A room off the main space that had been in a state of quiet administrative catastrophe for, by his own admission, close to three years.
There were filing boxes.
There were loose papers.
There were folders that had been started and abandoned.
There were receipts in a coffee can.
There were what appeared to be several hundred sticky notes in varying states of legibility.
Evelyn stood in the doorway of that office and looked at it.
“How long did you say?”
“Three years,” Jack said.
He sounded mildly embarrassed about it.
Which was, she was already learning, a relatively rare emotional register for him.
“And before that, we had a guy.”
“He moved to Tucson.”
“Did he have a system?”
Jack considered the question carefully.
“He had an approach.”
Evelyn set her bags down.
She removed her cardigan.
The heat was already building, even in the morning, and the office window unit was doing its best.
She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse.
Then she surveyed the room with the focused, appraising calm of a general studying terrain before deciding where to place her troops.
“I’ll need filing supplies,” she said.
“Folders, labels, a labeling system we agree on before I start so I don’t have to redo it.”
“I’ll need access to whatever software you use for accounts.”
“If you use software.”
“And if you don’t, I need to know that too because then we have a bigger conversation to have.”
She turned toward him.
“And I’ll need to understand what’s actually in all of this before I touch anything.”
“Because organizing things without understanding them is just rearranging confusion.”
Jack Walker looked at her for a moment.
Then he said:
“I’ll get you a legal pad so you can make a list.”
“I brought my own.”
She reached into the canvas bag and pulled one out.
Something happened on Jack’s face.
It was brief.
Somewhat unwilling.
But unmistakably the beginning of a smile.
“Coffee,” he said.
“Please,” she replied.
And she turned back toward the room.
The morning she spent cataloging.
Not organizing yet.
Just cataloging.
She went through every box.
Every folder.
Every loose paper.
She wrote down what was there.
What categories existed.
What was missing that should be present.
What was present that didn’t belong.
She worked methodically and without hurry because she had learned a long time ago that hurrying at the beginning of an organizational project meant doing everything twice.
The men moved through the clubhouse around her.
They checked on her.
Some of them in the slightly furtive way of people who wanted to look without appearing to look.
Tommy stopped in the office doorway around midmorning on the pretext of looking for something that wasn’t in there.
He ended up staying for twenty minutes watching her work until she handed him a stack of folders.
“Hold these.”
And he did.
Big Lou brought her lunch.
This was not something he announced in advance or made a production of.
He simply appeared at the office door at 12:30 with a plate of food.
He set it on the corner of the desk that she had cleared.
“Eat.”
Then he left.
The food was good.
Better than she had expected from a clubhouse kitchen.
Honestly, very good.
She ate it at the desk without stopping what she was doing.
By the end of the day, she had a complete inventory of the office contents.