C4 antho - Chamber Four

~294~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
“Look at Wilson out there laughing. Do you think he’s
drunk?”
Wilson soft-shoed into his son’s minivan, the star of his
own silent movie.
Freedman was forever in good spirits―he was a man of
the highest, proudest, most natural spirits Joseph had ever
known―and he pulled a Sam’s Choice lemon-lime soda from
the refrigerator along with his brown sack of lunch, and
laughed with a gentle calm that put Wilson’s bluster to
shame. “He deserves to be happy, no? A million and a half
for the Cleveland plant, I’d be handing out tulips and Swiss
chocolates.”
The pulp of Joseph’s lemon went on spinning in his glass
even after he’d stopped stirring, the swirls of dissolved sugar
warping and turning like heat waves coming up from a car.
He often felt blessed by small things and now, with the
young sun glinting off windshields and beckoning him outside
with his lunch, he felt deeply fortunate to have this
packet of sugar in his hand, to be already rolling the torn-off
piece of it between his fingers, to be here in this job, a translator
instead of a temp, twenty dollars an hour instead of
eight-fifty.
A million and a half.
“And―do you get commissions when you sell?” he asked,
expecting the worst. Every one of them must have been making
too much money to care about anything. He was halfway
back to his cubicle―a little-used door next to Herr Halsa’s
office led to the lawn behind the building―and Freedman
was about to disappear into the gear-hobbing maze.
“Nope. I guess commissions are an American thing,”
Freedman said wistfully. He was still smiling. He was almost
laughing, and his hands were plunged so far into his pockets
that his elbows were straight. Joseph thought he’d like to