Chapter 12
JANET
Walter came for me on the Monday, which was two days later than I expected.
He'd spent the weekend out at that house with the space heater and the AM radio building his approach, and when he came through my door at ten fifteen Monday morning he had the whole thing loaded.
He shut the door behind him. In twenty-two years Walter Larkin has shut my office door maybe five times.
"Sit," he said, which was funny, since I was already sitting and he wasn't.
"Walter."
"I'm going to say my piece."
"All right."
He put both hands on the back of the chair across from me and didn't sit in it.
"Halloran's an outfit. It's not a family. You'll be a line on a spreadsheet in Columbus, and the first bad quarter they have, they cut the line."
"That's possible."
"It's not possible, it's what happens. I've watched it happen to four companies in this county.
" He shifted his grip on the chair. "Second thing.
Whatever they're paying you, we'll pay you.
I'll do better. I'll go to a hundred and—" He stopped himself before he named a number he didn't know he had to beat. "Tell me the number."
"No."
"Janet."
"If I tell you the number, we're negotiating, and I'm not negotiating. I've signed."
"Signatures come apart. I've broken plenty of contracts."
"Not this one."
He let go of the chair and walked over to my window, which looks out at the rack line and the gate, and stood there with his back to me. He's shrunk a couple inches since I met him. I'd never once noticed it until I was looking at his back.
"CFO," he said. "Chief financial officer. On the door. Michael asked me for it and I said fine, and I'll tell you what, I'll go further than that. I'll put you on the board. There's three of us on that board and one of them's been dead to me since 2011."
"Walter."
"You'd be over the office outright. Nobody looking over your shoulder. Full authority."
"Under Evan."
"Well, everybody's under Evan, that's—" He turned around. "Is that what this is? You want to be over Evan?"
"No."
"Then what?"
He waited, and when I didn't fill it he pulled the chair out after all and sat down in it, which put him below me. I don't think he noticed.
I had a speech. Nine nights of it in my head, with some very good lines in it, and I'd gotten as far as deciding which one to open with.
"You told me at a dinner table," I said.
He blinked. "That's it? That's the — Janet, I told everybody at a dinner table."
"You asked Evan twice. In September. Over breakfast."
He didn't have anything for that.
"You told your son on the seventh of October, and you had him help you build a chart with my name in a box marked OFFICE, and between the two of you nobody thought I needed to hear about it before Dot did.
" I kept my voice level, which took some doing.
"You could have called me. You've called me at nine at night about a fuel invoice. "
"It wouldn't have changed my mind."
"I know it wouldn't. I never asked you to change your mind.
" I folded my hands. "I'm not leaving because you picked Evan.
It's your company and you picked your grandson, and that's the most ordinary thing in the world.
I'm leaving because in twenty-two years it never once occurred to you that I was somebody you'd have to tell. "
He sat there with the look he'd had at the funeral home picking out the program.
"You're family," he said.
"I know what you mean by that. Mike told me."
His mouth tightened up. Nothing else I said all morning got him like that did.
"I've got no one else," he said.
"You've got a two-hundred-page manual on my desk with your grandson's name on the front of it.
It's the best thing I've ever made. I'll spend the next eleven weeks teaching him out of it, and I will not cut one corner, and the day I walk out that door this place will be better documented than it has ever been.
" I stood up. "That's what you get. It's more than most people get. "
"You came in here in '04 and you didn't know a joist from a jamb," he said.
"That's true."
"Bev taught you the invoicing on a Saturday. You remember that? She had the shoebox out."
"I remember the shoebox."
"You caught on faster than she did." He said it grudgingly, like it cost him something to hand over. "In '07, when the note came due. You remember '07."
"I remember '07."
"You went to that bank with me."
"I went to that bank without you," I said. "You waited in the truck. You've waited in the truck every time since 2009, because you don't like the smell of the lobby."
He didn't argue.
"That's my point," he said. "You're it. You've been it. Whatever this is, whatever I did that made you feel—" He put a hand out, palm up, and let it drop. "I'm too old to learn a new way of saying things, Janet."
"I'm not asking you to say it different."
"Then what."
"I wanted to be told." I said it as gently as I know how, which is not very gently. "That's the whole thing. It was never about money. You could have called me on a Tuesday and said, Janet, I'm going to put Evan in, I'll need you to help him. And I'd have said yes. Walter, I would have said yes."
He sat there a good three seconds.
"Then say yes now."
"It's not the same offer anymore."
He looked over at the manual, four inches of it, tabs sticking out.
"You'd do that," he said.
"I'm already doing it."
He got up and made it as far as the doorway.
"Twenty-two years," he said, not really to me.
"Twenty-two years."
"Bev liked you from the first week. She told me, that girl's got a head on her." He put a hand on the frame. "She'd be after me right now. She'd be all over me about this."
"She would."
"Well," he said.
He went out and left the door open behind him, which I chose not to interpret.
The rest of it came at two o'clock, at the counter, in front of everybody, which was not my choice.
Evan had come in with a purchase order question. Ashley was at the front. Ricky and one of the yard guys were standing at the coffee pot because it was cold out. Mike was at the will-call log.
Walter came in from the parking lot with his coat still zipped — he'd been driving around, you could see it on him — and he said it loud enough for the whole room.
"Well, everybody say goodbye to Janet. She's going to work for Halloran."
The room quit. Ashley's face did something awful.
"February," Walter said. "Twenty-two years and about eleven weeks notice."
My ears went hot. Ricky was studying the coffee pot. Ashley was looking at her hands. I hired both of them.
I got my mouth open and didn't get to use it.
"Dad." Mike closed the will-call log and came around the end of the counter. "Stop."
"I'm telling the staff, Michael. They work here."
"You're telling them a story."
"I'm telling them she's leaving."
"She's leaving because of a chart I helped you draw," Mike said.
Nobody moved.
He said it at a normal volume, the way he'd read out a delivery schedule, and Walter took it worse than he'd have taken shouting.
"On the seventh of October, Dad told me Evan was going to be GM.
I sat at his kitchen table about a week later and helped him build the org chart, because he couldn't work the program.
" Mike put his hand flat on the counter.
"I put Janet's box under Evan's. I did that.
And I didn't tell her. She found out at Sunday dinner along with the rest of you, more than a month after I knew, and when she asked me how long I'd known, I told her a month. "
"Michael." Walter's voice had dropped.
"So nobody in this building is going to say she walked out.
" Mike looked at Ricky. Then at Ashley. Then at Evan, who'd gone the color of a bedsheet again.
"She got a better offer, and the reason she went looking is us.
Me first. That's the whole story, and if anybody wants to hear a different one they can go hear it somewhere else. "
I was standing behind my desk about eleven feet away with one hand on the back of my chair and a pen in the other. I'd been holding that pen since Walter came through the door.
Twenty-six years. I have watched that man stand in front of a customer and take a chewing-out with his hands down at his sides more times than I could count. I had never once seen him do it to his father in front of the crew.
Walter's face went a color I didn't care for.
"You want to talk about disloyal?—"
"I don't," Mike said. "I want to go back to work."
He picked the log back up.
Walter stood there. Ricky found something urgent at the coffee pot. Ashley picked up a phone that wasn't ringing.
"Evan," Walter said.
Evan looked up from the purchase order he hadn't been reading.
"You got anything to say?"
The whole room waited on him. He looked at his grandfather, and then at me, twenty-nine years old with a plate on his door that had been up eleven days.
"I've got a load to get out by four," he said.
Then Walter turned around and went out to his truck, and checked all four tires, and got in.
Ashley was crying at the front counter. Not loud. She'd turned toward the window and she was still typing.
I went out and stood next to her and let her get through it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "This is so stupid."
"It's not stupid."
"You hired me."
"I did."
"Who's going to — " She wiped under her eye with the side of her thumb. "Nobody here knows how anything works except you."
"That's the problem I'm fixing. You're going to know how it works. I've got eleven weeks and I'm spending some of them on you."
She nodded and blew her nose on a napkin from the coffee station.
Mike stayed at that counter another twenty minutes. The log was open to the same page it had been open to before his father walked in.
At one point he looked over at me, and I looked back, and neither of us said anything, because there were four other people in the room. I put my head down and went back to the aging report.
Evan came over to my desk about ten minutes after that. He'd gotten the load out by four — I heard later he loaded part of it himself.
He stood there with his hands in his pockets.
"I don't really know what to say."
"You don't have to say anything."
"He shouldn't have done that. In front of Ashley."
"No."
He nodded at the manual on the corner of my desk, four inches of it, tabs sticking out.
"Is that mine?"
"It's yours."
"Will you actually — " He stopped. "Are you actually going to teach me out of it? Or is that a thing people say."
"I've got eleven weeks," I said. "Get a pen."
He had two in his shirt pocket. He took them both out, looked at them, and put one back.