The scullery/living room is done up as festively as the twins could manage in a few hours. They strung a dozen balloons in assorted shapes and colors from the sagging ceiling; they shoved the dirty laundry into one corner to make room for the centerpiece of the apartmentwarming party: a long conference table. Jason told Samantha that, one night last week, he and Caccian had keyed into one of the places where one of them was temping, wrangled the table out of an unlocked storage closet, loaded it into the van and made off with it. Apparently there’s been a lot of that going on, because the table’s loaded up with office contraband of all sorts—pads of Post-it Notes (looks like a gross), a half-dozen coffee mugs from someplace called “Davis Rehab,” four reams of copier paper, a pyramid of boxed rolls of Scotch tape and two of those heavy desktop tape dispensers, a time-date stamp, a vertical stapler, about a thousand ball-point pens, a pad of pre-printed “Employee Progress Reports,” eight boxes of coffee filters, two huge, unopened canisters of non-dairy creamer, and, clamped to the table’s edge, what appears to be a document shredder.
“I still can’t believe you guys got all this stuff for him,” Samantha says. “Lord, we thank you for this bounty that you have provided.”
“We were going to go back and get some of those free-standing partitions, you know?” says Jason, draining the sink. “Those like—room dividers? But we ran out of time.”