Mimi
She wished that Stanley would stop trying to be so nice about the whole thing. She did not deal well with nice. She was not used to people being nice to her. She worked for the IRS. She got healthy doses of fear induced tip toeing around her upon occasion, but people were never genuinely nice to her. She was used to it being that way; she even understood it to a certain extent. She was the only face to the organization that some people ever saw. If they were seeing her, then there was some sort of a problem. Thus, they associated her with their displeasure, and she very often bore the brunt of it.
She knew how to deal with that. It had been a part of the job from the moment that it became her job. She had learned how to build up the walls from nearly that moment as well. Everyone did or they did not stay in the job for very long. The snide comments, the huffing in her general direction, and the occasional cussing on which she was on the receiving end (and the still even more occasional threats against her person) had become something that was simply a part of her day. It all rolled off of her, and she barely registered most of it any longer. (Sometimes, she memorized a particularly creative rant for the purpose of presenting it in comedic fashion for her mother's benefit at some point when they were sharing a dinner at one of their getaway spots.)
Stanley Richmond was something that she had difficulty quantifying. He was just so outside of the people that she normally encountered. (Or it might be that she had never spent enough time in any one place with any of her cases to notice someone like him before.) He was nice to her even when he did not think he was going to get anything out of it. She did not have people like that in her life. She had never even considered that someone like that would want to be a part of her life (had not considered in more years than she cared to count that there were people like that around to be a part of her life). The more out of her box of expectations that Stanley Richmond climbed, the more annoyed (and, at times, downright angry with him) she became. She hated to feel that things were out of her control. She hated to feel that she could not read the people around her well enough to know what was coming. She dealt with feeling out of control by lashing out. Snarky words and snobby commentary were her go to protections, and they were failing her right and left.
He had tried so hard to break the news about DC to her gently. She just had not been in a mental place to be properly appreciative of gentle. Gentle did not make it better. Gentle did not change what you were being told. Gentle did not prevent all your hopes about being able to go home from evaporating. Gentle was worthless and unwelcome. She did not know how to deal with gentle, and she did not want to learn.
Her home was gone. Her world was gone. Her mother was gone. There would be no more get together spa Saturdays. There would be no more lounging by the pool with drinks in hand telling each other that it did not matter that the rest of their home country was engaging in the apparently prerequisite overeating of their "family" holiday because they were the only family that they needed. It had all disappeared, and she had not even realized that it had happened. She had been tucked away in this place feeling sorry for herself and desperate to get away so that she could go back to everything that made sense to her and was familiar. She had clung to that idea. She had spent downtime avoiding thinking about everything that she did not want to be thinking about by counting and figuring and reassessing how long it would take for a way back to be made for her. There was nothing left for her to cling to now.
There was no job (which, the thought broke briefly through the rest of the fog in her head, meant that there was no longer any practical reason for the Richmonds to keep her with them). Her cases and notes and figuring of payment plans were worthless because the government for which she had collected had been incinerated. There were no more cases; there was no more supervisor to report to on her progress. The numbers and amounts and potential solutions that filled a space in the back of her brain all drained out of her as if they were forming a puddle around her feet. She did not need them any longer. She would never need them again. Their point was gone.
Her apartment with her newly remodeled kitchen was gone. She would never get to experience the fluidity of motion between the points of the organized triangle that the room now contained. She was not going to be able to sort the seldom used pieces into their proper drawers and have the satisfaction of knowing that everything would be exactly where she needed it to be should she ever happen to need it. Her poor fish were vaporized. They were not waiting for her to come back (because they did recognize her when she came home, she knew they did no matter what her friends and the girl from across the hall who fed them for her and picked up her mail while she was gone said to the contrary). She would never see eye rolling as she clucked over her fish again because those friends and that girl from across the hall were equally incinerated.
They were gone. Everything was gone, and some man that she had been in the midst of auditing was the only thing of her life that remained.