It had started with cupcakes.

The evening before, Natalie came home from work carrying a white bakery box tied with red string. She was smiling so hard her cheeks must have hurt.

She’d just finished her first full week at her first real job.

She was twenty-one. She’d spent four years studying for a business degree. She’d worked summers at a frozen yogurt shop and one semester at the campus library. But this was different. This was a desk, and a badge on a lanyard, and a parking spot with a number painted on it.

At twenty-one, everything about having a job still seemed exciting.

Even the office printer.

“It makes this awful grinding noise,” she told us, dropping her bag by the door. “Like it’s chewing on rocks. Every single page.”

“Sounds like our dishwasher,” Ben said from the table.

“Exactly!” Natalie pointed at him. “Except the printer actually finishes its job.”

I laughed while I set out the dinner plates.

Ben pretended to be offended. “That dishwasher is twelve years old. Show some respect.”

“I’ll show it respect when it cleans a fork.”

She’d already learned everyone’s names. All of them. In one week.

Her supervisor, Marissa, apparently owned six identical cardigans in six different colors and wore them in the same order every week.

“I figured it out on Wednesday,” Natalie said, sitting down. “Monday’s gray. Tuesday’s green. Wednesday’s beige. So tomorrow, if I’m right, it’ll be…”

“Blue?” I guessed.

“Navy. Blue is Friday.” She looked very serious. “There’s a difference, Mom.”

“Of course there is.”

A coworker named Josh kept stealing the good pens. Not the cheap ones. The smooth black gel pens that came in a box of twelve from the supply closet.

“There were twelve on Monday,” Natalie said. “There are three now. And he’s always holding one.”

“Have you said anything?” Ben asked.

“It’s my first week, Dad. I’m not going to accuse a man of pen crimes in my first week.”

Ben laughed. A real laugh, from his belly. I hadn’t heard him laugh like that in a while.