Chapter 12
TWELVE
Colt
“Weren’t you just talking about how young she is and calling me an HR nightmare?” Davis asks as we tee up.
One of our properties includes a members-only golf course, which we often find ourselves using after end of business as a way to blow off steam without joining the stuffier of our colleagues at happy hour.
It’s a decent-sized course with eighteen holes, a few of them a bit more challenging than the others. We figure we’ll have them redone once we each nail a hole-in-one in every location. It’s been four years, but we’re still hopeful.
Lining up my shot, I tell him, “I wasn’t kidding. She really did have a medical thing.” I pull my club back and swing, knocking the ball far enough away that I’m pleased with the shot.
“And she had to have her head on your lap for it?” He asks, throwing me a sideways look.
“Davis—”
Hands up in surrender, he says, “Hey, I’m not judging.”
“It sounds an awful lot like you are.”
“You fuckin’ her?” He asks.
“Jesus, Davis, no!”
He lines up his shot, taking a few practice swings before fully committing. “But you want to.”
“She’s twenty-one,” I tell him.
“At least you’re younger than her dad,” he shrugs.
That catches my attention. “You know her dad?”
“Uh, yeah?” He says, chuckling. “So do you, man, he worked for us.”
Reaching forward, I yank his club from his hand, effectively holding it hostage with my own, and I use the two of them to point at him.
“Talk.”
“Not much to say,” he tells me. “Guy works in the mail room for a few years, his wife kicks it, he never shows up for another shift. I saw him shitfaced a few months later at some dive bar, Al’s, but that’s all I got.”
She lost her mom?
“We didn’t help them at all?”
“Why would we? I mean, it was sad and all, but she didn’t work for us. And policy says let ‘em go if they don’t show up.”
I toss my club back into the bag. “I’m done here,” I say before hoisting the bag over my shoulder. “Finish without me.”
I can’t believe that I’ve gotten so out of touch with my own employees that I didn’t notice that one of them had lost a spouse, even worse that he didn’t show up afterward, and I didn’t even know his fucking name.
If we’d reached out, offered help, maybe he wouldn’t have gone so far down the rabbit hole.
Maybe Rowan and her sister wouldn’t be trapped in such a shitty situation.
Fuck policy, we should have helped. I should have helped.
What good is all this money if it just sits there when someone else needs it?
This was our fault.
My fault.
Back in my home office, I find myself digging through old employee files and news articles, forcefully dragging painful skeletons from the poor man’s closet.
Heath Caldwell, now forty-four, worked under us for six years as a mail room attendant.
Never a single complaint filed against him, never any marks on his employee record to suggest he’d done anything even remotely out of line with the code that our employees are held to.
To the contrary, in fact, there are several notes of commendation on his work and what an asset he had become to the team.
Sarah Caldwell, thirty-eight, was killed on impact when she lost control of her car driving through a heavy rainstorm three years ago.
She left behind a two year old daughter, Macie, who was present at the time of the accident and later treated for a deep facial laceration, caused by the shattered glass of the car windows.
The only thing that kept her from serious injury was a properly-secured car seat.
Sarah also left behind her husband, Heath, and her eighteen year old daughter, Rowan.
I flip back to Heath’s employee file to find the date he last clocked in here: four days after the accident. The day after his wife’s funeral. We only gave him three days off.
I close my laptop and slide it away from me, resting an elbow on the desk and scrubbing at my face as I try to choke back the wave of nausea that crawls over me. Heath was only a year older than I am now when his life came to a screeching halt.