Chapter 7
MIKE
She left at eleven forty on the Thursday. Told the front counter she had an appointment, which was true, and took the payroll binder with her, which was habit. She was gone six hours.
Ashley took a call at twelve fifteen from Stanek wanting a certificate, and she handled it.
I want that down somewhere, because she did handle it.
She got our agent's office, got somebody who wasn't Renae, read the policy number off a sheet taped inside the cabinet door, and had it emailed by ten of one.
Forty minutes. It takes Janet eleven. She pulled the wrong form the first time and had to call back, and when she hung up she said "sorry" to nobody in particular, which is a thing young women do that I wish they'd quit.
But it went out. The building didn't need my wife to send a fax.
At twelve fifty a driver named Cody came in off the road because his card wouldn't take at the fuel island in Newark.
Those fuel cards sit on an account Janet manages. There's a portal. I don't have the login. Neither does Ashley, and neither, as it turned out, does anybody, because the only place that login lives is in a woman's head forty miles away in a conference room in Heath.
"Can't you just call her?" Cody said.
I called her. Four rings and then voicemail, her voice giving out the main number in case it was a delivery.
He stood there in his coat with his hat in his hand. Two thousand dollars of block on his truck, a mason in Granville waiting on it, and every minute he stood in my office was a minute nobody was getting paid for.
"You want me to run it dry?" he said.
"No."
"I can maybe make Granville and back."
"You can't maybe make anything." I got my wallet out.
He put a hundred and ten dollars of diesel on my personal credit card. I've still got the receipt in the console. I never did turn it in, because by the time any of it mattered the receipt wasn't the point.
He said thanks, and he said it a little too warm, the way a man does when his boss has just done something humiliating in front of him.
"Don't tell anybody I did that," I said.
"I won't."
He told Ricky before he made the gate.
At two ten the bank called about a positive pay exception. That's when a check comes through that doesn't match what we told them was coming, and somebody has to say yes or no by three o'clock or it goes back. Ashley put the woman through to my extension.
"Who am I speaking with?"
"Mike Larkin."
"Are you an authorized signer on the account, Mr. Larkin?"
I sat in my own office, in a building with my last name on the sign, and said, "I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I run operations here. My wife handles the bank."
"Is Mrs. Larkin available?"
"She's out this afternoon."
Typing on the other end. "I show two signers. I can't read you the names."
"It's a family company. There's four Larkins."
"I understand, sir. I still can't read them to you." She was nice about it, the way you're nice to somebody's grandfather at a counter. "Is there anybody else there with authority on the account?"
I looked out my door at Ashley, twenty-four years old, on the other line.
"No," I said.
And I wasn't. Never had been. Janet's handled that bank since 2004 and in twenty-some years nobody had ever put the question to me.
The check turned out fine — a rekeyed vendor payment with a digit off, cleared the next morning after Janet spent nine minutes on it. But from two ten to three o'clock I sat in that chair and did nothing else at all.
Load-bearing. That's the word I kept coming back to.
The mail came at two forty and I brought it in, since Ashley was on the phone. There was a state envelope in it, the brown kind, and I opened it because that seemed like the sort of thing you open.
Notice of hearing on Denny Ruch's unemployment appeal. Telephone hearing, three weeks out, docket number at the top.
I read it twice. It wasn't anything. It was a piece of mail that goes in a folder, in a cabinet, in a system that hasn't failed once in twenty-two years, and I had no earthly idea which folder or which cabinet.
So I stood in her doorway.
Her desk is steel, older than I am, with a worn dark spot on the left edge where her hand goes. There's a cabinet behind it, four drawers. I put my hand on the handle of the second one.
Then I took it off.
Four weeks I'd spent going through her things the other way — deciding what she needed to know and when. Now here was my hand on her drawer.
I set the notice on her chair where she'd see it. Wrote SORRY on a sticky note. Took the sticky note back off.
Dad came in at three.
He'd heard about the fuel card, because Cody told Ricky and Ricky tells everybody, and he was in a fine mood about it.
"Where's Janet?"
"Appointment."
"What kind of appointment?"
"Personal."
He sat down in the chair across from my desk, which he does maybe twice a year, and laughed out loud.
"Cody put fuel on your Visa."
"He did."
"That's about a hundred bucks of diesel." He was enjoying it the way he enjoys weather. "That's why you've got Janet. Woman's got the whole outfit in her purse."
Then he asked me if the Fadeley trusses had shipped, and whether I'd looked at the gutter on the north side of the office, which has needed looking at since 2021.
That was the end of it. He moved on inside of four seconds, because to him it was a story about a fuel card, the way a flat tire is a story about a tire. He didn't think there was anything to prove.
I answered him about the trusses. I couldn't tell you what I said.
Woman's got the whole outfit in her purse. He meant it as love. He sat in my office bragging on my wife, and what he'd just described was a hostage.
"Dad. Does that not bother you?"
"Does what bother me?"
"Her sitting on that chart under a kid who's been at it eleven days."
"Well, that's the chart." He waved it off. "Chart's just so the bank's got something to look at when we do the succession."
"The bank."
"Loan officer wanted a reporting structure. That's where the whole thing started. Fella out of Columbus, thirty years old." He shrugged. "So we drew him one."
I sat with that a second.
A month. A month of quiet in my own house, a Sunday dinner, twenty-two years of my wife's life stuck in a box marked OFFICE with a line running up out of it — and the whole thing existed because some kid at Farmers National wanted a PDF for a file.
"You should tell her that," I said.
"Tell her what?"
"That it was for the bank."
"Why would I tell her that? It doesn't change anything."
It doesn't change anything, therefore there's no reason to say it.
I'd been running on that same engine since the seventh of October. Hearing it come out of him made my neck hot.
He stood up. His back caught, and he covered for it by straightening a pen on my desk.
"You know how I want it to work," he said. "Evan's going to make a mess for a couple years. That's fine, that's what it costs. But he needs bumpers." He held both hands up parallel, like a chute. "You keep him straight in the yard. Janet keeps him straight inside. That's how this goes."
I didn't answer.
"Michael."
"I heard you."
He went out to his truck and did the thing where he checks all four tires before he gets in. He's done it since I was a kid. It used to make me feel safe.
Bumpers. He'd said it with his hands up like he was showing me a chute for cattle, and he'd meant it kindly. I couldn't get the shape of those hands out of my head the rest of the night.
I sat there until five thirty. Ashley left, then the yard guys. The lot lights came on with that buzz they have.
Two weeks I'd been standing in the middle of this thing. Dad made a decision, Janet got hurt, Mike's caught between them. Nobody in the middle ever has to do anything.
Then he holds his hands up like a chute and shows me there's no middle in it at all. Two of us underneath, one on top. One of us gets a title as a thank-you, one gets a chart, and nobody asked either one of us.
Loyalty. That's what I'd been calling it my whole life. Show up, do the work, don't make it about you.
And then I had a thought in that empty office that I've never been able to put back down.
If he'd done to me what he did to her — sat at that table on a Sunday and said the yard was going to Evan, and Michael can keep him straight out back — I'd have been in his kitchen before the pie went cold.
She'd been quiet two weeks and I'd been calling it Janet being difficult. I'd spent those two weeks waiting for her to get over a thing I'd never in my life have gotten over.
There's a photo in the second drawer of her desk. I know because she showed it to me years ago and then put it back — Mom and Dad on the dock of the old metal building, 1998, holding up something framed. Dad with hair. Mom laughing with her mouth open.
Somebody handed her that to hang on the wall and she never hung it. I asked her once why not and she said the wall was full, which was a lie. I looked at that wall for twenty years and there was nothing on it but a calendar from a fastener company.
Every morning, that picture would have asked her a question.
Her car came into the lot at ten of six. She came through the shop door with her coat over her arm and stopped when she saw the lights on in my office.
"You're still here," she said.
"Yeah."
"Everything okay?"
There were fifty ways to answer that.
"Fuel card gave Cody trouble," I said.
"The Newark island. It does that when the odometer entry's wrong." She was already moving for her desk, already reaching for the mouse. "I'll fix it in the morning."
"Jan."
She stopped in her doorway.
"How'd it go," I said.
"Fine." Then, after a second, like it had to be pulled out of her: "It went well."