Arrangements by Amy Bohlman

The winter after stayed cold longer than usual even for Minnesota. Snow dressed the skeleton trees but scantily because mounds crowded the streets, the sidewalks, all the places I tried to move forward in. I did yoga in a hot room, hugged my boys, and hardly cried. 

Besides the pain, a daily drip when I walked by the desk in the cube Susan barely made it to that year, work became easier. I hired a replacement who could work without fatigue, without taking PTO or FMLA days, without me telling her incessantly, “Do what you need to do,” and then taking all her projects too, almost another full-time job by the end. 

I was new to my manager role then, learning how to handle team dynamics like catty older women who didn’t like a younger one telling them what to do, conducting performance reviews, hiring and firing, all difficult tasks while trying to avoid the Human Resources team, afraid they would make her go on permanent leave. Before working remotely became common practice due to a global pandemic, I’d allowed Susan to work from home due to her breast cancer which later spread to the rest of her small body.

Her work, my work, our work bled into my evenings and weekends, overlapped with family time with my husband and three-year-old, and made me bone-tired especially when I became pregnant again, but I kept our arrangement. She never said it outright, but I knew the medical bills were piling up. I knew she was single. I knew she needed the paychecks. 

After months at home, working on and off when she had the stamina to sit upright at her computer, she came into the office. We were happy to see her face, fawn-like with big gentle eyes, but noticed the chemo-pixie cut, noticed how her body held a strong and strange smell, noticed how she couldn’t hear out of one ear. We chatted like coworkers do, helped her print, and pretended cancer wasn’t in our workspace, the dark mass that made her disorganized and unfocused, the mass I ignored when it spread. 

She never came back in and died later that year. I no longer had her work to absorb. Suddenly I was idle, cold, and much older. I sought heat where I could that first winter without her, drinks in dark bars sometimes, my grandmother’s afghan on my lap while I was home, my newborn held tightly against my chest. 

With the last blizzard, I began negotiating, calling in higher powers in vain, but it was all out of my control. I lived in layers, bulky coats and new bitterness, ice lacing my bones and the streets. I cussed as I scraped my car. I talked too much about the weather. 

Amy Bohlman is a Minnesota-based writer in love with the short form. Her Tiny Love Story appeared recently in The New York Times and other work has been published in The Under Review, The Rupture, Ellipsis Zine, among others. She has her MFA from Hamline University. Find her at www.ashortgirl.com.

5 July 2023