Chapter 2
JANET
He didn't answer until we were in our own kitchen.
He drove the last eight miles doing the thing he does where he holds the wheel at ten and two like a man taking a road test. Pulled into the garage, hit the button for the door, and then stood in the mudroom taking his boots off one at a time on the bench like it was any Sunday of our lives.
I didn't sit down. I dropped my keys in the dish by the door — the chipped one from Gatlinburg — and stood at the end of the counter with my coat still on.
"Janet, sit down."
"How long."
He set the second boot down and lined it up with the first, toes even, which he has never once done in twenty-six years.
"About a month," he said.
A month.
I did the math before I could stop myself, because math is what I do.
A month put it at the second week of October.
The second week of October I'd driven to Columbus in the rain to sit with our health insurance broker, because the renewal came in at nineteen percent.
It took me four hours to get it down to seven, moving everybody to a different network tier.
I got home at nine at night. Mike made me a grilled cheese and sat across from me while I ate it and said, that's my girl, and rubbed my shoulders for about a minute and a half.
He'd already known a week by then. Maybe longer.
"Say something," he said.
"I'm thinking."
"That's worse."
"I'm sure it is."
"I'm still not sitting down," I said.
"Janet."
"I'm going to stand right here and you're going to walk me through it." Then I took my coat off and hung it up, which undercut me some. "All of it. From the start."
"Jan—"
"When did he tell you."
He came into the kitchen in his socks. He's still a big man at fifty-seven — thick through the shoulders, gone soft in the middle, one knee that clicks — and he filled up the space between the island and the fridge the way he has for twenty-six years.
It had always been a comfort. That night it was in my way.
"October seventh," he said. "Out in the yard. By the racks."
"He just came out with it."
"He said he was thinking about it. Said Evan had been asking for more, he'd been chewing on it, and he wanted to know what I thought."
"And what did you think?"
Mike scratched the back of his neck. "I told him I thought Evan was young."
"That's it?"
"I told him Evan was young, and Dad said everybody's young at first, and I said that's true."
"That's true," I said back to him.
"Janet."
"I'm just hearing it out loud."
He went to the fridge, opened it, looked in, shut it without taking a thing, which is what he does when his hands need a job.
"It's his company," he said. "It's not — I know how that sounds.
But he built the whole thing out of a pickup truck in 1974.
He can hand it to whoever he wants. I can't change that. Neither can you."
"I didn't ask whether I could change it."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking why I found out at a table with your aunt Dot."
He didn't have anything for that. The furnace came on downstairs and knocked once in the ductwork over the stove, the way it always does, and in that kitchen it landed like punctuation.
"I was going to tell you," he said.
"When."
"When it was settled."
"It sounded settled to me."
"It wasn't final, Jan. He changes his mind on things. In August he was going to sell the Newark yard, and then he didn't. I figured if I came home and dumped it on you and then he backed off, I'd have put you through all that for nothing."
I understood it, which was the trouble. In his head it was a kindness. A man standing between his wife and the weather.
"So you were sparing me," I said.
"Yeah."
"For a month."
"Yeah."
"Was I looking fragile to you, Mike?"
"Don't do that."
"No, I'd like an answer. Did I seem like I couldn't take it?
Because I fired Denny Ruch in August. Sat in that office and told a fifty-one-year-old man with two kids he was done, because you didn't want to do it.
Then I cut his final check and put his CObrA packet together.
Then I went to Fazoli's for lunch. Did any of that look fragile? "
His jaw moved. "That's not what I meant."
"Then say what you meant."
"You hate this stuff." He said it to the counter. "The family stuff. Dad stuff. You always have. Every time it comes up you go quiet for three days and I'm the one living in the house."
And there it was, sitting between us like something the cat dragged in.
"So it was easier for you," I said.
"That's not?—"
"It was easier. You didn't want three quiet days in October, so you bought yourself three quiet days in November. Except they're going to run longer than three."
He put both hands on the island and leaned on it. Under the pendant light I could see the gray coming in at his temples and that little white scar through his eyebrow from a load of scaffold plank in '98. And I loved him, and it didn't help one bit.
"Who else knew?"
"What?"
"At that table tonight. Who else already knew." I started counting them off on my fingers, because my hands wanted work. "Dot?"
"No."
"Evan?"
He hesitated. A quarter of a second, maybe.
"Mike."
"I don't know when Dad told him. I assume he told him."
"You assume."
"He wouldn't drop it cold at a dinner table without telling the kid first."
"He dropped it cold at a dinner table on me."
That shut him up. He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his knuckles, which he's done since he was thirty.
"Then there's the bank," I said.
"What about the bank?"
"If Evan's general manager he'll want signature authority, and Farmers National will want a corporate resolution.
Somebody has to draft it. Somebody has to get it notarized.
Somebody has to sit down across from Kevin Rausch and walk him through the change.
" I could hear my voice doing that flat competent thing it does when I'm holding on.
"You want to guess who that somebody is? "
He didn't answer.
"It's me. It was always going to be me. Which means somewhere between the seventh of October and tonight, one of you was going to have to tell me, because none of that paperwork moves without my hands on it.
" I set my palms on the counter. "You didn't decide not to tell me, Mike.
You decided to make it somebody else's job to tell me.
Your father's, probably. In a hallway at work, on a Tuesday, while I was busy. "
"That's not fair."
"Then correct it."
He opened his mouth and shut it again. Got a glass down, filled it at the sink, set it on the counter without drinking any.
"There's something else," he said.
I waited.
"You'll see it Monday anyway. I'd rather you saw it from me."
He went back out to the mudroom. I heard the truck door, then the garage door going up and coming down with that groan the spring makes. He came in with his work folder, the green canvas one, strap broke in 2019, fixed with a zip tie.
He took out one sheet of paper, set it on the island, and slid it toward me.
An org chart.
Clean. Printed on the good stock, the twenty-four pound we keep for bid packages, which means whoever ran it walked right past the regular tray on purpose. Somebody had built it in Word and gotten all the boxes to line up. That takes a while. That means somebody cared how it looked.
At the top: W. LARKIN — PRESIDENT.
Under him: E. LARKIN — GENERAL MANAGER.
Under that, two boxes side by side.
M. LARKIN — OPERATIONS.
J. LARKIN — OFFICE.
Office. Not accounting. Not administration, not finance, not HR, not the eleven other things that lived in that room with me. Office. A place instead of a person.
And a line. One clean vertical line, the kind you draw when you don't want any argument about it, running from Evan's box straight down into mine.
I looked at that for a while. Long enough that Mike started talking again somewhere off to my left, like a radio in another room.
"It's a piece of paper," he was saying. "Nothing changes day to day. You do what you've always done. Nobody's going to be standing over you?—"
"Who made this?"
He stopped.
"Mike. Who made this."
"Dad wanted a chart."
"That's not what I asked."
The refrigerator hummed. He looked at the chart instead of me.
"He couldn't work the boxes," he said. "The program. He kept crossing the lines. So I sat down with him at his kitchen table and we did it together."
"You made it."
"We made it."
"You put my box under Evan's."
"There wasn't anywhere else to put it," he said, and I don't think he heard himself say it. "If Evan's GM, everything's under Evan. That's just what a chart looks like."
I picked it up. Heavier than you'd expect. Twenty-four pound, nine dollars and forty cents a ream, top shelf of the supply closet behind the envelopes. I order it.
"Nothing changes day to day," Mike said again.
"You've said that twice now."
"Because it's true."
"Who renews the bond in April?"
"Janet."
"Who does Evan call when the auditor phones?"
"Janet. Jan, that's my whole point. Nobody's taking anything away from you."
"I know," I said. "That was never the complaint."
"Was Evan there?"
"At Dad's? No."
"Has he seen it?"
"I don't know."
"Has the bank seen it?"
Something went across his face and was gone.
"There's a loan officer," he said. "Dad wanted a chart for the file."
I set the page down and looked at it a while longer. There was a smudge in the bottom corner where somebody's thumb had gotten on the toner before it set.
"So that's the order," I said.
"Jan."
"Walter. Evan, probably. You. Some man at Farmers National whose name I'd have to look up." I squared the page against the counter edge, which I do without deciding to. "Then Dot. Then me."
"That's not an order. That's just how it happened."
"That's exactly what an order is."
I folded it in half along the line between Evan's box and mine, then in quarters, and put it in my coat pocket on the hook.
"Don't do that," he said.
"It's a piece of paper. You've told me twice."
"Did he ask about me?"
"What?"
"Sitting at his kitchen table drawing this. Did he ask where I went."
Mike didn't say anything.
"He did," I said.
"Janet."
"He asked where I fit."
I watched my husband's face and had the answer off it before he got his mouth open, same as I'd had it at the dinner table three hours earlier.
"What did you tell him?"