Chapter 13
MIKE
Eleven weeks goes faster than you'd think.
Nothing burned down.
I spent a fair amount of December waiting for it to. There's a part of a man that wants to be proved right about his wife, and that part doesn't much care what it costs the thirty-one people on the payroll.
It just got harder, in about nine small places at once.
First week of January we came in four days late on a certified payroll for the county garage job and they held the draw.
It came loose eleven days later, after a phone call I wasn't qualified to make and made anyway.
Evan spent a Saturday in the office untangling it with Janet on the phone from our kitchen, and she talked him through it for two hours and forty minutes.
I sat at the other end of that table and listened to her not do it for him.
Second week we lost a hire. Good kid, CDL, we'd been chasing him since October, and his packet sat in a folder nine days because nobody knew it was supposed to move. He took a job at the ready-mix plant.
Ashley came out to the yard in January to tell me herself, in a coat that wasn't warm enough, and she held her hand out flat to show me the ring before she got to the part about giving notice. She'd be gone in February.
Nothing to do with any of it. She was moving to Marion. But she was the one who knew where the will-call slips lived, and when she went it went with her, which is how it works in a place where nothing's written down.
Except now some of it was written down.
The manual sat on the corner of the credenza in Evan's new office.
Walter had moved him into the old conference room, put a desk in it, and put a plate on the door — EVAN LARKIN GENERAL MANAGER, white letters on brown plastic, same place they've bought plates since 1986.
Evan used that manual. Used it hard enough that by March the tabs were furry.
The kid got better.
Not fast, and not in a straight line either.
He made a purchasing call in late January that cost us about four thousand dollars in demurrage, and he took a chewing from Dad over it that I wouldn't have wanted at fifty-seven, let alone twenty-nine.
But he quit being the guy with the flat-cornered notebook.
He started calling builders before they called him.
In February he caught something in a bid package I'd have gone right past, and he came out to the yard to tell me.
I said good catch, and he stood about two inches taller the rest of the day.
Four thousand in demurrage and a shot from his grandfather, and Evan was still going to be all right, because he was getting to be bad at it first.
Janet walked in there at thirty-two and was correct on day one.
I made my calls in January.
Tom Yost first. Yost runs a framing and truss outfit out of Utica, eighty guys, and I've sold him material twenty years. I called him about a load, and then at the end I said, "Tom, you ever hear of anybody looking for an operations man, I'd take a phone call."
Long pause on the line. "You leaving Walter?"
"I'm thinking about the next thing."
"Huh," Tom said, and that was that, and I figured I'd hear nothing back.
He called me in six days.
Not for himself — Bickham Contracting, out of Newark. Forty-some employees, three crews and a fleet. Their operations manager went to Florida in November and they'd been running it with a fella from the office who didn't know a boom truck from a bucket. Tom put my name in.
I met the owner, Ray Bickham, at a Bob Evans on a Tuesday morning. Sixty-two, hands like a set of tools. We talked an hour and fifteen, and about eleven minutes of that was the job. The rest was people we both know.
He asked me one real thing near the end, fork in the hash browns.
"Why're you leaving your dad's outfit at fifty-seven?"
I'd practiced an answer. I didn't use it.
"He made my nephew general manager in November," I said. "Put my wife on the org chart underneath him, had me help draw it, and I didn't tell her."
Ray chewed on that a while.
"That's more than I asked for," he said.
"You'd have heard a version by March anyway. I'd rather you heard mine."
He nodded once, and he didn't ask me anything else about it. No story of his own, no opinion about my father. I sat there a second waiting for one.
"Let me ask you the one I care about," he said. "Do you want to run crews?"
"I've never run crews. I've run a yard."
"That's not what I asked."
I thought about it with my coffee going cold on me.
"Yeah," I said.
"Why?"
"Because a yard's the same day every day and I'm good at it, and I'm fifty-seven, and I'd like to find out if I'm good at something else while I still can."
"Well." He picked the fork back up. "Let's talk about my trucks."
The money was two thousand less than I made at Larkin. Better insurance, a truck, and a title that said what I did.
I asked for a week. Janet and I sat at the kitchen table with the real numbers — the ones I'd finally learned in December — and ran it three ways. With her new plan we came out about six thousand ahead on the year even eating the cut.
"Do you want it?" she said.
"I want to not be the last brick in that wall."
"That's not the same as wanting it."
"No." I turned the paper around. "It's a good outfit. Ray's straight. Same work I do now with about a third less politics."
"Then take it."
"I'm going to."
"Mike." She put her hand over mine on the table. "Take it because you want it. Not to keep score with your dad. Because if you're doing it to keep score you'll be back out there in eighteen months, and then it's my fault, and I'll never get out from under that."
I sat with it two more days. Then I called Ray.
I told Dad the first Friday in February, in his office, door shut. I handed him a written notice, typed, four weeks past Janet's last day so there'd be no month where they lost both of us at once. He read it twice.
"Bickham," he said.
"Ray's a good man."
"Ray Bickham buys from Carrolton half the time."
"He buys from us the other half. He'll buy more with me over there, but that's not why I'm going."
He put the paper down on his blotter and squared it up with the edge. I've done that my whole life and I'd never once seen where I got it.
"So she got you too," he said.
"Don't."
"That's what this is. She goes, you go. Two months." He shook his head slow. "I built this place for you, Michael."
"You built it for Evan."
"I built it for the family."
"Then let me say the actual thing." I sat down across from him, all the way down in the chair. "She didn't make me leave. She never asked me to. Two weeks ago she told me to take this job for my own reasons or not at all."
"Then what."
"Watching what I helped do made me decide."
He looked at the blotter.
"I sat at your kitchen table and I put my wife in a box," I said.
"And when you asked where she went, I said she'll keep doing what she does, and I thought I was standing up for her.
I've had four months of hearing that sentence back at me.
" I put my hands on my knees. "I can't unsay it.
What I can do is quit taking a check off a place where that's how it works. "
"It's how everything works."
"Maybe."
"It's how it worked at my father's shop. It's how it works at every outfit in this county. You think Ray Bickham's different?"
"I don't know. I'll find out." I stood up. "But at Ray's, if I get treated like a fixture, that's a job I can quit. Here, if I get treated like a fixture, that's my family."
He didn't say anything for a while. Out the window a truck was backing up to the rack line, that beeping going on and on.
"Four weeks after her," he said finally.
"Four weeks. And I'll write down everything I know before I go. Every builder, every account, every driver, who's reliable and who isn't. Janet's doing it for the office. I'll do it for the yard."
"I don't need—" He stopped himself. Seventy-nine years old, half his operation gone in one quarter, and he was not going to finish that sentence.
"I'm doing it anyway," I said.
Evan caught me in the hallway that afternoon. He'd heard inside of an hour, because Dad told him inside of an hour.
"You're going to Bickham."
"April sixth."
He stood there with his hands at his sides.
"I'm not going to make it," he said.
"You're going to make it."
"Uncle Mike, I've been here four months. I've lost two guys in the yard, and now I'm losing the two people who?—"
"Evan." I stopped him. "Listen, because I'm going to say this once and then we're both going back to work."
"Okay."
"When I was twenty-nine your grandfather gave me the yard.
Not the whole thing — the yard. And he was down my throat every day for two years, and I made about four thousand dollars' worth of mistakes, and I hated him for a good stretch of 1998.
" I put a hand on the wall. "That's how it goes.
It isn't comfortable and it's not supposed to be.
And you've got something I didn't have, which is two hundred pages of the best operating manual anybody in this county ever wrote. "
"I'd rather have her."
"Everybody would rather have her," I said. "That was always the problem."
I went out to the yard. About twenty degrees, wind coming across the field the way it does in February with nothing in the way of it.
I walked the racks. Ricky was at the far end with a load of sheathing, running the straps.
"Heard you're going to Bickham," he said.
"April."
He nodded, pulled a strap tight, dropped the handle, checked it.
"Twenty-two years for her," he said. "She hired me."
"I know she did."
"Tell her I said thanks." He moved down to the next binder. "I never did."
"Tell her yourself. She's inside till the twenty-seventh."
"Yeah." He worked the handle. "Yeah, I might."
He didn't. Far as I know he never did, and she never brought it up. In April he mailed a card to the house that my wife kept on the counter a week and then put in a drawer.
I finished the line. Two of the treated lifts were low and I wrote it on the back of my hand to tell purchasing, which is Evan now, which I kept forgetting.
Then I went in out of the wind. Evan had the light on in the old conference room, still at it, and I went past the door without stopping, because he hadn't asked me and I was trying to learn.