Chapter 10
JANET
Istopped rescuing things on a Monday.
Nobody could have pointed at a moment. I did my job — all of it, correctly, out to the edges — and then I stopped.
Monday morning Evan quoted a load of engineered joists to a builder out of Granville off a price sheet that expired October first. Eleven percent under.
I saw it because quotes come through the system and I look at everything that comes through the system.
Ordinarily what happens next is I walk out to the yard, find him, and say check your sheet date before the customer ever opens the email.
I didn't. I filed it and made a note in the procedures document with the date and the amount.
He caught it himself Tuesday afternoon, three hours after the builder had already accepted, which left him calling to eat it or renege. He came in from the yard the color of a bedsheet.
"I sent a bad number."
"I saw."
He stopped. "You saw it?"
"Yesterday."
"You didn't — " He didn't finish that. He rubbed his mouth. "How bad?"
"Eighteen hundred on that load. Worse if he tries to hold you to the sheet on the rest of the subdivision, which he will. So go call him now, not tomorrow, and tell him what happened before he thinks he found it himself."
He went and made the call. Twenty minutes, and he got the builder down to eating nine hundred, which was better than I expected. On his way back through he stood in my doorway a second like he had something to say. Then he went on out.
Not sabotage. Not silence. Answers when he asked, and nothing volunteered.
Because about a third of what I'd been doing for twenty-two years wasn't my job at all. It was me standing behind everybody catching what they dropped, and not one piece of it was in a file anywhere.
So I started writing it down.
I bought the binder myself, at the Staples in Newark on a Saturday, because I wasn't going to put it through the office supply order and have Walter ask what it was for.
Two hundred and eleven pages before I was through.
Tabbed sections, everything from the certified payroll process to the fact that Kimberly at Ohio Valley Fasteners takes lunch at eleven thirty and won't answer between then and one.
Screenshots. Logins sealed in an envelope for the safe.
The whole comp audit history with my notes on what the auditor's questions actually meant.
I did it on the clock and I did it well, because I wasn't going to leave thirty-one people standing in a hole. It's a better manual than most companies our size will ever have.
What I quit doing was being the reason the certified payroll went out. Writing down how it gets filed, I could do all day.
The second thing I quit was answering for Evan.
Thursday a general contractor out of Lancaster called the main line wanting to know why a delivery went to the wrong gate. Ashley put him through to me, because Ashley puts everything through to me.
Six months earlier I'd have taken it. Pulled the manifest, found the error, apologized, arranged the redelivery, and never mentioned it to a soul.
"That's Evan's," I said. "Let me get you his extension."
"Who's Evan?"
"Evan Larkin. He's the general manager."
There was a pause on that line about two seconds long, which is a long time on a phone.
"Since when?"
"Come January. I'll transfer you."
I did that eleven or twelve times over three weeks, and every single time there was the pause, and the since when. And every time, after I transferred, I'd sit with my hand still on the phone for a second, because there's a muscle that screams when you let a problem walk past.
The third thing wasn't anything I did on purpose.
In the middle of a call with our insurance agent I heard myself say "they'll need the new schedule by the first" about a company I'd been calling we since 2004.
Renae didn't catch it. I caught it, and I sat there afterward with a hand over my mouth like I'd sworn in church.
The title showed up the first week of December, which I hadn't expected, since I'd assumed Walter would forget he ever agreed to it.
He didn't forget. He told Ashley to order a plate for my door, and it came from the same place in Zanesville they've used since 1986 — brown plastic, white letters, the O's a little too round. She put it up herself on a Tuesday with a driver she borrowed off the yard.
Four days after that our surety agent called.
Not the main line. Me, direct, on a number he'd never once used in eleven years of calling Walter first and then being told to go talk to Janet.
He wanted to walk me through the renewal on the bond program, and at the end of it he said, "I'll copy you on the carrier correspondence going forward. I've got you as CFO now."
Eleven years of that man sending things to Walter, who'd put them in a stack, and then calling me when the stack turned into a problem.
It was not nothing.
Then Evan came through with a quote he needed approved and stood at my desk while I read it, rocking a little on his heels, and down at the bottom he'd written OK per E. Larkin in the signature block.
I signed underneath him. My pen went in the smaller space.
Walter noticed something the week after, though he couldn't have told you what.
"Something's off with you," he said, from my doorway with the coffee.
"I've got the year-end coming."
"You look tired."
"I am tired, Walter."
"Well." He knocked twice on the doorframe. Two knocks, always, since 2004. "Don't burn out on me."
Don't burn out on me.
I wrote it down in the notebook I'd started carrying in my purse, which I had never done in my life. The date and the sentence. Nothing else.
Thursday of that same week Evan came in at four thirty with his notebook and shut the door behind him.
He'd never shut that door.
"Can I ask you something."
"Sit down."
He sat, turned the notebook over in his hands a couple of times, and then set it on my desk face down, which I appreciated.
"Everybody's weird," he said.
"Weird how."
"You. Uncle Mike. Grandpa's normal, but Grandpa's always normal." He shook his head. "I keep thinking I did something. I've been going back over the last month trying to figure out what."
"You didn't do anything."
"Then what is it?"
I'd been deflecting for a month. But he was twenty-nine with a notebook, he'd eaten nine hundred dollars on a joist load and told the truth about it, and I was tired.
"Evan. When did your grandfather tell you about the general manager thing?"
"End of September." No hesitation at all. "First week of October, maybe. He took me to breakfast at the Dutch Kitchen."
"So before the dinner."
"Yeah, like a month before." He frowned. "He wanted to know if I even wanted it before he said it out loud."
"He asked you."
"Twice, actually. He asked me, and then he called me a week later to see if I'd thought about it."
I let that sit in the room a second.
"He asked you twice."
"Yeah."
"And he told your Uncle Mike on October seventh."
"I guess. I don't know when he told him."
"Evan." I took my glasses off. "Nobody asked me. Nobody told me. I found out at that table on the sixteenth of November."
He looked at me.
I watched it arrive on his face, and I'm not going to pretend I got nothing out of watching it. Four expressions inside of three seconds. The last one was horror.
"No," he said.
"Yes."
"But you were — " He stopped and started over. "I thought you were part of it."
"Part of what?"
"Deciding. All of it. When Grandpa said you'd keep me straight, I thought — " He put a hand flat on his own notebook.
"I've been coming in here a month asking you to teach me your job, and the whole time I thought you'd already said yes to it.
I thought you and him and Uncle Mike had it all worked out and I was the last one to know. "
I'd spent a month building a version of Evan Larkin in my head, and he sat in my office and took a fair amount of it apart.
"Aunt Janet, I would have — " He stopped himself. He didn't finish it, which is more than most men would have managed, because he didn't know what he would have done.
"Don't," I said. "Don't promise me what you'd have done. You don't know."
"Okay."
"It's not yours to fix, either. Your grandfather made a decision. It's his company and he's allowed to. I've made my peace with that part."
"What part haven't you?"
Smart kid.
"The part where everybody was in the room except me."
He nodded slowly and picked up his notebook, and at the door he turned back around.
"For what it's worth, I've been telling people you run the place."
"That's worth something," I said. "It's just not worth what it costs."
After he left I sat there until the yard lights came on.
Then I did a thing I'd been not doing for three weeks, which was open the second drawer and take out the photo. Walter with dark hair. Bev laughing. The metal building behind them, door up, a forklift half in the frame.
I looked at it a while. Then I put it in the top drawer instead, face up, on top of the business cards, where I'd see it every time I reached for a pen.
I shut the drawer and turned off the lamp.
It was dark by five now, that December dark that makes six o'clock feel like nine. The letter had been sitting on the kitchen counter under the fruit bowl nine days. I got it out and read it again standing up with my coat still on.
Then I called Carla Ostrowski at seven fifteen at night, on the cell number she'd written on the back of her card in blue pen.
She picked up on the second ring, television going behind her.
"Janet Larkin," she said.
"I'm accepting. If it's still there."
Half a second of pause, and then the television went quiet.
"It's still there," she said. "March second."
"March second."
"You want to talk about anything in it? Anything you want moved?"
"No. It's a good offer. You wrote a good offer."
"I know I did." She laughed. "Janet. Hey. Welcome."
I hung up and stood in my own kitchen with the phone in my hand and my coat still on, and my knees went. Actually went. I had to sit down on the step into the family room like a woman twice my age.
I hadn't cried yet. Not at the dinner table, not in that kitchen with the chart on the island, not out on the gravel by the reservoir.
I cried on that step about four minutes. Then I got up and hung my coat on the hook, because Mike would be home at six twenty and I wanted to tell him with my hands steady.