Passed Over for His Father's Nephew

Chapter 1

JANET

The roast came out at four fifteen, same as it had for twenty-two years, because Walter Larkin ate at five and took anything later as a personal insult.

Mike wasn't drinking.

"Janet." Walter, through the doorway. "You gonna hide in there?"

"I'm carrying a roast, Walter."

"Well, carry it faster."

He'd been talking to me like that for twenty years, and I'd quit hearing the edge somewhere around year four. The same man drove forty minutes through an ice storm to jump my car when I was twenty-nine and stuck at the Kroger out on Route 9.

I carried the roast in.

That dining room is always too warm. Walter keeps the thermostat at seventy-four from October to April, and the table seats nine when it needs to seat seven, so you eat with your elbows in.

Bev's china came out for Sundays. His sister Dot had the far end with her purse still up on her shoulder like somebody might call her away.

Evan had the chair by the window, twenty-nine years old, wearing a polo with our logo on the chest, which I found a little funny, since Evan worked the yard three days a week and mostly ran deliveries.

Mike pulled my chair out, the way he always does. I sat, he pushed me in, and his hand stayed on the chair back a half second longer than it needed to.

We ate. Dot went through her hip. Walter complained about copper prices, which he does the way other men hum.

I passed the green beans twice and got up once for the water pitcher.

Somewhere in there my phone started buzzing against my leg — the vendor line, forwarded to my cell since 2011, because when a driver can't find the will-call gate in Zanesville at six on a Sunday, somebody has to pick up.

I let it go. It was dinner, and whoever it was would try the main line next, and Ashley's voicemail would tell them to call me, and then they'd call me again.

Then Walter set his fork down.

He did it on purpose, tines down on the plate rim, and the whole table felt it. Dot quit talking in the middle of her hip. Even Evan looked up.

"I'm gonna say something," Walter said, "before the pie."

"Dad." Mike, low.

"I'm gonna say it before the pie, Michael, because I've been sitting on it and I'm seventy-nine years old."

The estate, I thought. Here we go. The house, the lake property, that insurance policy Bev left half-finished when she died. I reached for my water so my hands would have something to do.

"I've decided about the company," Walter said. "Come January, Evan's taking over as general manager. Whole operation. Sales, purchasing, the yard, the office. Everything under him."

Nobody said anything for a second. The room went thick.

Evan's ears went red. "Grandpa," he said, in a voice I hadn't heard out of him since he was fifteen.

"Don't grandpa me. You earned a shot."

"Well, Walter," Dot said. "That's — that's wonderful. Isn't that wonderful."

I put the glass down without drinking any of it.

Fine, I thought. Twenty-nine's young, but he's blood, and that's how these places work.

So now we talk about structure. Who signs what.

Who's got bank authority. Who carries the bond conversations, because I'd spent eleven years building up our underwriter and the whole relationship lived in exactly one place, which was my head.

I had my mouth open to ask about the signature cards.

"Now," Walter said, "I know he's green."

"He's green," Dot agreed, happy about it.

"He's got a lot to learn about the money end." He waved a hand my way, loose, the way you'd shoo a fly off a pie. "The gal in the office can keep him straight."

The gal in the office.

I heard Dot laugh a little, agreeable, because Dot laughs at anything shaped like a joke. I heard the furnace kick on under the floor.

Twenty-two years. Payroll for thirty-one people.

Four workers' comp audits, three of them I won on appeal.

The 2015 refinance, where I sat across a desk at Farmers National for two hours while Walter waited out in the truck because he doesn't care for the smell of banks.

Every vendor account. Every insurance renewal.

Every hire packet, every I-9, every unemployment claim, the OSHA log, and the certificates of insurance that general contractors want at eleven o'clock at night before a Monday pour.

The gal in the office.

My hands were flat on the tablecloth. I looked down at them and thought, of all things, that the ring needed cleaning.

Then I looked at my husband.

Twenty-six years, I can read the back of that man's neck from across a room.

I know what his face does when the doctor calls, when a check clears, when somebody says something stupid at a wedding.

I've watched Mike Larkin get blindsided maybe two hundred times and it never varies.

Eyebrows first. Then the mouth comes open a little. Then he laughs in the wrong place.

He wasn't doing any of it.

He was looking at his plate with his jaw set, the way he sets it when he's taking a chewing-out from a customer he's decided not to argue with. Shoulders down. Hand flat beside the fork.

He was braced.

"Janet." Walter again, warm now, expansive, pleased with himself. "You'll show him the ropes. Nobody knows that office like you."

My voice came out perfectly level, which surprised me. "I've got a lot of ropes, Walter."

He laughed. Dot laughed. Evan didn't. Evan had his eyes on the tablecloth with something on his face I couldn't read, and I had no room to try, because most of me was busy sitting very still.

"That's what I'm saying," Walter said. "That's exactly what I'm saying. You're invaluable."

Invaluable. He'd been calling me that for twenty years and I'd always said thank you. I sat in that overheated dining room with the roast going gray in its own juice and didn't say it.

My phone went off against my leg again.

Stanek Construction, per the screen under the table edge. Seven minutes past five on a Sunday, which meant somebody was standing somewhere with a problem.

"Excuse me," I said.

"It's Sunday," Walter said.

"It's Stanek."

I took it out in the hall by the coat closet, under Bev's picture of the covered bridge.

Their super, Frank, from a job site in Newark.

They'd started a footer pour at four thirty that morning to catch the weather, and now he needed a certificate of insurance in the general's inbox before seven or the inspector wouldn't sign off — or something in that neighborhood.

Frank has never once been clear on a phone.

So I stood in Walter Larkin's hallway in my stocking feet and got our agent's after-hours line, and a woman named Renae.

I gave her the policy number out of my head and told her which additional-insured form the general wanted, since I'd fought that same general over that same form back in August. Four minutes.

Five. "Janet, you're a lifesaver," Frank said, which men have been telling me since the Clinton administration.

The pie was on the table when I got back.

"Everything okay?" Evan said.

"Stanek needed a certificate."

Walter pointed his fork at me, tickled. "See that? Sunday night. That's what I'm talking about."

"Isn't that something," Dot said.

"Invaluable," Walter said again, to the table, to nobody, to the ceiling.

I ate my pie. Asked Dot about her physical therapist. Told Evan congratulations and found that I meant it, which I hadn't planned on. He was a kid. Somebody had handed him a thing and he'd said grandpa in a fifteen-year-old's voice.

Dot got her coat a little before seven and made Evan walk her out, and at the door she took my hand in both of hers. "You'll keep an eye on him, won't you."

"I will," I said.

Then I did the dishes. Walter's rule is that whoever didn't cook clears, which has never once been enforced, so I cleared.

He came through twice while I was at the sink.

First time he set his glass in the water next to my hands.

Second time he stood there a second and said, "That was a good roast," and went off to the front room to hunt the remote.

Mike dried. We stood at that sink shoulder to shoulder for eleven minutes without a word, which isn't unusual for us. We've never been big talkers.

He kept looking at the side of my face. Twice he took a dish off me without looking at what it was.

I handed him the roasting pan. He took it. "Jan."

"Not here."

"Okay."

"Don't say one thing to me in this house."

"Okay," he said.

Evan came back in from walking Dot to her car and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets while I wiped down the counter.

"Congratulations," I said again.

"Thanks." He looked at the floor. "Aunt Janet, I don't really know what I'm doing."

"I know."

"That's not — I mean, I know you know."

"Go home, Evan. It's been a night."

We got in the truck at seven twenty. The dome light hung on too long, because the door switch is going and I'd been telling him about it since June.

He backed down the driveway past the basketball hoop nobody's touched since Evan was in high school.

Out on the county road the fields were cut to stubble and the sky had that flat November color, more gray than blue, no clouds you could point at.

He made it about a mile.

"Janet."

I watched the ditch go by.

"He's had it in his head a while," Mike said. "It's not — this isn't about you."

A while.

If that had caught him cold he'd have said what the hell was that before we cleared the end of the driveway.

Mike gets mad on my behalf faster than he does on his own; it's one of the better things about him.

And he'd walked out of that house, put his hand on the small of my back, and said nothing at all.

The heater was too loud. I reached over and turned it down, and my hand was steady on the dial.

"Mike."

"Yeah."

"How long have you known?"