Chapter 9
MIKE
Iwent out there on the Saturday. No rolls this time.
He was in the garage again. Since Mom died he's got about four things he does and three of them happen in that garage, space heater going, radio on the AM station out of Zanesville. Sometime in the fall he'd put a piece of carpet down by the bench for his knees. Nobody had said a word about it.
"Michael."
"Dad."
He waited for me to say what I'd driven out to say, and when I didn't he went back to sorting a coffee can of hardware into a plastic organizer, which is a job with no end to it.
"Janet's got an offer," I said.
His hands stopped. "What kind of offer."
"A job. Halloran, out of Heath. Director of finance and operations."
He set the can down.
"Halloran," he said.
"Yeah."
"Ostrowski woman?"
"That's right."
"She's been sniffing around Janet for years." He said it dismissively, then heard himself, and didn't take it back. "What's the money?"
"More than mine."
His eyebrows went up. He picked up a washer and put it in the wrong slot and never noticed.
"Well," he said. "We'll fix it."
"That's not what I came out here about."
"Michael, if it's money?—"
"It's not the money." I made myself go slow. "I want to talk about how it happened."
"How what happened."
"The chart. Sunday. All of it." I leaned on the bench. "Dad, she found out at your dinner table. In front of Dot. Twenty-two years, and she found out about her own job standing up with a roasting pan in her hands."
"That's how I told everybody. That's why I did it at dinner. Family hears it together."
"She's not everybody. She's the one it happened to."
"It didn't happen to her. It happened to the company." He was getting some color now. "Nothing changed for Janet. Same desk, same job, same — she's got a raise coming, apparently. What exactly happened to her?"
"You put her under Evan."
"Somebody's got to be under somebody. That's what a company is. You're under Evan on that chart too, and I don't see you out here crying about it."
"I helped make it."
"You did."
"So I don't get to cry about it. That's about the size of my problem."
He looked at me sideways. Nobody who builds what he built out of a pickup truck is a dumb man.
"You told the bank before you told her," I said.
He looked up.
"You said it yourself. Loan officer out of Columbus wanted a reporting structure, so you and I sat at your table and drew him one. That chart went to Farmers National in October." I gave it a second. "A thirty-year-old kid at a bank knew where my wife sat on your org chart before my wife did."
"That's a stretch."
"It's a fact with a date on it."
"That's a bank document. Nobody reads those."
"She reads those. She's read every document that's gone to that bank since 2004, except the one with her own name in a box.
" My voice came up and I brought it back down.
"You know how she found out the health plan was going up nineteen percent?
A letter. She opened it herself, she fixed it, and then she told the rest of us.
That's the deal she's had for twenty-two years — she finds things out first and then she handles them.
You broke it exactly once, on the one thing that was about her. "
He picked the coffee can back up and set it down again. A few washers went over the divider into the wrong slot, and he left them there, which for him is a thing.
"Sit down," he said. "You're standing over me."
"I'm all right."
"You've been leaning on that bench ten minutes."
I sat on the paint cans. The space heater was cooking one side of my leg.
"You want an apology out of me," he said.
"I'd like you to understand it."
"Those aren't the same."
"No."
"Because I can't apologize for running my own company." He was getting his feet under him. "You've been out here twice in two months telling me how I hurt this woman, and every time I ask what I was supposed to do different, you tell me a story about a piece of paper."
"You could have picked up a phone."
"And said what?"
"Said, Janet, I'm making Evan GM. Before you asked the kid twice. Before you told me. Before you told a bank."
"It wouldn't have changed one thing."
"It would have changed everything for her, and it would have cost you a phone call." I couldn't get past that part and I still can't. "It was free, Dad. Free, and you didn't do it."
He stood there. Out in the driveway a car went by slow, somebody looking at his house the way people do out in the country.
"You know what she did on the sixteenth?" I said. "After."
"After what."
"After your dinner. We got home, she asked me how long I'd known, I told her, and then she hung her coat on the hook and asked me to walk her through it.
" I put my hands on my knees. "Not one raised voice.
She asked me questions like I was a vendor.
Then Monday morning she was in that office at five fifty-two working on the year-end. "
"That's what I'm saying. She's a professional woman."
"Dad." I had to stop a second. "That's not a compliment. That's what it looks like when somebody's decided you can't be talked to."
He didn't say anything to that.
"You want to know why it's Evan," he said.
"I know why it's Evan."
"Say it, then."
"Because he's a Larkin."
"Because he's a Larkin." He nodded like I'd passed something.
"That's right. When I'm dead — and it's coming, don't make the face — that place has got to have a Larkin in the chair.
Not a manager. Not some hired man out of Columbus with a haircut.
It's got my name on the sign. That's the whole reason to build the damn thing in the first place. "
"Janet's a Larkin."
No pause at all. He said it the way a man says the sky's up.
"Janet's family, Michael. But you know what I mean."
The radio was playing something out of the fifties. The heater cycled off and back on.
"No," I said. "Say the rest of it."
"There isn't a rest of it."
"There's a lot of rest of it. You cut it off in the middle."
He set the organizer down and turned on the stool to face me, and his back caught again, and this time he didn't cover for it.
"She married in," he said. "That's not an insult, that's a fact. Blood is blood. If you two had had kids I'd be having a different conversation right now, and you know it as well as I do."
We tried six years. It didn't take. Janet was thirty-eight when we quit, and she went back to work on a Monday two days after the last one, and nobody in that family ever said one word about it to her face.
"Careful," I said.
"I'm not being cruel, I'm answering your question.
" He put a hand up. "She's the best thing that ever walked into that office.
I've said it twenty years and I'll say it at her funeral, or she'll say it at mine.
But the company goes down the blood. That's not me being whatever you think it is.
That's every family business in this county. "
"And me," I said. "Where am I in it?"
"You?" He looked honestly puzzled. "You're where you've always been. You run the yard. You'll run the yard while Evan learns, then you'll run the yard while Evan runs the company, and one of these days you'll retire and we'll get you a boat."
"I'm fifty-seven."
"So?"
"So that's the whole thing. Yard."
"Michael, you never wanted the office. You hate the office. You told me in 1994 you'd rather dig a ditch than sit at a desk."
I did say that. I was twenty-five and I meant every word of it, and he'd filed it away and run on it for thirty-two years without asking me again.
"Did you ever ask me again?"
"Ask you what?"
"Whether I wanted the office. After '94. In thirty-two years, did you ever put the question to me a second time."
He opened his mouth and shut it and looked at the coffee can.
"I didn't figure I needed to."
"Right."
"You'd have said something."
"Would I?" I put my hands in my jacket pockets. "Dad, when have I ever said something to you? Name me one time in my life I came out here and told you I wanted a thing."
"You're doing it right now."
"For her. I'm doing it for her. That's the only reason I've ever been able to."
I watched that land. He turned back to the bench and moved two things that didn't need moving and didn't look at me for a while.
"Your mother used to say that about you," he said. "Michael'll go through a wall for somebody else. Won't cross the room for himself."
"She said that?"
"She said a lot of things." He picked up the file. "Go home, Michael."
I got as far as the driveway before I turned around and came back in. He was already filing again.
"One more thing. When you tell people about this — don't say she got her feelings hurt."
He didn't look up. "I'll say what happened."
"That's all I'm asking."
I drove home the back way.
There's a stretch on Township Road 12 where you come over a rise and you can see our yard from a mile off, the racks and the two blue buildings and the sign. I've been looking at that view my whole life. I pulled over on the berm, which is not a thing I do.
Evan gets the chair. Janet gets used. Mike gets the yard and a boat.
Two of those three I was fine with. I'd have gone on being fine with them until they put me in the ground, because the yard's good work and I'm good at it.
But the whole thing only stands up if Janet holds her end. Evan on top, me on one side, her on the other. She steps out from under it and it comes down on my father inside of ninety days.
A month of telling myself I couldn't change his mind. That part was true about his mind.
So I sat there and did the arithmetic on the other thing. On what kind of man takes the good end of a deal that's costing his wife twenty-two years.
Then I got to thinking about my mother.
She did the books out of a shoebox until 1996, at the kitchen table after supper with the radio going. My father used to come through and kiss the top of her head and say there's my accountant. Everybody thought that was sweet. I thought it was sweet. I was twenty-six.
She died three years ago and never did have an office.
Maybe she never wanted one. She might have been perfectly happy at that table. Nobody asked her either.
I sat on that berm until a grain truck came up behind me and had to swing wide.