DMV, page 10
He held up his phone. “Do you want me to record it?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, but there’s no way for you to know that, so, yeah, that’s a great idea.” She thought for a moment. “You know what? I’ll put it on speaker. That’ll make things easier.”
Danny followed his mother out to the living room, where they both sat down on the couch. She gave him time to set things up, then took the cordless phone out of its cradle, dialed the number listed on the masthead of the letter, pressed the speaker button and put the phone on the coffee table before them. Danny pushed Record and placed his phone next to hers.
There were layers of robo-messages to get through before she reached an actual person, so many that Danny deleted his recording and started again, twice. But finally, a Ralph Brandt came on the line, and his mom patiently explained that three years ago her late husband had turned over the title of his Jeep and donated the vehicle to the Underprivileged Children’s Relief Organization. She had the paperwork to prove it and could send it to him if need be.
“Unfortunately,” Brandt said, “that will not remedy the situation.”
His mom pointed to his phone, and Danny checked to make sure it was still recording. It was.
“What exactly does that mean?” his mom asked.
“It means that we will still be impounding your…” He paused, apparently to look up the information. “Twenty-fifteen Kia Optima and your two thousand-and-eight Honda Accord.”
“What? You can’t do that!”
“Because your Jeep Cherokee was used in the commission of a robbery, asset forfeiture laws allow us to confiscate any other vehicles registered in your name.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No, sir.
“I’m a woman,” his mom said drily. “I’m not a sir.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Danny frowned. Was the man saying that on purpose in order to make his mom mad? If so, it was working. He could see her face reddening, and he prayed that she didn’t make the situation worse by yelling or calling the man names.
To his surprise, her voice remained calm. “As I said, my late husband donated that Jeep three years ago and gave up the title to it. The vehicle is not now, nor has it ever been, in my name or the names of my children. I have documents to back all of this up, and if you attempt in any way to blame us for something involving that Jeep when it was owned by someone else, I will see you in court.”
Brandt was equally calm. “We will be by to take possession of your vehicles at our earliest convenience. Thank you for your time, sir.”
The line went dead.
Danny reached for his phone, checking the playback. “Got it!”
“Can you believe that guy? He thinks he can steal our cars because someone drove the Jeep to a robbery?” He could hear the anger in her voice. “I’ve a good mind to sue that charity. It’s their fault, as far as I’m concerned. After I sue Ralph Brandt and the DMV.”
“You should call Channel Four,” Danny said. “Or Channel Seven. They have those guys who help people fight companies and stuff when they’re being cheated. Consumer advocates. They could sort this out. No one wants bad publicity.”
“That’s an excellent idea.” His mom smiled at him. “I probably don’t tell you enough, but you’re a good kid. We’re...I’m lucky to have you.”
We’re.
She’d caught herself, but it slipped out anyway. They still weren’t used to his dad being gone, and sometimes it took a moment to remember that he was no longer here.
Danny stared hard at the phone in his hand, willing himself not to cry.
“But what do we do if they just show up in the middle of the night and tow the cars away?” she mused. “I need my car to go to work.”
Grateful to have something else to focus on, Danny felt the potential for tears recede. “We can’t put them in the garage because it’s too crowded.”
His mom’s eyes widened. “Mrs. Burkholder’s garage is empty. She’d probably let us put one of the cars in there.”
“Do you really think they’d just…take our cars?” Danny asked.
“There’s no doubt in my mind. You heard that guy.” She thought for a moment. “I’m going to go next door and talk to Mrs. Burkholder.”
“I’m staying here,” Danny said.
She looked at him. “I assume you have homework.”
“That’s my plan.” He smiled. “Not that I wouldn’t love seeing Mrs. Burkholder.”
His mom laughed. “Get out of here.”
Danny was halfway through his geometry assignment when he heard a car door slam and looked out his bedroom window to see his Mom backing the Kia out of the driveway. He leaned to the left so he could see Mrs. Burkholder’s house next door and watched as his mom pulled the car into her garage.
One down and one to go.
Apparently, none of their neighbors had space in their garage for the Honda, but twenty minutes later his mom moved the car across the street into the Lees’ driveway. “Maybe they won’t see it if it’s at someone else’s house,” she told him after coming back inside. “They might think twice if they think they’re stealing someone else’s car,”
“They’ll know it’s ours,” Danny pointed out. “It has our license plate.”
“I guess we’ll have to take our chances.” Frowning, she looked around. “Where is your sister? Isn’t she home yet?”
Danny had no idea where Jill was. He wanted to say that it wasn’t his job to keep track of her, but he knew that wasn’t fair to his mom. She had a lot on her plate these days—too much—and he should probably step up and help out more. Besides, telling her that it wasn’t his job to watch Jill was an old answer, the type he would have given if his dad was still here. Now it really was his responsibility to help look out for his sister, and the truth was that he’d been doing a poor job of it.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
His mom sighed. “What am I going to do with her?”
Ever since their dad’s death, Jill had been spiralling more and more out of control. Maybe because she’d been the one to find him, and had had to deal with 911 and the paramedics all by herself before he and his mom had arrived. Danny understood, but that still didn’t excuse her behavior.
The other day, after school, walking past Taco Bell on his way home, he was pretty sure he’d seen his sister come out of the fast food restaurant and get into a car with a man. Not an older student, a man. Danny hadn’t said anything to her about it and had definitely not told their mom, but it had been gnawing at him ever since. He could think of very few reasons why she would get into a strange man’s car—and none of them were good.
He was scared for her, but he was also scared of her, and as a result he did nothing but brood about it, although he promised himself that if he saw something more conclusive, something that couldn’t be explained away, he would tell their mom.
When Jill finally arrived home, after he and his mom had finished dinner, after not calling or answering her phone, it seemed as though she might have been drinking. Danny tensed up as she too-carefully closed the front door and their mom practically leaped out of her seat and stormed over to the entryway. “And just where the hell have you been?”
He didn’t want to be here for this and quickly left to hide in his room. The yelling from the front of the house grew louder, and he put on headphones, letting music drown out the noise. Once again, he felt sorry for his mom. Their dad had usually been the one to mete out punishment when he or Jill did something wrong. Or both parents had acted in tandem. Now his mom had to do everything herself.
He had a lot of homework tonight. He’d finished his math and biology assignments and was lying down on his bed, halfway through the four chapters he had to read in The Scarlet Letter, when the door to his bedroom opened. He took off his headphones, expecting his mom to come in and smooth things over, tell him the fight with Jill was finished, but it was his sister who walked through the door, and she quickly closed it behind her.
“Can we talk?” she said.
It was rare enough that Jill spoke to him in a way that wasn’t either mean or condescending, but coming into his room was downright strange.
Maybe she was drunk.
He sat up in bed, and she sat down next to him, glancing anxiously at the door. “I need to tell you something, but you can’t let Mom know.”
“What is it?”
“Promise me.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. You cannot tell Mom. No matter what.” She grabbed his forearm, squeezed it. “Swear. Swear on your life.”
“I swear!” he said, trying to pull away. “Ow!” Her fingernails hurt.
Jill let go of him. “Okay, then. Okay.”
But she didn’t say anything else, appeared to be thinking, and finally he had to prod her. “What?”
She took a deep breath. “I saw an accident today. Hit and run. A woman pushing a stroller was run over. I think both her and the baby were killed.”
“Oh, my God.”
“That’s not the worst part.” His sister looked genuinely distressed, and Danny felt a wave of gooseflesh surf down his bare arms.
“What’s the worst part?”
“You can’t tell Mom!”
“I won’t!”
“The guy driving the car,” she said, and her voice was almost a whisper. “It was Daddy.”
ELEVEN
Murdoch called on him as soon as he arrived Friday morning.
Zal dropped his stuff off at his workstation and went into the manager’s office, automatically closing the door behind him. “What’s up?” He tried to appear nonchalant, but it was rare for Murdoch to meet privately with any of them, and behind his calm facade, Zal was desperately trying to think if he’d done anything wrong. Was it possible that the DMV project wouldn’t require quite as many hands on deck as originally thought? Could he be getting laid off?
“Sit down,” the manager said, and Zal did so.
“We need you to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Or, rather, the DMV needs you to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It’s pretty standard,” he said. “Just like us, they have proprietary intellectual property to protect, and they want to make sure they’re guaranteed legal recourse should any of us share it with someone unauthorized.”
Zal relaxed.
Murdoch took a stapled set of papers from the top of a pile on his desk. He handed the packet to Zal. “Look this over and sign it.”
“This definitely isn’t standard,” Zal said, as he began scanning the top page. He looked up. “Have you actually read this?”
Murdoch looked embarrassed. “Well…not the whole thing. I glanced at it. It seemed pretty boilerplate to me—”
“‘Dissemination of any Department of Motor Vehicles protocol to any individual beyond those specifically tasked with incorporating said protocol into one or more computer programs designed to streamline or make more efficient a Department process utilized by a Department employee shall be subject to punishment involving but not limited to intense physical pain,’” Zal quoted. “Does that sound boilerplate?”
“Let me see that.”
Zal handed him the page, pointing to the paragraph he’d just read.
“Holy shit. You weren’t joking.”
“No.”
“Don’t sign a thing. We need to run this by Legal.”
“I wasn’t going to sign it.”
“Holy shit,” Murdoch said again. “I already signed that thing. So did Judi and Said and Rory and Ken. I was calling Bernard in here after you.” He flipped the pages. “There’s probably more in here, too.”
“What happens if they don’t back down? What if they say we have to sign it as is? Do we lose the account?”
“I don’t know,” Murdoch admitted. “That’s above my pay grade.”
“For the record, I’m not going to leak any information or compromise anything. So punishment’s not going to apply to me. But, out of general principle, I don’t want to be threatened with torture or death or anything.”
“I think we’re all with you on that.” The manager put the packet down in front of him. “I’ll make some calls.”
“Let me know what happens.”
On the way back to his cubicle, Zal stopped by Bernard’s desk to tell him about the NDA.
“I knew this was going to happen.”
“I call BS,” Zal said.
“Okay, maybe not this exactly. And maybe not right at this moment. But I saw the writing on the wall during the pandemic, when businesses started ordering people back to work too early, without providing protection, expecting employees to sacrifice their health and put their lives in danger to maintain company profits. It was only a matter of time before those bastards demanded that employees submit to physical punishment for the good of the company. They think they own us.”
“Murdoch’s having Legal look it over.”
“And what do you think they’re going to find? I guarantee you, they’ll say it’s legit.” He threw down his pencil. “I’m not signing it. I’ll quit, find another job, but they’re not bullying me into letting them have dominion over my body.”
“It won’t come to that.”
“Won’t it? We’ll see.”
Zal returned to his own cubicle and started working, but after seeing that NDA, Bernard’s paranoia didn’t seem so paranoid. He glanced toward Murdoch’s closed door and wondered how this was going to shake out. Could he afford to quit if he had to? The house was his free and clear, but he definitely didn’t have much in the bank.
He hoped it wouldn’t get that far.
The morning sped by, and at eleven-thirty he met Violet for lunch. They’d been eating lunch with her every day, but this time Bernard wasn’t going to be there, so in his mind that made it almost like…a date.
Zal hadn’t told her that he’d be alone, not wanting to scare her off, and sure enough, the first thing she said when she entered the break room and saw him sitting alone at a table was, “Where’s Bernard?”
“Out with his wife,” Zal said. “I’m pretty sure they had some sort of fight and he’s trying to make up with her. Bernard’s usually not a go-out-to-lunch kind of guy.”
Violet smiled as she took her food out of the refrigerator. “I noticed.”
He suddenly felt awkward. Had she noticed the same thing about him? What else might she have noticed? Was it possible she might want to go out to lunch with him sometime?
He wished Bernard was there as a buffer.
But they talked easily, as they always did, and for the first time, maybe because Bernard wasn’t there, Violet actually opened up a little about her personal life. He found out that she was twenty-six years old and lived with her parents; that her mom was from El Salvador, her dad from Canada; that she had one younger sister, a bachelor’s degree in English, and no idea why she’d been hired here since she had no interest in computers and had only applied for the researcher position because she hadn’t been able to get a job anywhere else.
He opened up, too. The story of his parents was kind of heavy, so he stayed away from that, but he told her a little about his dorky teenage years, his college days, and how he’d started working here right out of school.
Things were going so well that he almost got up the nerve to ask her out on a real date, but the break room filled up all of a sudden, five people entering at once, and he didn’t have a chance to steer the conversation in that direction.
They talked awhile longer, and he walked her back to her department, both of them smiling shyly as they said goodbye.
“See you on Monday!” she called as he was walking away.
He turned back and waved. “You, too!”
You, too? Zal cringed as he hurried around the corner. What did that mean? He needed to up his game if he ever hoped to move beyond the acquaintanceship stage.
It was Friday, and later that afternoon, before they left for the weekend, Murdoch called everyone into the conference room. In his hand were single sheets of paper, and he handed one to each employee as he or she walked in. “Non-disclosure agreement,” he announced when they were all seated. “From the DMV. The previous NDAs that some of you signed were completely unacceptable and have been invalidated. What you have in your hands is a new agreement provided to us by the Department of Motor Vehicles that is intended to protect their intellectual property, which includes the systems we will be working on.”
Zal glanced down at the sheet. It consisted of a single simple paragraph stating that any contractor hired to work on an assignment for the DMV must promise not to share or divulge information to anyone not specifically authorized to work on the same project. There was no mention of any form of punishment, only the vague phrase “legally liable.”
“The DMV said the other ones were a joke sent out by an ex-employee. As soon as Legal looked it over and contacted them, they immediately sent over this correct wording. So look it over, let me know if you have any questions, and if everything looks copacetic, sign the agrement and hand it back.”
Zal read the paragraph once more before signing.
He could live with this, he decided. It was normal.
Next to him, Bernard was signing his agreement as well, and as soon as Murdoch had collected their forms, the two of them left the conference room and went back to their workstations to pick up their personal stuff before heading home.
“Any plans for the weekend?” Bernard asked.
“Yes, indeed. Tomorrow I go to traffic school.”
“That’s tomorrow?”
“Time flies. Although, technically, it’s not called traffic school anymore. It’s behavioral training.”
“They think that’s a better name?” Bernard shook his head. “Orwellian.”
