Chapter 3
MIKE
Itold him she'd keep doing what she does.
That's the sentence. Five o'clock on a Tuesday in October, his kitchen table, laptop open between us and the cursor sitting in an empty box, and he says, "Where's Janet go?" and I say, "She'll keep doing what she does."
What I meant was she runs it. Nothing that matters moves in that building without her, and you can put whatever you want on paper, Dad, the paper doesn't change who's holding the thing up. You don't reorganize a foundation. The foundation stays where it is.
That's how it sounded in my head.
What it sounded like out loud, to a seventy-nine-year-old man with a cursor blinking at him, was don't worry about her.
He typed OFFICE in the box and never asked me a second time.
Five weeks later I'm sitting in a truck in the dark at six in the morning with the defroster going and my coffee cooling off in the holder, saying that sentence over to myself like a man checking a sore tooth.
We were at that table two hours.
He'd made coffee, which he does at any hour, and it was bad, which it always is. Mom's chair was still down at the end with her glasses case on it, three years on. The laptop's the one my sister gave him at Christmas, and he types with one finger and watches the keys, so I did most of the driving.
Seven boxes. We argued about two. He wanted the drivers under dispatch and I told him the drivers report to me, because I'm the one calling them at five in the morning, and he thought about it and moved them.
That's all it was. A man and his son sliding rectangles around a screen while the coffee went cold, talking Buckeyes in between.
Somewhere in there he says, "Should we put a title in Janet's?"
And I said, "She's never wanted a title."
She has never said those words and she has never asked for one. I sat at my father's table and turned that into a preference in about a second and a half.
He typed OFFICE. Printed it on the good paper, and while it ran he told me the printer had been acting up and asked did I know anybody.
I told him I'd ask Janet.
Then he asked did I want to stay for the game, and I said no, Janet's making chili.
I sat in that lot five minutes before I went in.
Yard lights still on, that orange color that makes everything look like a photograph out of the seventies.
Frost on the racks. Somebody had left the banding cart out by the gate again — used to be Denny's habit, and Denny's gone, so now it's somebody else's.
Her car was already there. The Equinox in the third spot, engine still ticking, at five fifty-two in the morning.
She gets in at seven fifteen. She'd left the house before I was out of the shower without saying anything.
And there was a mug rinsed and upside down in the drainer, which sounds like nothing except that Janet never rinses a mug.
She puts it in the dishwasher. You rinse it and set it in the drainer when you don't want the dishwasher running, because you won't be there to unload it.
That's what got me. A mug.
Inside, the lights were on and the copier was warming up. She was at her desk with her reading glasses on, payroll binder open, the big black one with the year on the spine in her handwriting, legal pad going beside it.
"Morning," I said.
"Morning."
That was all of it. Pleasant. Even.
I stood in her doorway with my hands in my jacket pockets like a guy waiting on a bus. The copier finished warming up and made that noise it makes.
"You're in early."
"Quarter close." She didn't look up. "Nine forty-one's due Friday."
"Right."
"And I want the Ohio unemployment filed before the site goes down for maintenance."
"Right."
She turned a page and made a note, and that pen was the loudest thing in the room. Out in the lot a truck started up, idled a while, and shut off again.
Here's the thing about Janet mad. She gets loud for about ninety seconds and then it's over.
She throws a dish towel. She says one thing with real teeth in it.
One time in 2004 she called me a coward in a Bob Evans parking lot over something I couldn't tell you now if you paid me.
Then she cried for a minute. Then we got in the car and drove home and that was the end of it.
This wasn't that.
This was somebody being professional at me.
She wasn't cold, either. Cold would have been easier. She said good morning, asked did I want the last of the pot, told me Kessler got shorted three bundles and did I want her to call or would I handle it. Every one of them a perfectly normal sentence out of a perfectly normal coworker.
Coworker. Twenty-six years married and she was talking to me like the guy who runs the yard.
"Jan."
"Mm."
"You want to say anything?"
She looked up then, over the glasses, the way that leaves a man feeling weighed.
"About what, specifically?"
"Come on."
"No, I'd like you to name it," she said. "There's four or five things and I want to be sure I answer the right one."
I didn't have one. She went back to the binder.
I went out to the yard and was no good to anybody for two hours. Gave Ricky the wrong stop order and had to chase him down at the gate.
"You give me Kettering first," he said out the window.
"I know what I gave you."
"Kettering don't open till nine."
"Just run it the other way around, Rick."
He held on me a second longer than he needed to, then put it in gear.
I told the Zanesville driver to take the trusses first when the trusses were third on the manifest. Around eight thirty I found myself standing in front of the rack of treated four-by-fours doing nothing at all. Looking at wood.
Dad came in at nine.
He walks the yard twenty minutes with a coffee he won't drink, tells one man he's doing something wrong, and clears out by ten thirty. He'd been in a good mood since Sunday.
"Michael." He clapped my arm. "She take it all right?"
"Who."
"Janet." Like there's no other she in the county. "She was quiet at the table."
"She was."
"Well, it's a lot at once." He nodded at his own wisdom. "She'll see it's a good thing. Kid needs her. She likes being needed, that one."
"Dad."
"What."
I could have said it right there, by the tie-down rack, with the forklift beeping behind us. She found out at a dinner table and I let it happen. Or, I put her under a twenty-nine-year-old on a piece of paper and then handed her the paper in our kitchen like a coupon.
"Nothing," I said. "Watch the ice by the gate."
"I've been walking this yard since before you could pee straight."
On his way in he stopped and squared a chain hook that was hanging wrong.
Then he went in to see her. I watched through the window — leaning on her doorframe the way he does, talking with the coffee hand, and I saw her nod, and I saw her write something down. Twelve minutes. He came out with the cup still full.
Evan got there at ten.
He'd been coming in early since Sunday, which I noticed and thought well of him for. He had a notebook now, spiral, still flat at the corners. He'd been carrying it around the yard asking guys questions, and Ricky had already made one joke about it that I shut down.
I was at the counter with the will-call log when he came through, and he stopped a few feet short of her door and hovered.
"Aunt Janet?"
"Come in, Evan."
He went in and didn't sit down. I could see him through the glass with the notebook against his leg, and I could hear every word. That office is small, the door was open, and I was eleven feet away pretending to read a log.
"So Grandpa said I should get up to speed on — like, the money side," he said. "The, uh. Payroll and stuff."
A pause.
"Okay," Janet said.
"He said you'd walk me through it."
"Did he say when?"
"He said — I don't know. Soon? He said you'd show me."
Another pause. Not a long one.
"Sit down."
He sat.
"Do you know what a certified payroll report is?"
"Um. Is that the — for the prevailing wage jobs?"
"That's right. Do you know what happens if it's late?"
"They... hold the money?"
"They hold the money. On the whole draw, not just labor.
Sixty-two thousand dollars on the school job last March, because a foreman turned in a time sheet with four blanks on it.
" She pulled the binder over and turned it around to face him.
"Get a pen. You'll want to write this down, because I'm going to say it once and then I'm going to expect you to know it. "
"Okay."
"Not because I'm being hard on you. Because there's a hundred and forty things in this room, and if I say each one twice we'll be here till spring."
"Okay. Yeah. That's fair."
He went out to his truck for a pen and came back with two.
I stood at that counter with the log open to a page I hadn't read a word of, listening to my wife teach a twenty-nine-year-old the job she's been doing since he was seven.
She was good at it. That's what killed me. Patient, clear, and she started with the thing that could cost the most money, which is how you teach a man when you want him to make it. She wanted him to make it. She has never in her life been able to stand and watch a job done badly in front of her.
He wrote it all down. Said okay about forty times. At one point he asked should he be writing it in a different notebook, like a work one, and she told him this was a work one.
She'll keep doing what she does.
I'd put that sentence in my father's mouth thinking it was a wall around her. What it was, was a job description.
At eleven fifteen she came out to the copier and started feeding the payroll binder onto the glass, page by page. Twenty-some pages, one at a time, lid coming down, light going across.
"You want help?" I said.
"I've got it."
"Jan."
"Mike, I've got it."
She stood there feeding paper into that machine with her back to me, wearing the sweater she'd worn to my father's house Sunday, and she never turned around.
I went out to the yard. Ricky was sitting at the gate with the Kettering load I'd fouled up, window down, waiting on me, and he didn't say one word about it, which was worse than if he had.