The People Here by Cary Holladay

“Sure, Jocelyn, I’ll show it to you,” says Leila Clark, the bank manager, when I ask to see the second-floor apartment in the building, advertised as vacant and available. Leila takes a key out of her desk and leads me outside and up a flight of stairs. The rooms are small but appealing. Beyond the windows is the greening world. The bank shares a parking lot with a nail salon and a discount furniture store. Beyond the town limits, young cornstalks sprout from rolling red earth, and a boys’ boarding school occupies a leafy hill above the Rappahannock River. 

“Are pets allowed?” I ask.

“The last people had a snake.” Leila shudders.

“I have a dog, a rat terrier.”

“That’s fine.”

Leila was ahead of me in high school, she must be forty-five by now. I’ve always looked up to her. She started as a teller, and the job has seen her through a long-ago divorce from Charlie Clark, who was the mayor of our town for many years. All along, Leila’s bosses down in Richmond and up in New York liked her and promoted her, a plucky small-town girl at the end of their telescopes. She and Charlie have one child, Jeremy, who is now about nineteen and lives at home with Leila. Post-divorce, Charlie moved to Florida, and enough time has passed that new mayors have been elected and re-elected. 

Leila wears pinstriped suits and pastel blouses. She has short black hair and dark eyes rimmed in blue liner, and it’s impossible to tell whether or not she’s happy. 

A maple tree grows outside the bank, mired in pavement. The apartment has a good view of it.

“As long as it doesn’t block the drive-through,” Leila says, “it can stay.”

***

I move in right away. My dog, Fontaine, loves the apartment. His nails skitter on the floor. We explore the shrubby woods around back, and I unclip the leash and let him run. One evening, he chases a squirrel into the woods, and I follow and whistle and call and search until after dark, but he doesn’t come back. Early the next morning, I go out and call again, hoarse now, fear like a latch in my throat.

I post Lost Dog ads and make flyers with Fontaine’s picture. Leila lets me tape one to the bank’s front door. I go to the nail salon, the furniture store, neighbors’ houses, and the animal shelter and ask if they’ve seen my dog. Day after day, I call into the woods and in vacant lots and alleys, “Fontaine, Fontaine!” 

For the first time ever, I visit the boys’ school; maybe Fontaine is there. The road wends through deep forest to a guard booth made of stone and thick glass, like a turret fallen from a castle. A keen-eyed, heavy-shouldered man whose nametag says Bret Highlander leans down to my car window.

“I remember you,” he says. “The collision center, right?” 

Which is where I worked the last five years, as cashier. The collision center is owned by my former boyfriend, Mark Madison. Long story, but all I say is, “I’m looking for my lost dog.” 

Bret Highlander waves me through. “You can park at the top of the hill.” 

Boys are playing soccer and lacrosse on thick green turf. The grounds are movieland beautiful, and the boys glitter and glow. A hill leads down to the shining Rappahannock, where boys are sculling in sleek boats. I search athletic fields, bleachers, and gardens. Maybe Fontaine is living in a residence hall as a boy’s pet, but no sooner have I put my hand on a door than Bret Highlander comes blustering up. I spot an unruly swirl of hair at his forehead, a cowlick, and feel oddly touched: a child’s trait. He was once as young as the students.

“Give me your number,” he says, “and if I see a dog, I’ll let you know.” 

He’s too polite to tell me to scram. I give him the number.

***

“Do you ever feel like we missed our youth?” Leila says, tears falling onto her mint green blouse. We … our … I warm to the plurals. She’s gotten in the habit of dropping by my apartment after work. 

“Leila, you’re Wall Street. How can you be sad? Want something to eat?”

She wipes her eyes. “Sure,” and laughs a little.

I fix frozen hamburger patties that aren’t quite thawed out and a salad that tastes like an old raincoat. In the cupboard, I discover an ancient box of Dream Whip. I add milk and beat it into great thunderheads of glory. We eat from the bowl, spoons clattering. 

“If you need somebody to fill in at the bank,” I say, “let me know.”

 “You’d have to be trained and cleared by the main office. We don’t let just anyone . . .” 

“I’m not just anyone.”

The next day, I hang around the bank lobby, tidy up the table with the free coffee, and chat with customers until the tellers start shooting me dark looks. While I’m watering the plants, Leila comes over and says, “Do you need to make a transaction, Jocelyn?”

“I’m helping out.” 

“You can’t just loiter.”

“I could set up an aquarium and maintain it for you. Customers would love it.”

“I’m asking you to leave.”

“Okay!” I set down the watering can and depart, hoping she doesn’t notice my hands are shaking. 

I need money, need work now that I’m out of a job. All those years at Mark Madison’s collision center, I explained to customers why a paint job cost so much, and whether a dent could be hammered out or if they’d need a whole new fender, and how much their insurance would pay and how much they’d pay out of pocket. Mark said he wasn’t firing me, but it would be awkward if I kept on there. The house we shared is in his name, though I paid half the bills. At least he didn’t want Fontaine. 

It seems fortuitous when Leila’s son, Jeremy, opens a soft-serve ice cream kiosk in the shared parking lot. I join a line of people waiting. Jeremy’s hands are full of cones and change, and his paper hat keeps falling off his head. He needs a helper. Impatient customers start peeling away to their cars.

When it’s my turn, I say, “I don’t think you’re supposed to handle food and money at the same time.” 

“You’re the collision lady,” Jeremy says. 

“Used to be. Hire me,” and he does.

He lets me put Fontaine’s poster on the kiosk. He asks me to work from two until ten p.m., which is fine. It’s good. I don’t expect Leila to drop by my apartment anymore. She hurt my feelings, and maybe I hurt hers, but one day, after she closes up the bank, she strolls over and buys a twist. Jeremy’s on a break, and it’s just me.

 “What’s in this, anyway?” she says.

 “Soft-serve is forty-five percent air.”

She laughs, so I guess we’re still friends.

***

The bank is a hundred years old. The state highway running in front of it used to be a country lane. The last time I was in there—the day Leila threw me out—the door to the vault was open, and I noticed a certain aspect of its vintage construction. The steel cabinet that holds the safe deposit boxes goes all the way to the ceiling, and it doesn’t seem to have a metal top. If I’m correct, the vault is right beneath my bedroom. 

One night, I gather a prybar and a Sawzall, shove my bed aside, and pull up the wall-to-wall carpet. I work a wooden floorboard loose, and it comes up with a screech. I pry up a few more boards and expose the subflooring, which looks like plywood and plaster. The boxes must be just below. I don’t dare break through the vault’s ceiling in the wrong place. Staying close to the wall, I cut out a big rectangle. 

Jackpot—gray metal boxes lined up like coffins. 

***

Hay trucks piled with round bales roll past the bank. Steamy rains scour the highway. We’re eighty miles from the ocean, but seagulls keep sentinel over puddles in the parking lot. Jeremy and I sell cones and sundaes. He pushes his paper hat off his forehead and reveals a whorl at his hairline, spiraled like soft-serve and oddly familiar. On breaks, he takes off his apron and glides away with a young beauty from the nail salon. 

And every night, working by flashlight, I dive for treasure in the crater in my bedroom. Because of steel enclosures around each box and sheets of metal between rows, I can access only the top layer of safe deposit boxes, but what plunder they yield: wills, passports, diamonds, cash, handguns, narcotics, a glass eye. 

At the collision center, I kept track of keys and receipts. My organizational skills are a marvel, but the flat gray boxes look alike, and once I take out the contents, it’s hard to remember what belongs where, so I mix things up on purpose, striving for parity, swapping a farm deed for the title to a Jaguar, orthodontia impressions for a child’s drawing. My fingerprints are everywhere, and still I can’t find what I’m looking for, which I won’t find anywhere, namely an explanation for why Mark Madison and I got together in the first place. I have seen his new girlfriend, but she is merely a gesture in my mind, a way she has of slinging her purse strap over her shoulder. Mark thanks each customer with a wink for the women, a handshake for the guys, as he shows them their repaired vehicles, and over the years, his gestures have grown tired, yet a weary wink can still attract; it’s how he got the purse-slinger, replacing me as easily as a busted taillight. 

The lid of each safe deposit box opens with a click, and now I know there is nothing whatsoever that cannot be exposed and held up to the light. 

In one box, I discover correspondence addressed to Leila Clark. Without even trying, I have found Leila’s box! Here is her divorce decree; here is what looks like a diary. And folded beside it is a note that says: 

Maybe one day, we can tell our son the truth. Bret.

Bret Highlander? Stunned, I put the things back in the box. 

The rising sun reddens the jagged floorboards and rifled boxes, my night’s work. At nine a.m., when the bank opens, I creep to the edge of the pit and listen. Someone sneezes down in the vault, only a few feet below me. I can tell that it’s Leila, because I recognize her sneezes, which sound peppery and helpless. The dust I’ve created from my carpentry rises in a scrim around me. Some of the dust must have shaken down from the ceiling; I pray it is not so apparent that she will investigate. I sense her standing there, so close beneath me, and perhaps she’s feeling that something is not quite right . . . but she can’t put her finger on what it is, and she has little time to wonder . . . and I’ve never credited her with much imagination.

Until my two-p.m. shift begins, I can sleep. The bedroom is wrecked, so I stretch out on the sofa, but sleep is elusive. In my dozing dreams, I meet again the people I’ve hated because they saw through me and I through them, and the old litany aches in my heart until the thoughts fall away.

***

The following night I sit on the floor, reading Leila’s diary from twenty years ago. Yes, she had an affair with Bret Highlander. As it progressed, she redacted Bret Highlander to B and then to a dash, which seems appropriate; aren’t we all dashing through our lives? My flashlight plays over her scrawl. She loved him madly, she was carrying a child and it was probably his. I read the innermost thoughts of her younger self, confided to the pages of the diary I hold in my hands. The twenty-years-ago Leila had a husband and a job, yes, but she was sick of the bank, she was a teller back then and had plans for a boutique that would sell things that smelled nice, like sachets and candles. She’d gotten as far as renting a space and gathering inventory. She had all these fancy bars of soap her friends had given her over the years. She wondered if it would be bad to offer them for sale, if her friends would come into the store and recognize the soap, which would be terrible. She and Bret Highlander trysted in the stockroom of this future store. One day, they had an argument, and she wrote down in her diary what they said. 

This stuff stinks, Bret said of the cinnamon-scented brooms in the stockroom. And I wish you wouldn’t wear perfume, he said. I rather you wore Raid. I really don’t like any artificial smells. I think this store is a mistake, Leila, a big mistake you’re about to make.

Leila reminded him she’d studied Marketing at William & Mary. I know what consumers want, she said. What people are willing to spend money on. How is it you think you know everything, Bret? she said. You, a security guard at a prep school? 

And he said, I understand people. I have warded off kidnapers. Would-be kidnapers, many times. Those boys’ dads are the richest men in the world. Kidnapers and hit men show up at the gate. I’m the firewall. I can spot bad guys, I get a vibe. I never let them get past the gate. I step on a buzzer, and the cops come and take them away. I’m a dragon-slayer, Leila. The boys’ dads know that I protect their sons. They’re very rich men, and they appreciate me.

And I slapped him. — Lelia wrote. – I slapped his face, I was so mad. What about the boys’ mothers, Bret? 

The moms? They’re grateful, sure, but it’s the fathers that have the dough. The men make the money, Bret said. I have saved them millions of dollars of ransom money. Don’t ever slap me again. Don’t you dare.

Some of the mothers are making money, too, Bret, and anyway, they’re the mothers. It’s not only the fathers that matter. I’m not sure I even believe you. If this was true, it seems like you’d have told me before. 

You get mad too easy, Leila, you’re acting crazy. Look, there’s lots you don’t know about me. The glass in my guard booth is bullet-proof. I have a security clearance and an AK-47. 

Are you threatening me?

No, but you may be interested to know that sometimes I am offered contracts of a certain nature. You may think I’m little more than a parking lot attendant, but I am much, much more than that, Bret said.

I look up from Leila’s diary, alert, sensing some subtle change in the room, some presence close by. In the corner of my eye, something moves. I drop Leila’s diary, and the beam of my flashlight catches a smooth shine gliding up from the excavation, not three feet away from where I sit. I leap up and turn on the lights, but the thing is gone, it might be anywhere among the metal boxes and the deeds and the jewelry I have dumped out of those boxes; it might be hiding in the broken floorboards I set aside, or in the rolled-up carpet, the box springs and mattress I pulled off the bed, or the stale sheets I threw in the corner. Leila’s diary has fallen into the abyss that I dug, where its pages flip slowly as if turned by an invisible hand. 

And it comes to me what love is: loneliness dressed up in thrills. The longing, the kept-apartness is divine. It bends time. It’s all around me. All these boxes. 

***

I could explain this situation quite easily, persuasively, if I have to, if it comes to that. I could say, There was an explosion. Somebody must have stored TNT here, and boom, it blew up like Krakatoa, Vesuvius! It blasted this hole in the floor, it’s a wonder I’m still alive. Yes, it was a shock, I can say: My head is still hurting, I’m reeling. I demand that all the rent I’ve paid be returned to me, plus my security deposit plus compensation for the inconvenience I have endured, a reasonable sum for psychological damages. 

***

The maple tree by the window is riddled with holes where woodpeckers and starlings have nested and drilled for insects. In the morning, a thick dark arm erupts from the trunk, and the birds go wild, shrieking and diving. It’s a snake, its skin gold plaid in the sun. Is it last night’s snake? Does it live in the tree and move in and out of the apartment at will, squeezing and tunneling through the walls? Its flat head flashes amid the maple leaves, and it disappears. If I tore this place apart, if I jumped into the pit and busted out the ceiling of the vault’s anteroom where Leila stands abstracted, a sneeze caught in her chest, her hands on a card file and a floor fan blowing her hair away from her face, I still wouldn’t locate what the last tenants may have left behind.

***

“Ever find your dog, Jocelyn?” Bret Highlander asks me, holding out his money for a soft-serve. His smile flicks over to Jeremy, who is shaking powdered sugar into the mixer in great dusty heaves. 

“Not yet, but I’m still hoping.” I hand Bret his cone and turn to Jeremy. This is a moment I have dreamed of; I am prepared. “Jeremy,” I say, and something in my tone makes the boy’s head snap up, his paper hat sliding off. “Jeremy, your dad let me look for Fontaine at the school.”

A frown furrows Jeremy’s brow. “Mr. Highlander’s not my dad. You know that.” 

Bret locks eyes with me in a long, measuring stare. I’m an assassin at his gate. I had no business knowing or saying this thing, this secret, busting it open, telling it, telling the child, the love child of an illicit affair! I have blurted, and my heart is lodged in my throat. Maybe it’s not even true. I meet Bret’s unblinking stare. He’d like to step on a buzzer and have me hauled away . . . But no one has ever regarded me so long and steadily, and his grass-green eyes are wide and clear, the eyes of a man who has suffered, and oh, suddenly that look seems like desire, I can feel it, and it comes to me that this is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve been missing. He has my phone number, and one day soon, he’ll call, I’m sure of it, and I’ll say yes, yes . . . 

His ice cream is melting and dripping, the chocolate soft-serve running out of the cone and down his hand and onto his arm, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He blinks, breaking the sorcery of his gaze, and turns to Jeremy.

“I am,” he says. “Jeremy, I’m your real father, your actual father, and you are my son.”

“No, you’re not, Mr. Highlander. This is nuts!” Jeremy presses a switch, and the soft-serve mixer comes to life, whirring and throbbing and slinging itself around. “My dad is my dad,” Jeremy yells over the noise. “He’s in Florida. He’s Charlie Clark, my dad, in Florida.” He turns the mixer off, and his puzzled glare sweeps over me. “What’s going on?”

“Jeremy, listen now,” Bret says. “Your mother and I . . .” and at that moment, a truck rips by so loudly I don’t hear the rest of what he says. His mouth keeps moving, saying words I can’t hear. I feel like I’m the mother he’s talking about, as if he and I created Jeremy.

***

Part o’ pain, part o’ pain? a mockingbird sings. People here, and it pauses as if considering, the people here . . . and it leaves the thought unfinished. In the woods behind the bank, a fox climbs a fallen log and sleeps so peacefully, I can’t bear to disturb it by calling Fontaine, but what I told Bret is true: I’m still looking. 

And time goes by, time keeps passing, and still on the first of every month, I go into the bank and hand my rent money to Leila. She slips it into her desk drawer and writes a receipt with nothing much to say to me. Does she know Jeremy knows, and how he found out? Does she wonder how I knew? There is so much more I want to know, if only she would tell me. Like why have she and Bret never married, when she’s been free so long? 

If she asks why I said what I said, why I told Jeremy the truth, the absolute truth it was his right as a nineteen-year-old person to know, my answer will be: Well, what about the soap your friends gave you, that you would have sold in your store that never opened, betraying them as if their gift meant zero to you? What about the boys’ mothers that you stuck up for when you argued with Bret and wrote it all down in a diary you kept twenty years ago and jammed into a safe deposit box and maybe forgot about? What if the school was a girls’ school, would kidnapers even bother? Isn’t a girl worth ransoming, same as a boy? 

And I think Leila would agree with me there.

No one comes to inspect my apartment, nobody seems to know about the ransacking or the hole in the floor or even to suspect that anything is wrong, and maybe nothing is. The moon is an icy thumbprint out my window, the maple tree huge and rustling in the dark. I run my fingers across my neck: that’s how a slither would feel, and then—I sink my nails into my skin—a puncture. Someday I’ll retrieve Leila’s diary from the crater and read it to the end. I’ll put the metal boxes back in place and fix the floor. 

Jeremy fired me after that conversation, unfortunately, and once again I need a new job. In a small town, you can change careers again and again, from cook to florist to CPA. You look familiar, people say, and all you have to do is smile, because you are still you. I’ve applied to be a veterinarian’s receptionist. Maybe a client will come in with a dog, and it’ll be Fontaine, and the person will say, I found this rat terrier, and Fontaine will jump into my arms. 

Just this afternoon, Jeremy and Leila dismantled the soft-serve kiosk, sweating beneath the tyrant sun. 

“Jeremy’s off to college,” Leila said, tossing equipment into a van. 

“Here, let me give you a hand,” I said.

“That’s okay, we’ve got this,” they chorused, as if they’d rehearsed it, mother and son—which for me was confirmation that the world I cracked open is still shuddering around its edges. 

I backed off and left them to their labor. I looked toward the trees that surround the boys’ school. Bret Highlander is over there, dreaming of lives he might yet lead. 

Jeremy, listen. Your mother and I—Bret said, but what else did he say, what was the rest of it? Every time a truck roars past, I strain to hear the words I missed. 

Used to love each other. Still love each other. Were waiting for the right time to tell you. 

Cary Holladay is a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA at Converse University. Her fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and her husband, John Bensko, live in rural Virginia.

13 March 2026