Chapter 14
JANET
Iwas bad at my new job for eleven weeks.
Not incompetent. Bad the way you're bad when you know exactly what has to happen and cannot make the machine do it. I'd told them ninety days to functional and said take a month off for pride. I should have said two.
Third week I ran a batch wrong and posted forty-one invoices to the wrong period. It took a woman named Yolanda up in the Columbus office two hours to unwind it.
Afterward I sat in my office with the door open — my office, window onto the yard, my name outside on a magnetic strip because they move people around too often for plates — and put my hands over my face.
Then I walked down to Carla's office and told her I'd done it.
"Yolanda already told me," she said.
"I wanted to tell you myself."
"You've been here nineteen days and you're worried about forty-one invoices." She took her glasses off. "Janet. Can I say something that might be out of line?"
"Go ahead."
"You came from a place where you couldn't afford to be wrong, because you were the only one there. Here, if you're wrong, Yolanda fixes it. And in nine months when Yolanda's wrong, you'll fix it. That's what the three people under you are for. That's what I'm for."
I didn't have anything for that. I went back to my office and got the ERP manual out.
Ninety days to functional turned out to be more like a hundred and ten. Six months to good turned out to be about six months, so I got one of the two right.
In April, in the middle of all of it, a lumber vendor tried to push a nine percent increase through on an open PO, and I killed it in one phone call.
Then I sat in a Wednesday meeting and said, "We're not doing business with them past the current commitment," and a man from purchasing said, "Do we need to run that up? " and Carla said, "No. That's hers."
That's hers.
Two words, and I thought about them the entire forty-one minutes home.
In May I hired somebody. Start to finish, mine — the description, the interviews, the offer, the salary.
Tanisha Cole, who'd been running a branch office for a plumbing supply and was better than I'd been at her age.
Her first day I walked her around the building myself and said, twelve separate times, "This is Tanisha, she's our new accounting manager. "
Not she'll be helping out in the office.
She caught me inside her first month using eleven clicks for something that takes four keys. I'd been doing it the long way since March.
In June I got one badly wrong.
There's a customer out of Zanesville, framing contractor named Hostetler, who'd been running at a hundred and ten days most of the spring. I had the aging report. I had the history. I cut him off.
The branch manager pushed back on the call. Give him till the end of the month, he said. Hostetler always comes in. And I asked him whether "always comes in" was a payment term, which was a smart-sounding sentence I would like very much to take back.
I had the authority. I used it.
What I didn't have was the rest of it. Hostetler had been on our books fourteen years at about six hundred thousand a year.
He paid slow because he ran four crews on draw schedules that were slow by design.
Everybody at that branch knew it and nobody had written it down anywhere I could find.
That hundred and ten days was the price of the account, not a symptom of anything.
He got the letter on a Tuesday. Called the branch Wednesday, embarrassed, because his foremen had been turned away at our counter in front of other contractors. Thursday he opened an account with Carrolton.
He paid us every dollar inside two weeks. He was never a deadbeat. He just wanted to be done with us.
Six hundred thousand a year at a real margin, gone off a decision I made in eleven minutes.
I told Carla in her office with the door open, because I wasn't going to make it a private thing.
"I know," she said. "Rob called me Friday."
"I'd like to tell you what I'd do differently."
"Go ahead."
"I'd have driven down there. I read an aging report from forty miles away and made a relationship decision out of it.
" I made myself finish it. "And I'd have asked that branch manager a real question instead of a clever one.
He knew. He told me. I didn't hear it, because he couldn't say it in numbers. "
Carla didn't tell me it was a wash. She didn't say anything at all for long enough that I understood she wasn't going to.
"That's an expensive way to learn it," she said.
"Yes."
"You're not in trouble, and I want to be clear about that, because I can see you sitting there waiting for it.
" She took the glasses off again. "You had the authority.
You used it. That's the job. The job also means this one's yours — I'm not carrying it for you, and in October when we do the numbers it'll be sitting in your column with your name on it. "
"I understand."
"Can you get him back?"
"Not this year."
"Then try next year," she said. "And go in person."
I went back to my office, shut the door, and sat a minute with my hands flat on the desk, the way I used to sit after a bad call at Larkin. That desk was steel. This one's laminate. I still notice it.
Twenty-two years at Larkin Supply, and I had never once made a decision big enough to be wrong about.
Mike started at Bickham on the sixth of April.
Our house got strange for a while. Two people who'd worked in the same building twenty-two years, suddenly with two commutes and two sets of stories about people the other one had never met. That first month we came home and talked at each other for forty minutes without either of us listening.
I left the house at six twenty now instead of seven forty, and I never asked him for one thing about it. I'd taken the job. The commute was mine to eat.
He moved the coffee timer to five fifty.
Started letting the dog out. Started making the lunches — both of ours, the night before, in the containers, which was a thing I'd done for twenty-six years and had never once thought of as a task.
By the second week of April he had the grocery list, and by May he was doing the actual shopping on Saturday mornings, and in June he called me at work to ask whether we wanted the good coffee or the regular.
I said the good coffee. He said okay. I sat at my desk and had to close my email for a minute.
He never announced any of it. When I said something about it in May he just shrugged. "You're leaving the house an hour earlier now. I've got mornings."
He also quit being the one who explained me.
We had dinner at his sister's in June, first family thing after everything, and a cousin's husband asked what I did now.
Mike used to field that one. He'd say something generous — Janet runs the office over at Dad's, she does all the money — and I'd sit there while a man who loved me described my job in the third person.
This time he ate his potato salad and let the question hang there until I picked it up.
"I'm director of finance and operations at Halloran, out of Heath," I said. The cousin's husband asked what that meant and I told him, and it took about four minutes. Mike didn't say a word the whole time except, at the end, "She hired three people this spring."
The apology came in July, on a Sunday, in the garage.
We were cleaning it out. He was working through a shelf of paint cans that had been there since the Bush administration, and I was on a folding chair with a box of extension cords. Out of nowhere he said:
"I want to say the thing right."
"What thing?"
"I've said sorry about eleven times since November and I've never once said the right thing."
He set the can down and looked at the shelf instead of at me.
"I told myself I couldn't change Dad's mind, so there was no point telling you.
And that part was true, about his mind." He rubbed his palm on his jeans.
"But you weren't going to be in a fight with him.
You'd have been in it with your own life.
You'd have had a month to think about what you wanted, and to call Carla back, and to be a person instead of somebody getting handed a piece of paper in her own kitchen. "
I set the extension cord down.
"I took that month off you," he said. "Because I didn't want three quiet days. That's the whole reason. Everything else I said was dressing."
"Yes," I said.
"Yeah."
"I'm not going to argue you out of it."
"I don't want to be argued out of it."
We were quiet a bit. There's a window in that garage that doesn't open and the light comes through it dirty.
"I've got one," I said.
"Okay."
"I could have asked."
He turned around.
"Twenty-two years, Mike. I never once asked your father what my title was.
I never asked for a raise that wasn't handed to me.
In 2017 Carla Ostrowski offered me a job and I turned her down in the parking lot of the Athletic Club without asking one question about it, because I already knew I wasn't going. "
"You were loyal."
"I was comfortable." I wound the cord down to the plug. "There's nowhere on this earth I've ever been more necessary than that office. Nobody could replace me, because I made sure nobody could, and I called that doing the job."
I set it in the box.
"That's not the same as what I did."
"No. It isn't." He wasn't getting that one from me. "You knew for a month and you helped draw the chart. I'm not splitting that with you. I'm telling you why I sat in that chair eleven years after I knew better."
He came over and sat down on the cooler across from me, which put his knees up around his ears. Neither of us laughed.
"Sunday dinners," he said.
"What about them?"
"I've been going. You've been not going. And I've been letting that just be a thing that happens instead of a thing I decided."
"I'm not going to your father's for pot roast, Mike."
"I know. I'm not asking you to." He worked his jaw. "I'm saying I'll go every other one instead of every one. And I'm going to say out loud why, because if I just quietly go less, in a year Dot'll have a story about it and the story will be about you."
"He'll take that badly."
"He'll take it badly."
"Every other one," I said.
"Every other one. And Thanksgiving here, at our table, if you'll have him."
Walter at my table. My plates. The chair nobody sits in, and him in it, telling Mike about the price of copper.
"He can come," I said.
He put his hand out and I took it — my husband's hand, with the nail he smashed with a hammer in 1999 that never did grow back right.
"Twenty-six years," he said.
"Twenty-seven in October."
"That's what I said."
"You did not say twenty-seven."
"I was rounding," he said, and I laughed for the first time in that garage in about nine months.