2. How to Let Go
Roman
“Let go, or be dragged.” I muttered the words aloud to myself. That sometimes helped.
Easy for you to say, Sensei, came the answer in my head, because as an Aikido student, I was sometimes rubbish. Which was the point of Aikido, of course. Knowing you were rubbish, and gradually becoming less rubbish.
I breathed and relaxed my hands on the wheel, but I also put the Kia EV6 into GT mode and put my foot down. Driving fast relaxed me, and there was almost nobody on the motorway, not this far south of Dunedin, in this rain and wind. The car shot forward like a greyhound out of the gates, and now I could think about what had just happened, could examine it from all angles and see the truth.
Even if the truth was that I’d been wrong.
Not my best thing, but I was working on it.
“Twenty-two of the turbines are still on the ground,” Jordan Brawley had said, sliding a pen through his fingers as he sat on the edge of his seat in the conference room. “We could remove the rest, abort the whole thing. What do you want to do?”
“Dunno, mate,” I said. “You’re the Director of Operations. What do you recommend?”
“I thought I’d check with you first,” Brawley said. “The cost of repair in the field is likely to be … And this is the second year we’ve had flooding in Hawke’s Bay. We thought it was just the cyclone last year, but we’re not even operational yet, and … But then, the land’s bought and the foundations done already. Sunk cost, though, so if we want to pull out …”
Instead of answering, I turned my focus to the chief engineer, Dane Franks. “How long to assess damage?”
He said, “Should know more next week. I’ll keep you posted, shall I?” He paused a moment. “Both of you.”
“Do that. Every day.” It wasn’t that hard to get answers, as long as you framed your questions right. How much to repair the cyclone damage on the forty-eight half-installed wind turbines, and how long would it take? What was the insurance cover? What was the likelihood of future flooding on the site? Two years wasn’t necessarily a trend. How much could we sell the land for, if it came to that? When you knew enough answers, you knew the answer.
I could have run through all of it, step by step, but there was more than one way to throw good money after bad, and I couldn’t be the only person capable of solving problems anymore. I was juggling too many balls for that, so I stood up and said, “Give me a report by next Friday. Hang back, Jordan, will you? And Dane—wait in my office, please.”
Dane looked surprised for a moment, or as surprised as a bloke like Dane would ever look, then said, “Sure.”
“The rest of you,” I said, “if you’ve got issues with the flooding—houses, families, all that—go see to them, and I’ll see you Monday. If not, don’t. Tell your staff, too.”
Some relieved looks, either because they weren’t the ones being called on the carpet or because they wanted to get home and check their sandbags, and the rest of them filed out of the room. All but Esther, my assistant, who remained at the foot of the table with her hands poised over her laptop. Esther had decided, somewhere in the early days, that what I needed in my life was a sort of court reporter who’d take down everything that happened. She probably had it all indexed, too, because she could recall it almost before I could ask the question. Esther was my permanent record.
Jordan glanced at her, then at me, and looked relieved himself. I couldn’t be doing anything too bad to him, his body language said, if Esther was still here.
I said, “This isn’t going to work out. Sorry, but you’ll have to go.” No point dancing around it.
“What?” His pale blue eyes darted around the room for an instant as if searching for support, then came back to me, and a flush was mounting on his cheekbones.
“We spoke two months ago about bringing solutions,” I said. “I don’t hear solutions, and I need solutions from my Director of Operations. You’ll get your four weeks’ pay in lieu of notice. You’re a good engineer. You’re not a good manager. You could think about that when you look for your next job.” More than I usually said, but he looked poleaxed, full-on stunned mullet. Which was why he wasn’t a good manager. When a problem came up, you didn’t run away from it. You shifted into it.
I could have explained that, too, but there was no point. I stood up and held out my hand. “Thanks for your hard work.”
“That’s it?” he asked, not taking my hand. The pale-blue eyes were fixed on me, his sandy hair seeming to bristle. “You’re sacking me? Just like that? It’s been more than four years! I’ve helped you?—”
“No,” I said. “I’m sacking you after a conversation about specific ways I needed you to improve your performance, and your failure to improve it. Take your learnings from it, is my advice. Esther will brief you on the details.” No point hanging about to have a yarn about it, so I walked out.
“You’re a cold bastard.” Ah. Not over after all. I turned in the aisle of the open-plan office to see Jordan in the conference-room doorway. Now, he stepped out and advanced a couple of paces. “You come in like God Almighty,” he said, his voice rising, “pronouncing judgment like you’ve never had a weak moment yourself. Never made a mistake. You got lucky and got rich, and now you think you’re the last bloody word on everything.”
I could have said, I am the last bloody word on everything, because I’m the boss. That’s how the world works. I didn’t, because, again—no point.
“Are you done?” I asked. Everybody in the room was staring, but what would you expect. This was high drama, and they weren’t the ones getting sacked.
“No,” Jordan said. “Just because you can’t keep a wife and you don’t have enough blood in your veins or—or love in your heart to care for a family, you don’t think anybody else should have one, either. You think we should all live for this job. Live for you, more like. Live to line your pockets. You’re a cold, heartless prick who deserves every lonely night that comes your way, and you’re going to have heaps of them. All those cars and houses—what good are they then? What good are you?”
“You could have a point.” One of my favorite expressions. I didn’t add, But you don’t. “You can leave now, or Security will escort you out.” I nodded at Esther, who was already thumbing her phone, left them there, and headed to my office, ignoring the half-scared, half-curious, possibly-resentful looks cast my way.
Should I be concerned about any of that? No, I decided now as I slowed for the outskirts of Balclutha and the turn off the motorway onto the Owaka Highway. Nobody liked to see a co-worker get the sack, however well deserved. Made them jumpy. Not an entirely bad thing. Anyway, it was done, and by all I’d learned over nineteen years in business, my judgment had been sound.
Let go, or be dragged. Very useful concept. I refocused on the road. It was trickier driving along here, especially since the rain had steadily worsened during the drive south. More of a deluge, now, and the wind was whipping the trees. A family in their rain gear stacking sandbags against their garage and a flock of sheep on a green hillside, still grazing at the sodden grass in the stoical way sheep did. Masters of accepting the situation as it was, sheep.
I slowed over the Catlins River Bridge, then sped up again until I reached the shingle road. No traffic along here, not today, because nobody was fool enough to drive out for a lovely walk on the beach in this storm. It hadn’t gone seven yet, and the sun wouldn’t set until nine, but it was dim enough. Sheets of water poured down the roadway, but I wasn’t driving through any standing water. The road was too hilly for that, I hoped. I had a stack of sandbags in the garage. Enough? We’d see.
My thoughts drifted back to the scene with Jordan, and what had happened after it, in my office.
I’d shut the door behind me, thinking over what I’d just done, and?—
Oh. Right. Dane.
I’d walked over to my desk, set beside floor-to-ceiling windows that normally looked out over Dunedin Harbour and the Otago Peninsula, but at the moment looked out at rain, and said, “You’re my new Director of Operations, if you want the job.”
Dane blinked his brown eyes. “Jordan get the sack, then?”
“He did. Does that scare you?”
Dane didn’t answer straight away. He considered. That was why I liked engineers better than MBAs. You couldn’t rush a good engineer, and you couldn’t sway one, either, not if he was sure he had the technical details right. “I want it,” he finally said. “Course I want it. Does the job scare me, you mean? Probably. I’d give it heaps, no worries, but it’s only fair to say that I’ve got no business diploma and I wasn’t planning to get one, so you should decide how much that matters before I get in over my head. You may do better if you advertise, interview some others. There’s Roger Wandless over at Pulse Energy. He’s?—”
“Do you really think he’s better than you?” I asked.
“No,” Dane said, and grinned. “I could just be a cocky bastard, though. I’m barely thirty. Just saying.”
“I was barely twenty when I started the first thing.”
“Bargains-dot-EnZed.”
“That was it. As for Zephyr, we’ve both been doing this a wee while now.”
“Yeh,” Dane said, “but you’re Roman D’Angelo, certified business genius.”
“Nah, mate,” I said. “I’m not. I do my research, I educate myself, I back my judgment, and I succeed more often than I fail. So far. When I fail, I ask myself why, I keep asking until I’m sure I know, and I refuse to close my eyes to the truth. That’s about the sum of it.”
“Fair point,” Dane said with another barely subdued grin. “You did hire Jordan, so …”
I smiled myself. “I did. And now I’m hiring you. What do you say?”
“What the hell,” Dane said. “What’s the worst that can happen? I flame out in disgrace and embarrass my whanau. But I’ll back myself. When do I start?”
Esther camein ten minutes later.
“Jordan gone?” I asked, swiveling away from the computer.
“Yes.” She sat down. Tidily, the way Esther did most things. She had to be—what? In her late thirties? Around my own age. I’d aged, though, while she looked almost the same as she had when she’d first walked into my office fifteen years ago, gazed around at the desk made of an old door and two sawhorses, at the milk crates that served as filing cabinets and the profusion of sticky notes, and told me I needed to hire her. Same dark hair pulled back into a low knot, so tightly that you could barely see how curly it was, same conservative dark dresses, same nearly unlined skin, dark enough that you guessed at her ethnicity, but not so dark that you knew the answer. Somewhat like me.
The woman hadn’t got any less composed over that time, either. “I watched him to the lifts,” she said. “And waited for the floor indicator to show he’d left.” She pulled a check out of an envelope and set it in front of me. “Sign it, and I’ll nip into the post office so he’ll have it Monday. I should just have time.”
“Pissing down out there,” I commented.
“Sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”
I grinned. “Raining pretty hard.”
“I won’t melt,” she said. “Before I leave—your flat here will be all right”—it was at the top of one of Dunedin’s many hills, so it had better be—“and the cyclone didn’t cause much damage in Auckland, but there’s flooding starting down in the Catlins. Would you like me to have somebody check on it?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
She didn’t argue, just nodded.
“You don’t have an opinion?” I don’t know why I asked it. Curiosity, maybe.
“You don’t pay me to have an opinion,” she said. “You pay me to handle the results of your opinions.”
“True enough,” I said. “Maybe I want one, though.”
“I think hiring Jordan was a mistake, then,” she said. “He’s clever enough. Knows enough. Not much character, though. No mana.” The kind of follow-me grunt and performance that earned you respect without your seeking it, she meant. The kind that made you a leader.
“Could you see that?” I asked. “At the interview?”
“Yes.”
“Next time, if you think I’m going wrong, tell me.”
“All right,” she said, still unruffled.
“You’re not making a note,” I pointed out. I don’t know why. Teasing, maybe, though Esther was tease-proof. Now, she had mana.
“I don’t need to,” she said. “I’ll remember.” And got up to go.
I knew she needed to leave to get that check into the post, but as she reached the door, I said, “I should sack you, come to that.”
She stilled, then turned. “Pardon?”
“It’s been fifteen years, and you’re still my assistant. Bloody hell—ah, crikey—but you could probably do that Director of Operations job yourself by now. What’s the problem? Confidence? Hard to believe. Love? Even harder. I’m not an actual troll, but?—”
“You pay me well,” she said.
“Too right I do. But I’d pay you more in the kind of job you should be doing. Why have you stayed?”
“Because you need me.”
“I could get another assistant.”
“Not as good as me.”
“Well, no, but?—”
“If that’s all, then,” she said, “I’ll be off. If you get to the house and need help after all, let me know.” And left.
I smiled, now, remembering. What would she do if I told her, “Up or out”? Would she take a promotion? Or would she quit? I wasn’t going to find out. Serve me right if she did quit. Everybody had the right to determine their own path, however mad it looked to me. And frankly, I had no idea what Esther’s path was. She’d never told me a thing about her personal life. She wore no ring and displayed no photos. If she kept so much as a cat, I didn’t know about it.
Up another hill, then down again on the shingled road. Around the hairpin turn, the sporty car gripping the roadway with satisfying competence, and the road sloping downward more sharply, the road narrower than ever. Not another soul out here, as I’d expected, and I wasn’t getting here a moment too soon. Things were going to flood before long, and the house?—
I’d slowed automatically for the drive, and now, I turned in. And nearly hit a splintered wooden beam. Post box, I realized, because the box itself was on the ground, a few white envelopes spilling out of it.
I didn’t swear. I stopped, got out of the car, and ran to haul the broken pieces out of the way. That’s why I was dragging a piece of splintered wood when I heard the shouting. Not on the road. In the bush. In the rain. Down the hill.
“Help,” the voice was yelling. “Help!” More than scared. Panicked.
I ran.