Chapter 6
GIL
There was a thing I hadn't told her, and it had been sitting in my chest all week like a swallowed stone.
Two people had already interviewed.
I'd shoved it down so hard I'd almost managed not to look at it — which is a hell of a thing to admit, that a man works to keep from remembering he sat two strangers down in his wife's chair — but I'd filed it away with everything else about the hire, under doing something nice, under taking care of it, and things you file there don't come up for review.
It was only Monday night, after she read me twenty-two years off a legal pad, that the interviews came back up my throat and I made myself look straight at them.
Late July. Two of them. I set the appointments myself, on a Tuesday and a Thursday when I knew Fern would be out doing the Weber books, because — and I hadn't let myself say this straight, even to myself, until right then — because I'd timed it so she wouldn't be there.
I'd been careful about it in the exact way a man is careful when he knows he's doing something he shouldn't and calls it a surprise.
First one was a guy named Pete, retired out of a supply house, decent enough, didn't know QuickBooks. Second one was Kayleen.
Kayleen I remembered because she was good.
Sharp. Late thirties, showed up with a folder of her own, asked smart questions.
I walked her around the office — walked her around Fern's office, is what I did.
I stood in the doorway and waved a hand at the desk and the gray cabinet and the whole running machine of my wife's life, and said something like, it's a lot to take over but the systems are all in place.
I said that. The systems are all in place.
Like they'd grown there on their own. Like the tomatoes.
She sat in Fern's chair. Put her hand on Fern's desk. Pulled the top drawer open — I told her to, get a feel for it — and looked at the labels, PAYABLES, RECEIVABLES, all that brown-marker handwriting, and said a thing I didn't think twice about at the time and couldn't stop turning over now.
She said, "Whoever set this up really knew what they were doing."
And I said, "Yeah. We've been lucky."
Lucky. Twenty-two years of my wife, and I called it luck to a stranger, in the chair, with the drawer open.
I keep coming back to the chair, and I couldn't tell you why it's the part that won't leave me alone.
It's a nothing chair. Gray. One wheel sticks.
Fern asked me a dozen times to replace it and I never did, because I never sat in it.
It was hers the way the whole office was hers — twenty-two years of occupation and not one word of deed — and I put a stranger in it.
On a Thursday I picked on purpose because my wife would be four miles off untangling a dentist's leases, I sat a woman named Kayleen down in that chair and walked her through Fern's systems and told her the job was hers to grow into.
A man doesn't get to say he didn't know what he was doing when he picked the day that careful so his wife wouldn't be in the building.
I've caught enough guilty men in my own trade to know the ones who schedule around you already know.
And here's the part that wouldn't let me sleep.
I'd been nervous the whole interview. Not about Kayleen.
About Fern coming back early. I kept half an ear on the lot the entire time, listening for her car, the way you listen for a boss you're not supposed to be talking to.
In my own office. About my own hiring. Sneaking around the woman who ran the place, in the place she ran, and my body knew it was sneaking even while my mouth was calling it a surprise.
I didn't sleep Monday. Tuesday I did the thing I do, which is move, because I can't sit inside a bad feeling, I have to get up on it. I dug the two phone numbers out of my email. Pete and Kayleen. And I called them.
I hadn't planned what I'd say. Pete didn't pick up, so I left it on his voicemail, and then Kayleen answered on the third ring, wary, the way you answer a number you interviewed with and never heard back from.
"Mr. Sowder?"
"Kayleen. Yeah. Hi." I was standing out in the gravel lot by my truck, because I couldn't do it inside.
"I'm calling to take you out of the running for the position.
And I owe you a straight reason, so here it is.
" I looked at the building. "That position's been filled for twenty-two years.
I just never wrote it down. There's a person who's held it since before you or I ever met, and she does it better than anybody I could hire, and I put it on a website like it was open because I'd talked myself into a story where it was.
It wasn't open. It was never open. I owe the person who holds it a real process, and I can't run a real process for her with you and Pete waiting in the wings like she's got competition for her own life.
So I'm sorry to have wasted your time. That's on me, not you. You interviewed great."
There was a quiet on the line. I braced for her to be mad. I'd have been mad.
She wasn't mad. She was something else, and it took me a second to hear what.
"Can I say something that's maybe none of my business," she said.
"Go ahead."
"When I was in there. In the office. I looked at those training binders on the shelf, the ones with the tabs — the vendor list, the permit steps, all of it — and I read a couple pages while I waited for you to get off the phone that day.
" A pause. "It's all one handwriting, Mr. Sowder.
Twenty-two years of a company and it's one person's hand, the labels, the notes in the margins, the little corrections.
I remember thinking, this whole business is one woman's memory in a filing cabinet.
I honestly wondered why you were hiring at all.
Looked to me like you already had the best office manager in the county. I figured she'd retired. Or died."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"She didn't retire or die, did she," Kayleen said, gentle now, a woman who'd clearly seen a thing or two.
"No," I said. "She's my wife. And she just applied for her own job."
Kayleen laughed — one soft, surprised note, not unkind. "Good for her. God, good for her. Do the process right, Mr. Sowder. She's already got the references. They're in her own handwriting on your shelf."
"Can I ask you something," I said, because I was standing in a hole and she looked like a woman who'd climbed out of a few. "If you were me. If you'd done what I did. How do you fix it? And don't tell me to say sorry. I already know sorry doesn't touch it."
She thought a second. "You don't fix twenty-two years, Mr. Sowder.
You don't get them back and you shouldn't act like you can.
What you do is make the twenty-third one unmistakable.
Put her on paper so hard nobody — not the bank, not the state, not your own kids — could ever pretend again she wasn't there.
Overcorrect. Go past the posting. If the posting said office manager, you'd better be thinking bigger than office manager, because office manager's what you'd give a stranger, and she's not a stranger.
She's the person the company already belongs to and just doesn't legally know it yet.
" A beat. "That's free. I charge for the rest."
I laughed, and it caught me by surprise, a real one. "You'd have been good here."
"I'd have been fine here. She's essential here. That's the difference, and it took you a while, but you're hearing it now, so." A pause. "Go do the process, Mr. Sowder. And fix the chair. Whatever chair she's been sitting in, I'd put money it's the worst one in the building."
I didn't ask how she knew about the chair. She'd sat in one like it somewhere. That was how she knew.
I stood out there a while after she hung up.
The building sat in the heat with my whole life inside it, all one handwriting.
I hadn't been trying to hire an office manager at all.
I'd been trying to make one exist on paper so I'd never have to admit the one I already had was real.
A stranger saw it in ten minutes of binders.
I'd had twenty-two years and looked right past it every single day.
I got Pete on the second try that afternoon and told him the same thing, shorter.
He took it fine — mostly relieved, he'd only come in to keep his wife from calling him retired.
And then there were no candidates left, no posting worth a damn, no surprise to spring, no story left to hide behind.
Just me, in the lot, with a filing cabinet full of one woman's handwriting and no more excuses about whose it was.