When he was done, no one would be able to go back and see who WebFence had flagged and how many times and for what reason. He scrubbed his own hard drive, too, cleared his practically nonexistent e-mail history. He wiped the machine clean and reinstalled all the programs.
Then he cleaned out his desk—well, the drawer that Kristi had allotted him. There wasn’t much in there. Gum. Microwave popcorn. A few CDs.
By the time he was done, it was after ten, too late to call Greg. He’d talk to Greg tomorrow. He found Doris in the break room, playing solitaire and eating bright red pistachios.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, honey. Hey, look at you. I like your haircut. You know, we used to call that a D.A., ’cause it looks just like a duck’s ass.”
He tried to run his hand through his hair, to press it down, but his fingers got caught in the styling wax.
“Have you eaten yet?” She pushed the pistachios toward him.
“No, I guess I forgot. Look, Doris, I came down to tell you that …I think I’m going to quit tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Lincoln said, and nothing was ever going to happen. “I just really hate this job.”
“You do?” She looked surprised. Hadn’t he ever complained to Doris about work?
“Yeah,” he said. “I hate it. I hate the hours. I hate reading everybody’s e-mail.”
“Why do you read everybody’s e-mail?”
“That’s my job,” he said. “And I hate it. I hate sitting in that office by myself. I hate being up all night. I don’t even like this newspaper. I disagree with the editorials, and they don’t run any of my favorite comics.”
“You don’t like Blondie?” she asked. “And Fox Trot?”
“Fox Trot’s okay,” he said.
“You’re really quitting?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yes.”
“Well …good for you. No sense staying someplace after you realize you don’t want to be there.
Good for you. And good for me that you stayed this long. Do you have another job?”
“Not yet. I’ll find one. I have enough in savings that I don’t have to find one right away.”
“We should celebrate,” Doris said.
“We should?”
“Sure. We should have a going-away party.”
“When?”
“Right now,” she said. “We’ll order a pizza, and we’ll play pinochle until it’s time to clock out.”
He wouldn’t have thought he’d feel like celebrating, but he did. Enough is enough, he thought.
Enough is enough is enough. They ordered pizza from Pizza Hut—one medium Meat Lover’s Pan Pizza each. And Doris won six rounds of pinochle. When it was time to go home, she got a little choked up.
“You’re a good kid,” she said, “and a good friend.”
“We’ll still see each other,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner when you retire.”
He stopped at Chuck’s desk on the way back to the IT office. “I can’t talk, I’m on deadline,” Chuck said.
“I just want to tell you that I’m quitting.”
“What? You can’t quit,” Chuck said.
“I hate working here.”
“We all hate working here. That doesn’t mean we quit. Only quitters quit.”
“I’m quitting.”
“I guess this is good-bye, then,” Chuck said.
“It’s not good-bye. We can still play golf.”
“Piffle,” Chuck said. “You’ll get a day job. You’ll forget us. There won’t be anybody to help us do math.”
“You might be right,” Lincoln said.
“Bastard.”
“Don’t tell anybody until tomorrow.”
“Bastard defector.”
When he got back to his desk, Lincoln decided he wasn’t coming back tomorrow to quit in person.
He wasn’t ever coming back. He didn’t want to see Beth again. Didn’t want to find himself opening the WebFence folder after he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to for the four-thousandth time.
So he took out a pad of paper and wrote two notes. The first was to Greg. A quick resignation and an apology.
He slipped it into an envelope and stuck it into Greg’s keyboard where Greg would see it first thing the nextmorning.
The second note he lingered over. He didn’t have to write this one. He probably shouldn’t write it.
But he wanted to walk away from the newspaper tonight (this morning, actually) feeling truly and completely free, with his conscience as clear as he could make it without publicly crucifying himself.