Stue's Sleaze

Fuck Stue. Molly leaned back in her chair, as the fluorescent lights above her flickered. She had seen him from the corner of her eye, shuffling his fat ass over to her cubicle. She had made it a point to not look his way, in the vain hope that if she didn’t, maybe he wouldn’t talk to her. She had ignored him up until his stomach was touching her backrest, and Molly could smell the scent of sour, stale crackers that always seemed to follow Stue for some reason. Even then, she only turned around when he tapped her shoulder. “Oh! Gosh Stue, sorry I didn’t see ya there,” she had said, an Oscar-worthy smile painted on her face, “I was, well, y’know, Excel sheets, ya get so caught up in them, I forgot I was even here, ya know!”

Stue had then chuckled. Molly had seen straight into his throat. He had fillings on too many of his teeth, and his tongue was fleshy, short, and stiff, spazzing like the roach Molly had suffocated with hairspray the other day. Gross. She had smiled anyway. Stue had then started saying something or another about the value of hard workers like Molly, and how people like her were people like him, and that she would one day be of the few on their floor that would “make it”. His voice had boomed across the office, as if she was supposed to set an example to the rest of the staff, and they, too, should pretend to find joy in organizing excel sheets. All in that begrudgingly cheerful tone of his. Molly had fixated on the pimple that had found home in the crease between Stue’s nose and cheek. It moved left, right, up, and down as he spoke, and she had been afraid that it would burst, spraying its gunk onto her face, as if the man’s spittles weren’t already enough. She had been thinking about how it was almost bordering on being greenish, when Stue clapped her between the shoulder blades, “Right, Molly?”

She had smiled and nodded, “Right, of course.”

“Good girl,” he had said, then leaned over. Molly could smell the pastries on his breath and tried not to recoil as he said, “I’ll leave the documents on your desk before I head out, I want the paperwork done by 10 tomorrow, can’t do it myself, would if I could, but y’know, with the kid-”

“10 in the morning?”

“What else, kiddo?”

“Stue, it’s been snowing all day,” Molly had said, finally breaking her smile.

“You have a car, don’t you?” 

“Yeah, but wouldn’t the roads be...” she had trailed off, poking her head over the cubicle to look at the snow falling in big chunks. It didn’t look like it would let up anytime soon. 

“You’re a smart girl, Molly,” Stue had replied, turning his head to the window, “you’ll figure it out. Call an Uber if you have to.” He had then raised an eyebrow, and added, “Unless you want someone else to get paid? Patrick’s looking-”

“I can stay overtime, Stue, nothing I haven’t done before. I just think there might’ve been a blizzard warning toda-”

“I knew I could count on ya!” Stue had said, and had clapped her back one more time before leaving. 

And that was how Molly found herself picking at the corners of manilla colored folders with documents containing the firm’s expenditure and profit of the year in her cubicle at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in December, while a snowstorm brewed outside. Fuck. Stue. “Fuck this,” she said, stretching. Her office chair cramped up some part of her no matter which way she contorted her body. She groaned as she got up and kicked it aside, swinging her foot at the cubicle wall. “This is what I get for lying on my resume, I guess,” she mumbled. She sauntered over to the window wall. The layers of snow seemed to muffle the sounds of Boston- no bangs, no occasional yells, distant chattering, muffled knocks, no cars. No cars. Molly looked at the street below, but what she saw was less of a street than a perfect sheet of snow, only disrupted by sloped mounds in the place of cars parked curbside. Where her own shitbox was parked. “Shit,” she said, “shit, shit, shit, shit!”

She was stuck at the very least until morning. Fuck Stue. Molly turned back to the rows of grey boxes behind her, and not hastily began making her way to her own cubicle. She wandered into some of her coworker’s boxes, picking up a rubik’s cube here, a family photo there (Patrick’s wife was especially pretty, and Molly frankly didn’t understand why she would settle for someone as average as him), and always set them back down. Nothing was interesting enough to keep anyway.

At the end of the row, she found herself turning not to her workstation, but towards Stue’s office. The man had left the blinds to the windows that overlooked the cubicles half open, as if daring her to snoop around. But Molly wouldn’t go in. At least, she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t found the spare key on top of the doorframe of the office. That was practically an invitation. The door gave way as soon as the lock clicked. No resistance. She walked in. It was odd to see the office illuminated only by the dimmed lights of the staff workspace and the orange glow of the street lights beneath the windows. It looked like any common executive’s office, cream colored folders organized by date in a bookshelf to the left behind an imposing dark wood desk with a green banker’s lamp on it, probably bought by some secretary secretly fucking her boss back in the 80’s to add to the “ambiance”. Amusing enough, on the wall opposite the windows that looked onto the street, above the filing cabinets, Stue had hung up inspirational quote posters. Take the risk or lose the chance. There is no elevator to success, take the stairs. A winner is a dreamer who never gives up. “Straight out of Ms. Moriarty’s office, eh?” Molly mumbled, and scoffed. Ms. Moriarty, who, when Molly was 17, had told her that maybe college wasn’t for her, and that, maybe, she should reconsider that managerial job her uncle had offered Molly at their local corner store. Fuck Ms. Moriarty. She made her way behind the desk, and plopped down onto the soft leather chair, spinning it to the left and right. It had lumbar support and her shoulders fit comfortably in it. No pain. Stacks of paper were strewn about the desk, some even balanced on top of a bowl of candy Stue offered to people who came in, and some covered his beloved gold nameplate. Beneath the lamp was a photo frame turned face down. 

“The fuck are you hiding, Stue?” Molly mumbled as she pulled the string on the lamp and turned over the photo. A thinner, less bald Stue, a bleach-blonde wife with tired eyes whose roots were showing, and a son around 8, slumped in a wheelchair smiled back at her. The kid must have been a teenager now. It was no secret around the office that Stue’s kid had medical problems, Stue left early every other week because he needed to head to the hospital, but Molly had never considered the fact that the kid could be paralyzed. “Shit,” she said, putting the photo back down “must be a hell of a lot of hospital fees”. Molly chuckled. She would have expected Stue to milk sympathy from his kid’s disability, pointing to it as yet another reason to lecture the employees about hard work, and how he became a financial manager all while taking care of his kid, and how some of them don’t even have kids to worry about. Molly then opened and shut a few of the drawers closest to her- they only contained office supplies. She was doing it more so to ease the shock of what she had found out about Stue’s home life anyway. 

Once the initial surprise had worn off, and Molly started looking around for the odder object, she found a folded up piece of paper taped up and tucked away in the back corner of the third drawer on the left. Being careful not to tear the paper with the tape and unfolding it, she saw it was a long list with names and amounts in dollars. The page looked familiar. She recognized a few of the names on it as accounts she had dealt with earlier in the year- one was even highlighted. Stue had highlighted some of the names and written “100,000” in the bottom margin of the page. At the bottom right corner, the page read “5/50”. “Where’s the rest of this, then?” Molly asked, getting up. Though the names weren’t arranged alphabetically, towards the top of the list was one of the accounts that Molly had dealt with in January, and towards the bottom, one of the more recent ones. And odds were, they were all accounts from this year, and there was a chance she had a copy of the full document in the pile Stue had left for her. Molly headed back to her cubicle and started rummaging through her pile of papers, giving attention to what she was doing for the first time that week- or perhaps for the first time since she began working at the firm. 

Half an hour later, she found it- “Accounts closed and their subtotals,” she muttered. The document gave a detailed summary of every account the company had dealt with the past year, and their net profits. Molly turned to page 5 of the document, only to find that she couldn't catch sight of any of the names that had been highlighted on Stue’s copy, nor could she find them anywhere else in the document. No other papers in her stack dealt with individual accounts, either, she was sure of that. She had spent mind numbing hours looking over them. Calculating the net sum of the two pages, the numbers were drastically different, by about 100,000 dollars- so the missing names had not been merged onto other accounts or added later, either. Though, Molly’s document matched the firm’s current bank statement given to her. What the fuck, Stue. “You don’t have the balls or brains to launder money, man. So what are you doing?” Molly asked. 

The Harvey account. Highlighted, missing, and one that Molly had handled. She rolled her chair over to the filing cabinet behind her and unlocked it. She always filed dossiers as soon as she was done with them and locked the cabinet when she was done using it. It was the one thing she did right, and she knew that if it existed, she would find evidence of its existence in that metal box. Molly got up and looked through the “H” section, once, twice, three times. No Harvey. “What the fuck,” she shrieked. Her frustration echoed throughout the workspace. Pacing, the realization dawned on Molly that if any loss was traced back to her, she stood the risk of losing her job. As shit as it was, it paid well, and perhaps more importantly, she did not want her asshole acquaintances to use her joblessness as a way to fake compassion and sympathy towards her and brag about it to get “kindness points” from other assholes. Molly didn’t need their pity. 

Maybe someone had asked to borrow the Harvey file. She booted up her computer, and logged into her work email, searching the term “Harvey”. Many emails dealing with the proceeding and details of the account showed up from June, but nothing after, and nothing casual from her coworkers or Stue. “What if?” Molly mumbled, turning all of the search filters off and hitting “enter”. A single message different to the others popped up. Molly had sent it July 1st, just before she had gone on that trip to Vermont, to Stue. It read: “Hey Boss, thanks for handling the filing and stuff for the Harvey thing, I owe you.”

“Fucking Stue!” Molly yelled. She had forgotten about him offering to finish up that account for her. He had drained whole accounts, and shaved off 100,000 dollars from the company’s earnings. Molly laughed. She folded up Stue’s list, taped it back up, and walked back into his office. At his desk, she sat down, propped up the family photo, and placed the list into the corner of the third drawer on the left. Molly leaned back, smiling, and looked to Stue's high school counselor posters. Take the risk or lose the chance. She scoffed.