Revenge by Yōko Ogawa Read Free Book Online Page B

cookies or other food, it goes on the middle shelf in the cupboard.
    Not long after I started working here, some bigwig in Neurology asked us to help with a presentation he was going to give at a conference. It had all these graphs and charts, and he wanted it back in just two days. She split the work with me and we typed up labels for the slides.
    “Use the number 508 stickers for the slides,” she told me. “They’re for conferences.” No. 508 was a dull gray.
    I did the job just the way she had asked, but when the doctor returned to pick up the presentation, he took one look at it and threw it back on the desk. It all tumbled down onto the floor.
    “This color won’t show up on the projector,” he said.
    “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, stepping in before I had the chance to say anything. Her apology was really smooth. “I told her to use number 608 as usual, but it’s my fault for not checking. She’s new and I think she’s a little color-blind. I’m very sorry. We’ll get it redone by the end of the day.”
    The doctor said he’d be back later and stormed out.
    Color-blind? For a moment I wasn’t sure what she’d said—just that she’d sounded really charming when she’d said it. No. 608 was bright blue.
    She had definitely told me no. 508. I knew because it was the same number as her apartment. I wasn’t likely to make a mistake about something like that. And she had given the presentation one more pass before the doctor had come to get it. I started picking up the papers.
    “It’s your mistake,” she said. “You fix it.”
    I didn’t finish until way after midnight. I felt like I was sinking in some kind of gray swamp.
    The next morning she handed the new slides to the doctor as if she’d done them herself. He seemed really embarrassed he’d made such a fuss and he asked her out to lunch to apologize. I was not invited.
    I never said a word of what happened, not to anyone. I was willing to be color-blind if it would keep her perfect.
    *   *   *
    “I told you she got pregnant just when he was about to ask her for the divorce.” I shake the next coat and two cafeteria tickets fall out of the pocket: one for spaghetti with meatballs and one for a cream soda. “I bet she did it on purpose, part of her evil scheme.”
    She isn’t looking at me, but she doesn’t seem to be writing in the register anymore either. She’s usually such a perfectionist, but she can get pretty sloppy if she’s thinking about her doctor.
    “When I asked him if he’d even told her, he got defensive and came up with all these excuses: they’re worried about the boy getting into the right elementary school; his wife could go into premature labor; he’s got some experiment running at the lab and can’t be distracted; the train got stuck in the snow … a load of crap!”
    She stops for a moment and I read the label on the next coat. She writes it down in the register—I think.
    The coats are in a pretty sorry state, all wrinkled and stained. Blood, spit, urine, tears. You can tell by the color, and the smell. It’s amazing all the stuff that can ooze out of a body.
    “‘One lie leads to another,’” I say. She should know.
    “He finally showed up past ten last night. Dog-tired—from being stuck on the train for five hours, he said. But I was the one who was tired. Tired of waiting all that time, of running to the door at every little noise, watching the dinner I’d made get cold.”
    She runs her hand through her hair and looks down again. Her skin is so white. Her shoulders are really beautiful. The pen rolls across the desk.
    “Do you know what he told me? He said he’d ‘had a lot of time to think’ on the train. That he felt like ‘some invisible force’ was holding him back. That it ‘wasn’t the right time,’ and that was why it had snowed. He said he wanted me to be patient, to wait just a little longer. ‘Just a little longer…’ And then we screwed, just like we always do.