Chapter 15
JANET
The regional builders' association does a fall meeting every October at a hotel in Columbus, in a ballroom that smells like carpet cleaner and chafing dish fuel.
I'd been to eleven of them. Every one with Mike, in a good sweater, standing next to him while somebody introduced me as Mike's wife who works at Larkin, or Walter's daughter-in-law, or — twice — as the gal who does their books. They all meant it kindly, every one of them.
This one I went to on my own ticket. Halloran bought a table.
I got there at five thirty. Mike met me in the lobby at a quarter to six, straight off a job in Reynoldsburg, wearing the shirt he keeps in the truck for exactly this. He'd shaved in the parking lot, dry, with the razor out of the console, and there was a spot under his jaw he'd missed.
"You missed a spot."
"Where?"
I got it with my thumb. He stood there and let me, chin up, the way he does at the barber, and then went and checked it himself in the glass of the fire cabinet.
Inside it was the same as always. Two hundred people, half of them in quarter-zips, a line at the cash bar, a raffle for a cooler nobody wanted. The Halloran table was up near the front — eight chairs, company name on a little card easel. Somebody had already taken the chair I wanted.
"You want a drink?" Mike said.
"Club soda."
"That's not a drink."
"I've got Delacroix at that table and I'd like to still be able to do math," I said, and he went to stand in the line.
First person I saw was Gary Poff, who has been selling trusses in this part of Ohio since roughly the Ford administration.
"Janet! How's Walter?"
"He's well."
"Still got you chained to that desk?"
"I'm at Halloran now."
He blinked. "Halloran."
"Since March."
"Well, I'll be." He looked honestly thrown, the way a man looks when a piece of the scenery gets up and moves. "Doing what?"
And there was a full second where I could feel the old sentence coming up my throat. Oh, the same thing, the books and whatnot.
"I run finance and operations for the Heath campus," I said.
"Huh," Gary said. "Well, congratulations."
Then he wandered off toward the bar. It wasn't a moment. He forgot it inside the hour. But I stood there in a hotel ballroom holding a club soda and thought: that took me eleven months to be able to say in one breath.
Carla found us before we got twenty feet in.
"There she is." She had a man in tow, older, with the flushed look of somebody on his second bourbon. "Ken, come here. Ken Delacroix, Delacroix Homes. Ken, this is Janet Larkin, our director of finance and operations at Heath."
"Janet." He shook my hand. "You're the one who straightened out our billing."
"That was Tanisha, actually. She works for me."
"Well, somebody did. It was a mess for two years." He waved his glass. "Can I ask you about retainage? Because I've got a thing with a general down in Circleville?—"
And then I was in it. Fourteen minutes on retainage and lien rights in Ohio, with a man who builds ninety houses a year, has a real problem, and wants the answer from whoever's standing in front of him.
Mike stayed right beside me the whole time.
He didn't step in. He didn't explain what I meant. He never said she used to run my dad's place, she knows all this. He held his beer. And when Delacroix glanced over at him mid-question the way men do, checking, Mike tipped the bottle an inch in my direction and said, "She's the one you want."
Four words, and I had to look at the carpet a second.
Later Carla put me at a table with two people from a bank and had me talk through the Heath campus P&L.
I got a number wrong. Said four-eighteen on the first-half gross when it was four-twenty-four, and I heard it about nine seconds later while the younger one was still writing it down.
"Four-twenty-four," I said. "I gave you the wrong number a minute ago."
"Thanks," he said, and crossed it out, and asked me his next question.
Somewhere in the middle of that I looked across the room and found Mike over by the wall with two men from a concrete outfit, laughing at something. Not watching me. At a party, having a conversation of his own.
A year ago he'd have hovered, out of love, and I'd have felt it on my back all night like a hand.
We found Evan by the dessert table around eight.
Sport coat that fit him, which was new, standing with two men from a truss plant, holding a coffee. He'd put on a little weight. He looked older than twenty-nine.
He caught sight of me over one of the truss men's shoulders, held a finger up to them, and came over — which took him about as long as it takes a man to decide he doesn't care what they think of him for doing it.
"Aunt Janet."
"Evan."
He shook Mike's hand, then hesitated in front of me a second until I put my arms out, and hugged me the way you hug an aunt.
"How is it?" I said.
"It's hard." He said it like a man reporting weather. "We had a rough June. Two guys quit in the yard, and I hired the wrong replacement and had to let him go in August."
"That's the worst one."
"It's the worst one. I did it wrong, too. Did it on a Friday afternoon."
"Never on a Friday."
"I know that now." He shifted the coffee. "Ashley got married. In June. She sent a picture."
"She sent me one too."
"We hired a woman named Doreen for the counter. She's fifty-eight and she scares me a little."
"Good. Hire people who scare you."
"That's in the manual." Deadpan. "Section one, page four."
"That is not in the manual."
"It's in the margin. You wrote it in pen."
I laughed. I'd forgotten doing that.
"How's the receivables?"
He grinned. "Fifty-two days."
"That's better than I ever got it."
"That's Doreen. She calls them Mondays, before they've had a chance to get busy. I told her it was a terrible idea." He shrugged. "She did it anyway."
Then he said, "Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."
"Ask."
"Would you have taken it? If he'd offered it to you instead of me."
He'd earned a real answer, so I gave him a second before I said it.
"No."
"Really?"
"I never wanted his chair. I wanted to be in the room where he decided who got it." I picked a fork up off the dessert table and set it back down, because my hands wanted something to do. "That's all it ever was, Evan. People think you want the crown. Mostly you just want to be asked."
He nodded, and for a second he looked about forty.
"I've been asking people," he said. "That's the thing I took out of it. I ask everybody now. Doreen probably thinks I'm nuts."
"Doreen's fifty-eight. Doreen thinks it's about time."
He asked about Halloran and I told him. Then he asked a real question about how we handle branch-level P&L, and I answered it, and he pulled out his phone and made a note. I didn't mind that at all.
"How's your grandfather?" I said.
"Cranky. Back's worse. He comes in at nine and leaves by ten thirty." A pause. "He asks about you."
"Does he."
"He asked me in July if I thought you'd ever come back."
Mike made a small sound beside me.
"What'd you tell him?"
"I told him no." Evan looked down at his coffee. "And then he said — " He stopped.
"You can say it."
"He said, 'Well, she'd have been wasted here anyway.'"
I stood there by a table of cheesecake squares and turned that over.
Secondhand. To a grandson. Six months late. It was the whole of what that man had.
I took it, because I had somewhere to be.
"Tell him his company's in decent hands," I said.
Evan's ears went red, exactly the way they did at that dinner table, and he said he'd tell him, and then one of the truss men called him back over and he went.
Walter came to Thanksgiving that first year, and the one after, and he has never once said a thing at my table I had to send him home for.
He calls me about twice a month. There's always a reason — a form, a name he can't come up with, do I still have the number for the man who fixed the compressor.
He'll talk eleven minutes about the reason.
Then at the end he says, "Well. All right then, Janet," in a particular voice.
That's the voice. Two minutes at a time, twice a month, for as long as he's got.
I take the calls.
Carla got the microphone at nine for the raffle and gave the cooler to a man from a concrete outfit in Marysville who already had two of them.
We left at nine thirty. Out in the parking garage the concrete was still holding the day's heat, and Mike walked me to my car first even though his truck was closer, because that's a thing he does.
"Good night?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Delacroix's going to call you."
"He already emailed me from the bar. I watched him do it."
He laughed, and he kissed me in a parking garage at fifty-eight years old, which he does more now than he used to.
"See you at home," he said. "I got the coffee set."
I watched him head off toward his truck. He's got a hitch in his step now on the left side, from the knee, and he won't go see anybody about it.
Halfway down the row he turned around and walked backward a few steps.
"Hey," he called. "Delacroix asked me what you were like to work with."
"What'd you say?"
"Told him I wouldn't know. I've never worked for her."
He turned back around and kept going, pleased with himself, and I stood there by my open car door in a parking garage in Columbus, laughing at a joke my husband made about a chart.
I got in and put my purse on the passenger seat. The little clutch I'd brought slid off onto the floor, and when I leaned over and picked it up it had come open.
My cards were in it.
I'd had them made in February, before I started. Three hundred of them. I'd handed out maybe eleven that night.
I took one out and held it under the dome light.
JANET LARKIN Director of Finance and Operations Halloran Building Products — Heath Campus
My name. My title. My phone number, which rings at my own desk, in my own office, with a window on the yard.
I sat there and looked at it a while with the engine off.
Then I put it back in the case, and the case in my purse, and I drove home the long way, past the reservoir, because I felt like it.
THE END