Monday, May 8
Monday afternoon, at exactly four, Dale Marabout pushed himself away from his desk, stood up, swung his chair once around his body like a giant discus and slammed it into his computer. He yelled out the three words I’d been dreading for some weeks now: “ I. FUCKING. QUIT. ”
Before the elevator door closed he shouted a single word at Aubrey, who had her knees on her desk and the Hannawa white pages in her lap: “ HAPPY?”
I hurried down the stairwell as fast as I could and intercepted Dale on the parking deck. He was crying like a baby. While we hugged I reached into his pants pocket for the handkerchief I knew he carried there. I dabbed his eyes and whispered “It’ll be okay” I don’t know how many times.
Dale was ripe for a mid-life crisis no matter what was going on at the paper. He was in his late forties and his kids were grown. Whatever secret dreams he carried inside him were simply dreams now, defeated by the limits of his talent and his metabolism. So in my mind Tinker’s transferring in from Baton Rouge, or Aubrey McGinty waltzing in from Rush City, had very little do with Dale’s anger. He was angry with himself.
“Wait an hour,” I told him, “then go back to your desk with a mug of coffee and a cookie and nobody will say a thing.”
He tried to unlock his car but I strategically squashed my backside against the door. “There’s no way in hell I’m going back in there,” he said.
“Yelling ‘I quit’ is not the same as writing ‘I quit.’ Until you give Tinker a written resignation, you haven’t officially resigned. You’ve just gone a little crazy. You’re allowed. All will be forgiven.”
“Move your ass,” he said.
I moved and he drove off. He didn’t show up for work the next day and Sylvia Berdache told me Tinker had an e-mail waiting for him when he got to work. It said: “In case you haven’t heard by now, I.