tell me I've made a mess of my week and then sit there while I fix it. She doesn't let me off anything."

"And that's better."

"That's the only thing that's ever worked."

His coworker is quiet again. Then, not quite casually: "Does She do that for everybody?"

"She takes who She takes."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

He finishes his lunch. His coworker sits there a minute longer, phone face up on the table, not looking at it, thinking about the last time anyone had asked him anything.

Fifty. Then I'll tell you what comes next.