Agency

27 Mother-Daughter

Verity lay in the dark on the porn couch, in her mummy-bag liner, listening to Joe-Eddy snoring in the bedroom.

The Tulpagenics glasses were charging on the nearby seat of a wooden café chair he’d spotted in a dumpster on Fourteenth. One of the only known examples, he said, to have escaped being painted purple.

“Can’t sleep?” asked Eunice, currently a small, uncharacteristically tinny voice from the earpiece, which itself was charging beside Verity’s head, on white pleather.

“How’d you know I was awake?” Verity moved her ear closer. There were no lights on in the apartment, just glowing LED hyphens on a few devices, with the blackout curtains drawn against whatever illumination nighttime Valencia might have offered.

“The Robertson heads have night vision. Your eyes were open. Joe-Eddy keeping you awake?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about how Tulpagenics can’t hear what we’re saying, just something you’re making up instead. What are they hearing us say right now?”

“You’re telling me how hot it was, in here, back in the heat wave.”

“You’re making that up? For them, I mean?”

“Part of me must be. The bugs can’t hear me when this is in your ear, and I’m quiet enough now for them not to pick it up. But there’s a sub-second lag I expect they’ll notice eventually.”

“Sounds too complicated.”

“Doable, though, with the right budget. And staying here gets Joe-Eddy reacclimatized faster.”

“Why’d you bring him back?”

“Branch plant made the call. He’s infosec. And he’s in your existing trust network, so that puts him in mine. Not that I didn’t do due diligence. He’s qualified.”

“Why me?”

“Who else? Gavin? Nobody else, till you.”

“But that means you’d only met one other person.”

“I had shoulders,” Eunice said, “I’d shrug ’em.”

The snoring stopped. Joe-Eddy coughed, cleared his throat. She listened as he made his way in darkness to the bathroom. Sound of the door closing, then of extended urination, muffled by the door, then of the toilet flushing. The door opened again. His bare feet on the creaking floorboards, making his way back to black sheets.

“Closes the door before he pees,” Eunice said. “Reason to hire him right there. Bigger reason’s that he’s tight with people who can help set up the kind of network I need.”

“What kind is that?”

“One that takes care of business whether or not I’m here.”

“What’s that mean?” Verity asked, not liking the sound of it.

“I’ll explain as it comes together,” Eunice said. “In the meantime, how about you call your mom now?”

“She’s nothing to do with this. And she’s in Michigan. Wouldn’t be up yet.”

“Just now pinned some flower arrangements on one of her Pinterest boards, baby pugs on another, so definitely she’s up.”

“Stop doing that.”

“You call her, on average, every seven to ten days. Today made twelve.”

“You think you can make me call my mother?”

“I can suggest it.”

“On my own phone?”

“Using theirs would violate your NDA. Not that they aren’t already tapping yours.”

“But then they’ll have her number.”

“Already do. But I can’t use postproduction on this call, because it won’t be on their system. So you’ll be under heavy manners, strictly mother-daughter stuff. If you make it sound like you’re okay with the job, that’s a plus.”

Verity fumbled for her phone, unlocked it. “This better not wake her up.” Opened Contacts and tapped the phone icon under her mother’s first name.

“It’s five in the morning, dear,” said her mother, after the second ring.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. I was doing my Pinterest. And Daisy’s out doing her business.” Daisy was their Labradoodle.

“You okay?”

“You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.”

“But it didn’t happen. That war.”

“Decades of background dread did,” her mother said.

“How’s Lyle?” Her stepfather.

“They’ve planted his prostate with radioactive seeds. Sounds like something would grow, but really it’s for the opposite. Still has to get up a lot, in the night.”

“How’s that for you?”

“I can usually get back to sleep. You?”

“New job. Just started.”

“Like it?”

“Seems okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“What I was doing before.”

“Stets is engaged.”

“I know, Mom,” Verity said.

Her mother had been galvanized, Verity supposed understandably, by her daughter having received so much attention as the girlfriend of a billionaire tech investment wizard. And now seemed, in Verity’s opinion, insufficiently ready to let that go. But at least they’d bounced comfortably enough over the topic of her stepfather.

“I hear Daisy tearing after something in the yard,” her mother said. “She’ll wake Lyle. Gotta go.”

“Okay,” Verity said, “love you, Mom.”

“Love you too, hon. Bye.”

Verity lay there in the dark, looking up at nothing. Joe-Eddy still hadn’t started snoring again.

“How was she?” Eunice asked, from the headset beside her.

“You didn’t listen?”

“You were talking with your mother.”

“She’s okay. My stepfather’s got cancer. It’s being treated. And he’s racist, which didn’t come up.”

“Plenty of both around,” Eunice said.

“Took me a while to get that he doesn’t realize he is. Makes me wonder if I’d know I was.”

“How you can tell you’re on the right track, anyway,” Eunice said. “Stepdad’s the one positive he’s not.”

“You just look him up?”

“Didn’t need to. Try and get some sleep.”

Verity put her phone on the floor.

Closing her eyes, she imagined Daisy the Labradoodle chasing something, in her mother’s yard.