The Return of Jonah Gray by Heather Cochran

him that I’m awful. That I’m a monster. That I’m wicked and bound to bleed him dry. This guy Jonah, he never actually says anything bad about me, not that I’ve found, at least. He wonders and he worries, but he’s mostly just self-deprecating. I don’t know what to think.”
    â€œGive the guy a break. He’s being audited. He can’t know how charming you are, my little bean counter.”
    â€œYou’re just trying to get back on my good side.”
    â€œHow am I doing?”
    â€œWhat should I do about Jeff Hill?” I asked him.
    â€œDid he ask you to do anything?”
    â€œNo,” I admitted.
    â€œThen there’s no decision to be made, is there?”
    When Ricardo left, I turned to my worktable, to the tall stack of audits ahead of me. Somewhere in that pile, I would find him. Somewhere in there, Jonah Gray was waiting.
    â€œGray, Gray, Gray,” I muttered as I rifled through the stack, and then, “gotcha!”
    â€œYou okay over there?”
    â€œI’m fine, Cliff,” I called back. I took the file folder labeled Jonah Gray back to my desk. “So, Mr. Gray,” I murmured. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
    Â 
    I already knew that Jonah Gray lived in Stockton, and I wasn’t surprised. Many of my audits that year had been from Stockton, the same city my older brother Kurt had recently moved to, about an hour east of Oakland. Since we were a district office, I was often assigned returns from places I’d never been, and Stockton was one such place.
    I took note of Jonah Gray’s street address: 530 Horsehair Road. Sometimes you could tell something about a person by the street address—whether it was a small or large apartment building or something that sounded like a town-house development or even a post office box. But 530 Horsehair Road was an address that didn’t give much away. I made a mental note to ask Kurt whether he knew the street.
    I glanced at Mr. Gray’s personal information. Jonah F. Gray. Social Security number: 229—
    I stopped. Now that was a number that told me something. Told me quite a bit, actually, and got my pulse going a little faster.
    They say that most Americans live within fifty miles of the place where they were born. My experience with tax returns bore that out. Most California taxpayers offered up Social Security numbers showing allegiance to California, whether they were born there or were naturalized there. And if Jonah Gray had been from California originally, his Social would have begun with a number between 545 and 573, or else between 602 and 626.
    But Jonah Gray was not from California, not originally at least—229 came from the East Coast, from Virginia. And specifically, it came from the southwestern corner of the state, from the rolling green hills at the cusp of the Blue Ridge Mountains, almost to Tennessee but not quite. The number 229 was from Roanoke, an old Virginia city along the salty banks of the river that gave it its name. I knew this because 229 began my Social Security number, too. So, 229 meant that Jonah Gray and I were from the same place, probably the same town, perhaps even the same zip code. That wasn’t just rare—it was something I had never before seen.
    So he was a Virginian originally, but like me, he didn’t live there now. How long had he lived around Roanoke? I wondered. Had we crossed paths before? When had he left, and why? Had he been brought west by his parents, as I had been, years before? Or had he moved later, on his own volition? And how on earth did he end up in Stockton, in the agricultural belly of the San Joaquin Valley? Kurt had moved himself, his sons and his wife there to assume a tenure-track geology professorship, which he’d been torn about accepting because of its location. Stockton wasn’t commonly considered a hub of culture and industry. Indeed, it was known as a place to drive past