Chapter 6
JANET
Itold him on a Wednesday with my hands in dishwater, so I wouldn't have to turn around.
"I'm taking Thursday afternoon off."
"Okay."
"I'm going to Heath. Halloran called me. They've got Dave Ruhl's job opening up in March and they asked me to come talk about it, and I said yes."
The dish towel stopped moving behind me.
I turned around. He was standing there with a wet plate in his hands, wearing the face he had in the hallway outside his mother's room in 2019. I'd rather he'd shouted.
"You're interviewing," he said.
"I'm going to a conversation."
"Janet."
"Yes. I'm interviewing."
He set the plate down. "When did they call?"
"Last Thursday."
"Last Thursday." He counted it out loud, which is what he does when he's stalling. "Six days ago."
"I wanted to decide before I told you. Now I've decided. Now I'm telling you."
"That's—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "Do you hear that?"
"Yes."
"Do you hear how that's the exact?—"
"Yes, Mike. I hear it." I pulled the plug and let the water start down.
"The difference is six days in, before I've done one single thing.
You told me a month and a half in, after you'd already done the only thing that mattered.
If you want to litigate the six days we can, but I don't think you do. "
He didn't.
"How long's the drive?" he said.
"Forty-one minutes."
"That's not bad."
"No."
"That's not bad at all, for what they'd probably—" He stopped, because he'd heard where the sentence was going, and neither one of us went after it.
He sat down at the table, making the chair look small the way he always does, and put both hands flat on the wood.
"Is this to scare me?"
"No."
"Because if that's what it is, it's working, so you can quit."
"It's not about you." I dried my hands and sat down across from him, because I wasn't going to say it to his back.
"I have worked in one building for twenty-two years.
Nobody who wasn't a Larkin has ever looked at my work.
I don't know what it's worth. I don't know if I'm good, or if I've just been the only one in the room long enough that nobody can tell the difference. "
"You're good. Everybody knows you're?—"
"Everybody who's related to me knows I'm good." I let that sit a second. "That's a compliment from my family. It isn't information."
He rubbed his face with both hands.
"And this isn't revenge," I said. "If I wanted revenge there are about nine ways to hurt your father from that desk. I've thought of all of them. I'm not going to do a single one. I want to know what I'm worth to somebody who doesn't have to love me."
"And if the number's big?"
"Then I'll know that."
"That's not an answer."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
He looked at the table a long minute.
"Do you want me to come?"
I had to look at the table myself for a second. "No. But thank you for asking."
Halloran's place in Heath is a low brick building with a two-acre yard behind it and a sign out front you can read off the highway.
I got there early, the way I always do, and sat in the lot looking at the loading dock.
Four bays. We have two. Their racks run east to west so the trucks don't have to back into the sun, which is so obvious that I sat there a second feeling stupid about our yard.
The drive had taken me forty-one minutes. Twenty-six is my usual.
Fifteen minutes each way. I wrote it on the back of an envelope before I went in, because I wanted to see it in ink.
Carla came out to the lobby herself instead of sending somebody. She's about my age, maybe a hair younger, with the kind of short haircut a woman gets when she's stopped negotiating with her hair.
"You brought a folder." She looked delighted. "Nobody brings a folder anymore."
"I brought two."
We sat in a conference room with a window onto the yard. There was a man there too, Rob Deike, general manager of the Heath campus, in a quarter-zip with the logo on it. Coffee in paper cups. A plate of grocery-store cookies nobody touched.
I'd prepared for the kind of interview I give. Tell me about yourself. Greatest weakness. Where do you see yourself in five years, which is a question I've been asking in that office for twenty years and never learned one thing from.
Rob Deike said, "Okay, here's a real one. Customer at eighty-one days, ninety-four thousand out, decent outfit, eleven years with us, and their controller's quit returning calls. Their guys are on our dock right now with a truck. What do you do?"
"Who's on the dock?" I said.
"What?"
"Which of their guys. A driver, or an owner?"
He sat up a little. "Driver."
"Then you load the truck." I set my coffee down.
"You don't do it at the dock in front of a driver with no authority.
He'll go back and tell everybody how you humiliated him, and then the whole thing's about pride instead of money, and pride costs more.
So you load him, and that same afternoon you drive to their office, and you sit in their lobby until somebody with a title comes out. "
"You sit in the lobby."
"I've sat in a lobby two hours and forty minutes. Nobody can stand it. Somebody always comes out."
Carla laughed once, short.
"And you don't ask for ninety-four," I said. "You ask for a number they can say yes to today, plus a written schedule for the rest, and you get the schedule signed before you leave the building. A promise on the phone isn't anything."
They asked about experience modifiers. They asked about a comp audit that came back wrong, and I told them about 2018 and the misclassified drivers. Rob Deike said "huh" in a way I've been hearing my whole career out of men who expected less.
They asked about software, and I put my coffee down. "You're on a real ERP. We're on a system from 2009 with a bolt-on I built myself out of spreadsheets. I can learn yours. I'll be slow for a while, and I'll hate being slow, and you ought to know that about me going in."
"How long is a while?" Carla said.
"Ninety days to functional. Six months to good."
"That's honest."
"It's optimistic. Take a month off both numbers for pride."
Then Carla asked the one I hadn't prepared for.
"You'd have three people reporting to you. Have you managed anybody?"
I started to say yes, and then I didn't, because I'd just told them the truth about the software and it seemed like a poor place to start decorating.
"I've supervised. I've never had a direct report on paper. There has never been a line on any chart connecting anybody to me."
"But you run that office."
"I run it the way a woman runs a house. Everybody does what I say because it's easier than not doing what I say.
" I turned the cup a quarter turn. "I've hired twenty-one people in twenty-two years.
I've fired six. I've had every hard conversation that building has ever had, including two that should have gone to my husband.
What I've never done is have somebody's raise be my decision. "
"Would you want it to be?" Rob said.
"Yes."
"That was fast."
"I've had a while to think about it."
"What would you do with it?"
"I'd have hired a second person in my office in 2019." I turned the cup again. "Thirty-one employees on a system from 2009 with one set of hands on it. I put it in writing twice. Nobody told me no. Nobody told me anything."
Then he wanted the six firings walked through. I gave him four. On the fourth — a woman I let go in 2016 for taking three hundred and forty dollars out of petty cash over five months — Carla asked if we'd prosecuted.
"No."
"Why not?"
"She had a kid in a car seat out in the parking lot. And I'd been sloppy with that box for two years. I wasn't going to send somebody to court over a thing I'd made easy."
Nobody said anything for a second.
"Did you fix the box?" Rob said.
"That box has had a log and two signatures on it since March of 2016."
He wrote something down, which he hadn't done all afternoon, and turned the pad face down when he finished.
We ran two hours on a ninety-minute meeting. Then he had to leave for a call, and he shook my hand and said, "This was not what I expected," without telling me what he had expected, which was probably for the best.
Then it was Carla and the cookies.
She finally took one and broke it in half without eating either piece.
"Can I tell you what Dave Ruhl said when I told him I was calling you?"
"Please don't."
"He said, 'The one from Larkin? She's the reason that place is still open.'" She set the two halves down. "Dave's been in this business forty years. He doesn't hand those out."
Then she sat back. "You know what struck me. Two hours and you never once said the words my father-in-law."
"I noticed I wasn't saying them."
"Most people would've spent forty minutes on it."
"It's a small industry. If I badmouth Walter Larkin in this room, you'll hire me and you'll never quite trust me."
She smiled at that. Then she pulled a legal pad over and clicked a pen, and the temperature in the room changed.
"All right, let's not waste each other's time. I'm going to write you an offer. I need to know what you're after before I take a number upstairs, because I want to carry one number up there, not three."
"What's the range?"
"I asked you first."
I had a figure ready. Three nights at my kitchen table with salary surveys and what I knew our competitors were paying. I'd practiced saying it out loud in the car.
I opened my mouth to say it.
And what came into my head was: twenty-two years. She'll show you. The gal in the office.
I heard myself add eleven thousand dollars.
Carla wrote it down. She didn't make a face. She didn't ask me to say it again. She didn't do one of the things I'd braced for.
"Okay," she said, and underlined it.
I drove home the long way, and I couldn't tell you why. Past the old grain elevator, past the church with the pun on the sign, forty-one minutes turning into fifty-five. Somewhere around the reservoir I had to pull off onto the gravel, because my hands weren't any good on the wheel.
She hadn't blinked.
A woman I barely knew had written down a number I'd been scared to say out loud in my own car, and she hadn't even paused over it.
I sat on that gravel with the engine running until my hands quit. Then I drove home and made dinner, because it was Thursday, and Thursday is chicken.