Chapter 4
JANET
Igave Evan eleven days, and not out of spite. Out of the calendar.
I could have handed him a stack of folders and let him drown. I thought about it on the Wednesday, the third time he asked me what a lien waiver was. But there were thirty-one people on that payroll, half of them with kids, and my hands wouldn't do it.
So I taught him.
First morning I put a legal pad in front of him and wrote three headings on it — MONEY OUT, MONEY IN, THE STATE — and turned it around so he could read it.
"That's the whole job?" he said.
"That's the whole job. It's the hundred and forty things underneath that'll get you."
I started with the money that goes out, because payroll has to be right every single time. Then the money that comes in, which is harder, since receivables in this business is about ninety percent psychology. Then insurance. Then the state.
Some of it he was better at than I expected.
He picked up the aging report fast and asked a good question on the third day about why we let Dunlevy run sixty when the terms said thirty.
Other things were worse. He didn't know what our experience modifier was.
He didn't know we had one. When I explained that a single bad claim rides along on every bid we submit for three years, he wrote EMR in his notebook and circled it twice, as though circling would help.
Fourth day I put him on the phone with our comp auditor, speaker on, my finger over the mute.
He made it eleven seconds before he said about. About forty guys in the yard. I hit the button.
"Never say about to that woman."
"I don't know the exact?—"
"Then tell her you'll have the exact number by four o'clock. And then get it to her by four o'clock." I let the mute go. He said it. She thanked him.
Fifth day he said, "How do you keep all this in your head?"
"I don't. It's in the binders."
"You never look at the binders."
"I look at them constantly."
"You look at them like you're checking your own work," he said. "Not like you're finding out."
That was a sharp thing to notice. I gave him credit for it, and it annoyed me that I had to.
Seventh day I let him sit in on a collection call.
Dunlevy Builders, sixty-eight days out, twenty-two thousand dollars. I put it on speaker so he could hear, which I had never once done for anybody.
Their bookkeeper's a woman named Peg. Nineteen years with Ron Dunlevy, and Peg has never had the money on the day I call.
"Janet. Hi, hon."
"Hi, Peg. I'm looking at sixty-eight days."
"I know it. Ron's waiting on the draw off the hospital job."
"When's that draw?"
"He says the fifteenth."
"He said the fifteenth last month too, and it came on the twenty-ninth." I said it the way you'd say it was going to rain. "Here's what I need. Eight thousand this week, so I've got something to show my people. And I need Ron to call me himself about the rest."
"He won't like calling."
"He never likes calling. He always calls."
We had the eight thousand by Friday. Ron called Thursday and complained for six minutes first, which is his price.
I hung up and Evan said, "You didn't threaten him."
"Never threaten a man who owes you money.
He'll pay whoever he's scared of last, because paying you means admitting he was scared.
" I made my note in the file. "You threaten a man once, at the very end, and then you do it, and then you never do business with him again. That's the only version that works."
He wrote it down word for word. I could tell because it took him too long, and because his lips moved a little at the end of it.
Walter came in most mornings, stood in my doorway with his coffee, asked how it was going — meaning how was Evan doing.
"She'll show you," he told Evan, on the Tuesday.
Thursday a general contractor called wanting a certificate with an additional-insured endorsement, end of day, or they'd bounce our truck at the gate Monday morning. I called our agent, got it, emailed it. Twenty-two minutes start to finish.
Walter happened to be standing there for the last four of them.
"See that?" he said to Evan. "Twenty minutes. Guy on the phone doesn't even know how lucky he is."
"How would I have done that?" Evan said.
"You wouldn't. That's why she's here."
He said it the way a man brags on a good truck.
I sat there with the phone still warm in my hand — the vendor phone, that black cordless from 2009 I won't let anybody replace, because the battery in it outlives everything they make now. And I saw the next fifteen years all at once.
Evan signs. Evan goes to the association dinners.
Evan is the one the contractors call the Larkin kid, and then Evan, and then eventually Mr. Larkin.
Evan sets the prices, takes the meetings, decides who gets hired.
And every time something has to be actually correct, somebody comes and gets me, and I fix it, and Evan carries the fix out of the room with his name on it.
Evan wasn't a bad man. That was the trouble. There was nowhere to put any of it.
He asked me something that afternoon I've hung onto.
"When you started here, who taught you?"
"Nobody."
"Somebody had to."
"Bev showed me the invoicing on a Saturday out of a shoebox.
The rest I got out of a book, or off a state website, or by calling somebody up and admitting I didn't know.
" I capped my pen. "I called the workers' comp bureau eleven times in 1999.
There's a woman down there named Sharon who still knows my voice. "
He wrote Sharon in his notebook, which wasn't the point, and was also exactly the point.
Twenty-two years of that, and I'd built it well enough to hand to somebody else without my signature on a single page.
After everybody went out to the yard I sat there and opened every drawer in that desk.
Top drawer: pens, the good stapler, a spare pair of readers, three of Walter's blood pressure prescriptions I'd picked up in 2019 when Bev was sick.
Second drawer: check stock, locked. Third: files I can't throw away.
Deep drawer on the left: a Christmas ornament from a vendor, a box of Kleenex, and the photo.
The photo's from 1998, before my time. Walter and Bev on the loading dock in front of the first building, the metal one they tore down in '06, holding up a framed something — the incorporation papers, I think, or the first hundred-thousand-dollar month.
Walter with a full head of dark hair. Bev laughing with her mouth wide open.
Somebody handed it to me to hang and I never did. It had been lying in that drawer fourteen years, face up, under the Kleenex.
The desk is steel, from back when they built furniture to outlast people. It was in that office when I got there. Twenty-two years, and there's a worn place on the left edge where the paint's gone smooth and dark, exactly where the heel of my hand lands when I reach for the phone.
I put it all back and shut the drawers. Then I opened the top one again and took out my business cards.
I ordered them myself four years ago, five hundred of them off some website, because a lumber rep asked me for a card at a show in Cleveland and I had nothing to give him. Walter never authorized them. He never denied them either. Nobody asked.
JANET LARKIN LARKIN SUPPLY CO.
Then the phone number, the fax number that hasn't worked in years, the address.
No title, because in 2021 I sat at that desk for a good while and couldn't come up with a word that was true.
I still had one in my hand when the phone rang. Not the vendor phone. My cell, in my purse.
I didn't know the number. I knew the exchange.
"Janet Larkin."
"Janet. Carla Ostrowski."
I sat back in the chair. "Carla."
"You're going to hang up on me."
"I've never hung up on you."
"You've turned me down twice, which is worse.
It's politer and it lasts longer." Carla runs operations for Halloran Building Products out of Heath — distributor, three hundred and some employees, four locations.
She cornered me at a state association luncheon in 2017 and again at a supplier expo in 2022.
Both times I was flattered. Both times I said more or less thank you, but that's my family's business.
"What's the occasion?" I said.
"Dave Ruhl's retiring in March. Twenty-six years with us. He's our director of finance and operations at the Heath campus, which means he does about four jobs, three of which nobody's ever written down."
I noticed I'd picked up a pen.
"I'm not calling to feel you out," she said. "I've felt you out twice. I'm calling because I've got a real opening with a real number attached to it, and I'd rather spend one phone call on you than six weeks of resumes from people who've never had to explain a comp audit to a seventy-year-old."
"Carla."
"Also because Doug Whitmer told me your father-in-law's putting his grandson in as GM." A beat, careful. "That true?"
The pen stopped.
This industry is a hundred and forty miles wide and everybody's brother-in-law works at the ready-mix plant. Walter announced it at a dinner table on Sunday. It was Thursday.
"That's true," I said.
"Okay." She let it sit there, which was smart of her. "I'm not going to be cute about it. Would you come talk to us?"
I looked at the org chart.
It was in my top-right file drawer in a folder marked 2026 PLANNING in my own handwriting, because apparently I can't be angry without filing it first. My box. That clean vertical line coming down out of Evan's.
Out the window, Mike was walking the rack line with a clipboard, checking bundle tags. He stopped and squared one that was hanging crooked. He can't walk past a crooked tag.
"When," I said.
"Thursday of next week? One o'clock. I'll block ninety minutes."
"One o'clock works."
I hung up and sat there with the pen still in my hand, heart going like I'd run up a flight of stairs. Out in the yard somebody dropped a bundle of strapping on the concrete and Ricky said something about it that I could hear through the glass.
Then I opened my calendar and typed DENTIST at one o'clock. I looked at it a second. Deleted it and typed PERSONAL.