Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman Page B

have racked up if he’d ever had a real job.
    “And you need to be extra careful. Remember, I have daughters. I can tell when a girl has a crush on someone she shouldn’t. She’s not old enough to understand how powerful she is, yet—but you are.”
    “Let’s not be dramatic here. She has a boyfriend.”
    “Yeah, I remember him from the holiday party. Seems like a real winner—reminds me of all my daughters’ boyfriends. Just think of me as an old sage, Tom—the voice of experience.”
    “Duly noted,” I say. I glance at the picture on Doug’s desk—him and his wife and their five children and a cocker spaniel in a dog sweater. “So, is this why you wanted to see me? Greg’s tattling?”
    “I wish. Like I said, I don’t pay much attention to Gregory when it comes to his opinions on you. Truth is, all this turmoil is making Buckingham Palace nervous. I’m getting some bad vibes.”
    “Really? From Ian? Is he even in town? Maybe his cricket team lost or something. The Brits are a moody people.”
    Doug looks out his window where we have a lovely view of a construction site. Every man and woman in this building is afraid of two things:
    1. Losing their job
    2. Ian Barksdale, our British CEO
    “Our clients have lost their asses this week. Some of them don’t even exist anymore, as of this morning. If they don’t have money, we don’t have money. Trickle-down economics.”
    “What’s this mean for us then?”
    “Ian’s been looking to bring over some of his cronies from the Mother Country for years. Those swinging dicks in London would love to shake things up over here. All that bullshit about streamlining. Less is more. That kind of garbage.”
    I fight the urge to make a buzzing sound. It seems like that would be counterproductive. In the last five minutes I’ve been told to fear a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl and all of Great Britain. Doug runs his hand through his gray hair and looks at the television. H OW B AD WILL I T GET? the new graphic asks.
    “You remember that tsunami from a few years back?” he asks. “Remember how things were all tranquil and sunny in those home videos, like some vacation, and then that big wave came out of nowhere and sucked everything out to sea?”
    “Yeah,” I say.
    He points at the TV again, which has suddenly become the world’s most frightening appliance. “I think the wave’s coming.”

Chapter 8
    I parallel-park my Honda between a Mercedes and a BMW SUV. I’m two blocks from the house, but I can already hear Hank barking. He recognizes the sound of my car, its engine, and the way the door sounds when I close it. According to our vet, Hank suffers from something called “acute anxiety.” Before Hank was our ugly little dog, he was someone else’s ugly little dog, and then he was an ugly little dog at the D.C. pound. I don’t know how he ended up there, but when we leave him alone, even if only for a few hours, he acts like we’re never coming back.
    As I walk through my neighborhood, I look at all of the expensive houses, fairly certain that many of their inhabitants are inside suffering from a little acute anxiety of their own. How many of these people could barely afford these places when they bought them and now can’t at all? The Obama/Biden signs in each of the tiny yards look uniform and neat, like B-roll footage from a campaign commercial, and I wonder if Doug is right about all of this being bigger than a president. It seems like one of those pessimistic things that people say when they’ve accepted certain things about the world.
    Hank’s happy yapping borders on mania and I’m surprised to find my dad’s Porsche unmoved in the driveway, one tire still run up drunkenly in the grass. Like Sonya, I figured by now he’d be safely tucked away in one of the most expensive suites at the Fairmount Hotel, but apparently he’s still here. I touch the car’s fender and look inside. My dad’s old messenger bag is sitting in the front