“I didn’t realize you were a woman,” said the man in his late forties sitting on the other side of my heavy, wooden desk.
I knew what he meant—in my occupation and with a name like Sydney, it was a common mistake—but I waited to see if he’d dig himself a deeper hole. He’d come in asking if my boss was around, so it could only get better.
Deaf to his own verbal missteps, he continued, “I don’t think my wife knows you’re a woman, either.”
He abused the hat in his hand, twisting it and tapping it against his leg. (Since when did men start wearing hats again? Men other than hipsters, that is, who aren’t exactly thick on the ground in Tallahassee.) I wondered if there was a pile of gray lint beneath the chair, cast off when his hat struck the leg of his matching pants and gathering like drye
