Jack

Jack's one bad habit turned out that he had none. He came from a good family of the unassuming respectable sort. Keith and Margaret Richards had come from a long line of midwestern farmers and had over the last few generations graduated to producing the type of midwestern accountants that were known for their steadfastness. Hard work, diligence, and honesty were the hallmarks of the Richards family and for three generations they had born and bread accountants, lawyers, and clerical staff whose lack of imagination was relied upon in the sort of middle income, white collar world that ran the lower to mid office towers of the unfashionable side of a big mid-western city which, in the interests of our narrative, shall remain nameless.

Jack woke up every day, kissed his wife Daisy Richards goodbye, drove his sensible designed in Japan assembled in America with the good gas mileage in to work, and filed taxes for the firm of Peabody, Lionel, and Rotherson. Jack was 34, had ten year old son in the fifth grade, little Johnathan, who was beginning to learn his times tables. Jack and Daisy had married after college and had Johnathan shortly thereafter - it wasn't so much expected as it was the done thing. Daisy herself put on her scrub uniform every morning and drove into work as a nurse. Her locker was adorned with cutesy stickers and animals as it had been all her life. She was, in a word, sweet, and about as unassuming as it was possible to be and still be able to draw blood from her patients. She worked in an orthopedic clinic where there wasn't too much blood and about the most serious ailment that came into the office was a dislocated knee. They both put away from retirement in IRAs that were as sensible as Jack could structure them. They had a small house with a picket fence. Their life path was set in stone - they would work for thirty years or so and then they would retire to a slightly bigger house somewhere warm as their parents had and their parents before them had.

It was not so much to call Jack, Daisy, and even maybe little Johnathan, happy as it would be to say that they had no comparison of what life was about. They were happy *enough*. They had enough food to eat and a roof over their heads. They weren't religious per se, Jack liked to mention in casual conversation to anybody that had the misfortune of being in earshot that he came from "good Christian stock", although Jack was more interested in his other, more material, accounts. They had a weekly barbecue every Saturday with the neighbors, Max and Mira Drotherson, who lived next door. Max was the owner of the local car dealership in town and while his house was about as cookie cutter as the Richards, although a pale shade of blue than stark yellow, there would always be some exotic car sitting in his drive way that he "test drove" before selling them to the public. Mira sold art in town. The art was bad, but people bought it out of charity. Mira had either the foresight or the ignorance to pretend otherwise; it was sort of hard to tell with Mira.

"Look, Jack," Max gesticulated with his beer one Saturday at the end of July when the heat was becoming scorching. Max and Jack were standing in front of the grill cooking weenies while the girls were in the garden. As per usual they were at Jack's house but Max was grilling and Jack was standing watch. They had fallen into this habit, and neither understood why. Jack didn't drink. "You need to lighten up a little. Get out of town for a while, see the sights. Even up to the Lakes for awhile. I've got just the car that you could rent for a long weekend away for a bit..." And so the conversation went as it almost always did, with Jack nodding along and murmuring, in his meek and polite way, how now was not the best time. There would have to be arrangements made for a baby sitter for Johnathan and his summer schedule. How much work there was at the office these days.

In fact, the one problem that Jack seemed to be having in his life is that nobody around him respected his need for a certain amount of boring. For Jack, he enjoyed what he had because he had never had the taste of what he could had if he, in the words of some of his colleagues at work, applied a little creativity. Even in the most boring and staid of offices, his boss Mr. Peabody would politely nod his head during the bi-weekly figure reports with a weariness that spoke volumes. People assumed that Jack was insensitive to their emotions, or as the hippies getting high near the lunch trucks might call them, "vibes", but Jack wasn't. He just was vibe immune somehow. Stephanie, Mr. Peabody's secretary, consoled him more than once when a fellow clerk was promoted ahead of him. He just needed to show a little more - mojo was the term she used. But they were accounts dang it (that was the word he said to himself as he sometimes kept himself awake at night in his little yellow white picket fence house). They weren't supposed to be interesting, and he liked them that way.

The latest indignity had pushed him over his proverbial edge. His desk had been moved away from his customary position near a window to let a much younger clerk, a junior, into his spot and he had been banished to the middle of the office where there was much less privacy. Jack valued his privacy, he valued that his day to day life had a certain uniform consistency, and he valued not being humiliated in front of his peers. Damn the window (this time he really meant it), it was the indignity of it all. All his life he had done what others told him to do because they more or less fell in line with his expectations. But for some reason that he couldn't really fathom that wasn't working any more, so he began, for the first time in his life, to become cunning.

One Saturday Jack convinced Max to lend him one of his high powered sports cars for the week. Jack, who on principle refused to lie, in keeping with his family tradition, told him that he was just looking for a change. Max jumped at the idea. For him the cars were free rides and he secretly liked the idea of thinking that he knew his neighbors secret, that Jack was having an affair downtown. Max liked to think he knew things and Jack did not go so far as to completely banish the idea from his mind. On that Monday he drove into work in a car that was worth easily ten times what his sensible Asian compact was worth.

News around the office spread like wildfire. Stephanie looked at him with new found respect and began playing with her pencils when she talked with him. The junior accounts manager that had taken his chair deferred to him in a completely trivial matter and Mr. Peabody, bald headed paunchy Mr. Peabody practically gushed over figures that hadn't changed significantly over the last week. Jack, to add fuel to the rumors, carefully added a doctored spreadsheet showing exponential growth in some obscure stock. Jack did not lie, but if any of the partners or associates were to happen to walk across his terminal when he was roaming the halls that wasn't exactly his problem either.

On a Friday the partners took Jack out to lunch and effused over his performance. Jack carefully noted what they ate (steak and salad) and what beer they drank (an import of a variety that closely matched the pedigree of his loaner vehicle). He ordered a smaller steak and a beer. This seemed to please the partners and they were quick to enjoy him to a more senior role within the firm, one came with an office and a door.

At weeks end, Jack returned the car to Max and the following week happily moved his small office belongs, a cactus, lamp and calculator into his new office. No mention was made of the car which had disappeared from his parking space other than a few looks that suggested some slight betrayal. Stephanie stopped twirling her pencil, but also stopped consoling him as an equal - he now became Mr. Richards with a cold brusqueness. Other than this his normal duties more or less resumed.

Yet...the hours were longer and the figures involved became both more and less serious. Jack's role became less about accounting and more about having to manage people, which involved learning more about food than he would have cared to admit. Over the next few weeks he began having to learn about the gastro sensibilities of the other managing firms in town and their clientele. The reason for this was simple - the accounts of Peabody, Lionel and Rotherson did not balance and as Jack was beginning to understand most of the accounting books in town, maybe even all the accounts in the world, or at least it seemed to Jack, might not balance. It started with a simple phone call over some tractor supplies to a manufacturing firm that had off balance sheet items that were not listed anywhere in any way. Bounced from one representative to another Jack quickly found that the only way to gain any traction was to call up a sales rep which involved another steak dinner. Chad from Feed Supply Unlimited. An explanation was given over tartar sauce that seemed reasonable enough. Jack submitted his report, Mr. Peabody was pleased and he moved on to other work.

That was the beginning. The life that Jack had envisioned - honesty, integrity - started to quickly become mired in the reasonableness of his clients. Jack could not, would not for his own principle sake become involved in a lie, but he was forced, time and again to call up clients to explain their discrepancies in their accounts. From tractor wholesalers to lampshade dealers, Jack would be forced to find ways to excuse the profligacy of the accounts he was handed. And the explanations always made sense at the end of the day, there was no denying that. But Jack was having other problems. His waistline was expanding and he began to have bags under his eyes. The looks that Max gave him that summer were beginning to rub off on Daisy who looked at Jack with a side eye every now and again. The extra money and the promotion sounded too good to be true to her and the extra hours away at the office and the way that Jack came home every day exhausted and smelling of alcohol could only, to her sensibilities, mean one thing - that Jack was cheating on her. Daisy didn't say anything - in fact she was her old normal cheerful self, but she rolled away from him at night and more often than not she "got headaches".

Jack had traded away his simple life of honest toil for money. His wife wasn't honest with him, what amounted to his friends thought he was having an affair, his clients were not honest. How could he then live an honest life? And so a hot sweltering night filled with sleeplessness found Jack out in front of his yellow lemon house taking a baseball bat to his sensible asian compact with the good gas mileage.