Chapter 5
MIKE
Saturday morning I drove out to Dad's with a box of the cinnamon rolls he likes from the IGA, which is what a man brings when he wants something. He was in the garage with the space heater going, running a file down the blade of a snow shovel — a job that doesn't need doing and takes an hour.
"Michael."
"Dad."
He looked at the box. "What'd you break?"
"Nothing."
"You brought rolls."
"I brought rolls."
He set the shovel down, wiped his hands on the rag hanging out of his back pocket, and moved a stack of paint cans off the second stool so I'd have somewhere to sit. That took him a while. His back's bad and he won't say so, and if you get up to help he'll find you something else to carry.
"Coffee's on," he said, meaning the pot from that morning.
I let him get settled. Then I said, "I want to talk about Janet."
"What about her?"
"She needs a title."
He looked at me over the top of his glasses and kept working with his hands the whole time, so I knew I hadn't earned the whole man yet.
"On the chart," I said. "You've got Evan as GM and me as operations. She's got 'office.'"
"That's what she does."
"That's not what she does. Dad, she does the money. Insurance, the bank, payroll, the state filings, all of it. She gets hit by a truck tomorrow, we're closed inside six weeks."
"Don't say that."
"I'm making a point."
"Make it without the truck."
"Fine. She gets sick. She takes the six weeks she's never taken in twenty-two years. Do you know what a positive pay exception is?"
"I know what a check is."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what everything in that building is. I bought all of it." He pointed the file at me. "Don't come out here and quiz me at seventy-nine years old."
"I'm not quizzing you."
"You're quizzing me."
"I'm telling you the woman does eleven jobs and the chart says one."
He went back to the shovel. Two more passes.
"Who does the comp audit?" I said.
"She does."
"Who'd do it if she didn't?"
"An accountant. We'd hire it out." He shrugged like it was nothing. "Cost us eight, nine thousand a year."
"So she's worth nine thousand a year to you."
"Michael, don't go putting words?—"
"You put the number out. I didn't."
He turned the shovel over on the bench and looked at the blade instead of me.
"Your mother did all that," he said.
"Mom did some of that. Mom did it in 1988, when we had nine employees, no bonding requirement, and the state didn't have a website."
"Your mother worked like a dog."
"I know she did." I made myself slow down. "That's not the argument, and nobody's saying otherwise. I'm saying Janet's been doing a bigger job than Mom's for longer than Mom did it, and she's got nothing on paper with her name on it."
"She's got a job."
"Everybody's got a job."
He set the file on the bench. The space heater clicked off. He looked out the open garage door at the driveway, at nothing, at the basketball hoop with the net gone out of it.
"What's she want?" he said.
That was the only real question he asked me all morning.
I took a breath. I'd rehearsed the whole thing in the shower, where he says whatever I assign him.
"She should be CFO. Chief financial officer. On the chart, on the door, on her card. She's earned it about nine times over."
He picked the shovel back up and ran the file down it, and the sound went right through my teeth.
"Dad. Put that down a second."
He put it down the way you humor somebody.
"You done?" he said.
"I'm done."
"Fine."
I sat there.
"Fine?"
"Call her CFO. I don't care what we call people." He turned the shovel over. "Your mother wanted to call herself office manager in '91. I told her she could call herself the Queen of Sheba if it got the invoices out."
"So you'll do it."
"I just said I would." He blew the dust off the edge. "Print her up some cards. She'd like that. She likes things to look right."
Four seconds. No negotiation, no let me think about it.
He fought me six months in 2019 over a second flatbed. Fought me a year over the GPS units. He handed over the second-highest title in that company between two passes of a file, and I sat on that stool and took yes for an answer.
On my way out he stopped me at the garage door with a hand on my arm.
"Michael. She's not sore at me, is she?"
I had about half a second to decide whether to be honest about it.
"She's not happy," I said.
"But she's not sore."
"Dad, I don't know how to answer that."
"Because she's been fine at work. She's been perfectly fine at work." He looked relieved, the way a man looks when the weather holds. "That's a professional woman right there."
"Yeah," I said.
I drove home feeling good about myself. Twelve minutes on Route 40, working out how I'd put it, picturing her face doing the thing it does when she's pleased and won't let on.
She was at the kitchen table with the laptop open on a spreadsheet.
We'd been talking all week — the gutters, her sister, whether we were doing Thanksgiving at Dad's. Every conversation perfectly fine. Every one of them over the second its business was done.
"I talked to Dad," I said.
She didn't look up right off. She finished a cell first.
"About?"
"You. Your title." I dropped my keys in the dish. "You're CFO. Effective whenever we do the January stuff. It goes on the chart. I told him about the cards and he said get them printed."
She closed the laptop halfway. Not all the way.
"He agreed to that."
"He agreed to it in about four seconds."
"Huh," she said.
Not thank you. Not anything else. Huh.
"Jan, that's a real thing. That's the number two title in the company. Nobody's ever had it. Mom never had it."
"What does it come with?"
"What?"
"The title." She turned the chair to face me. She wasn't angry — I can handle angry. She had the face she uses on a vendor trying to slip a fuel surcharge past her. "Walk me through it. I'm CFO. What changes Monday morning?"
"You'd — " I stopped. "It's a title, Janet. It's respect. It's on the door."
"Do I sign the operating line?"
"You already sign it."
"I sign it because Walter's on the card with me and he won't go in the bank. Am I on it in my own right?"
"I don't know."
"Does the January health renewal come to me, or does it come to Evan?"
"Evan doesn't know how to?—"
"That's not what I asked. Who does it come to?"
I didn't have anything.
"If I want to hire a second person in that office," she said, "and I have needed a second person in that office since 2019 — do I hire them? Or do I ask Evan?"
"You'd — I mean, he'd sign off, he'd say yes, he'd say yes to anything you?—"
"So I ask Evan."
The furnace knocked in the ductwork.
"If Evan tells me to cut a check for a vendor I've already put on hold," she said, "and I say no, and he says do it anyway. Who wins?"
"Janet, that's not going to happen."
"It happened in 2013. Your father did it.
Braxton Concrete. I put them on credit hold, he told me to release it, I released it, and we ate nineteen thousand dollars when they folded in June.
" She tapped the closed edge of the laptop with two fingers.
"I lost that one because he owns the company, and that's fine, that's the deal I signed up for.
But now I lose it to a twenty-nine-year-old whose W-4 I filled out because he didn't know how many allowances to claim. "
I was standing in my own kitchen with my coat still on.
"So it doesn't matter," I said. Flatter than I meant it.
"It matters. It just doesn't change anything. Those aren't the same."
"He told me to get you cards printed."
"I know. I heard you the first time."
"He said you'd like that. Said you like things to look right."
She went still.
"Do you know what's in my top drawer?"
"Janet—"
"Five hundred business cards. I ordered them in 2021 with my own money, because a man from Weyerhaeuser asked me for one at a show in Cleveland and I had to write my name on the back of somebody else's.
" She held two fingers up, an inch apart.
"There's no title on them. I sat at that desk forty minutes and could not come up with a word that was both true and printable. "
"So now you can. That's what I'm telling you. Now you put CFO on them."
"And the first contractor who calls the main line asking for the CFO gets me.
Same voice, same desk, same extension." She almost smiled, which was worse than if she hadn't.
"You know what a title is, Mike? It's a promise about what happens when there's a disagreement.
That's all it is. Mine would be a promise that when Evan and I disagree, Evan wins. "
"I went out there. I brought him rolls. I sat in that cold garage and made the case for you, and he said yes, and I have never in my life gotten a yes out of that man in four seconds."
"I know."
"Then what am I supposed to do with that?"
"You want to know what would have worked?"
"Yes."
"Signature authority on the operating account in my own name, not shared with a man who won't go inside a bank.
Hiring authority for one position in that office without asking anybody.
And the insurance renewal comes to me and goes out from me, and Evan finds out what it cost when I tell him.
" She counted them off on her fingers, flat, like she was reading a packing list. "Three things.
Not one of them costs your father a dollar.
Not one of them takes anything off Evan that he can actually do. "
I sat with that a minute.
"I could go back out there," I said.
"With what? You already used your ask."
"I'd use another one."
"He'd give you the title again." She wasn't being cruel about it. She was reading it off. "You'd get a bigger word. You'd come home with vice president, or executive vice president, or whatever else is on the shelf, and I'd have to be grateful again in this kitchen."
"You weren't grateful the first time."
"No. I wasn't. I'm sorry about that part."
"Don't be sorry."
"I'm not sorry about the substance. I'm sorry you drove out there in the cold with rolls."
She looked at me a while then. Long enough that I could hear the clock over the stove, which I never hear.
"Ask yourself why it was cheap," she said.
"Jan—"
"Mike." Her voice never came up at all. "You got me a nicer label on the same box."