Chapter Thirty-Three
Garrett
March came in with the specific relief of a Chicago winter that had decided it was finished.
Not warm yet, not by any reasonable standard, but different: a lightness in the air, the lake doing something other than simply being cold, the sky above the South Side moving from the pressed-down grey of February toward something with more range in it.
The workers on the day shift had started leaving their heavier coats in the cars.
Ota had appeared one morning in a cardigan instead of his usual insulated jacket and had not commented on this.
Garrett had found it, unreasonably, cheering.
The restructure was in its final quarter.
The City College cohort had a completion date of the second week of September and a forecast return rate of ninety-six percent, two points above Cait's original projection.
The Kelleher arrangement was generating volume ahead of schedule, which had moved the break-even forecast from month seventeen to month fifteen and a half.
The pension recovery was tracking so cleanly that Lehrman, the fund administrator, had used the word exemplary in his last report, which Garrett understood to be the most superlative term Lehrman's vocabulary contained.
He sent the month-four update to Victor on a Thursday. Victor replied with two words: Good work. This was, in Victor's economy of praise, a significant statement.
He was also, with a growing and not entirely comfortable clarity, running out of time.
Not on the restructure. The restructure was fine.
He was running out of time on the question he had been carrying since Thursday evenings in the West Loop and Sunday mornings in Pilsen and the specific accumulated weight of four months of being in the same building as a person who had changed the shape of what he thought a working life could contain.
He had been, in his working life, decisive.
He made decisions from available data, he committed to them, he did not revisit them without cause.
The Meridian decision had been decisive.
The argument to Victor in February had been decisive.
The Thursday evenings had not been a decision in the formal sense but they had been a direction, and directions, in his experience, became destinations if you followed them long enough.
He wanted this destination. He had known he wanted it for a while.
What he had not yet done was convert the wanting into a plan, because a plan required knowing what she wanted and she had told him honestly she did not yet fully know, and he had respected that and was continuing to respect it, and was also, with increasing difficulty, holding his own position in suspension while he waited for her to reach hers.
Victor had said three months in February. It was now March. The six-month term ended in May. He had not raised the question of an extension with Victor because he had not yet formed the request into something he was ready to make.
He thought about this on Friday morning while walking the press line, which had become a form of thinking as much as an inspection. The machinery did not care about his personal situation. The Schuler press ran its thirty-year schedule regardless. There was something clarifying about that.
He went back upstairs. He knocked on the open door of the small office.
She was on the phone. She held up one finger without looking up, which was one of her habits he had come to understand as fluency rather than dismissal. He waited in the doorway.
She hung up. She looked at him. Outside her window the secondary parking lot had a different quality in the March light: less bleak, more simply functional. "Kelleher," she said. "He wants to discuss the renewal terms. A month early."
"He wants to lock in the rate before the Lake Shore contracts are confirmed."
"Yes. Which means he thinks the contracts are coming." She almost smiled. "Which means he's been talking to someone who knows the timeline."
"His company bid on the subcontract work. He has contacts."
"So do I." She turned back to the laptop. "The renewal terms will be better than the original. He needs us more than he did in November."
"Negotiate accordingly."
"I intend to." She glanced at him. "Did you come down here for something specific or were you on the floor again."
"The floor," he said. And then: "And you."
She looked at him. The small office was quiet. The radiator was in one of its warm intervals. She had the chipped green cup on the desk, half-full, and she had been turning her pen end-over-end before he knocked, which meant she had been thinking through something before Kelleher called.
"Sunday," he said. "Come for dinner. I'll cook."
"You cook."
"I cook four things adequately and one thing well. Sunday is the one thing."
She looked at him for a moment. "What is it."
"Come Sunday and find out."
She turned back to her laptop. "Sunday," she said. Which was yes.
He went back to the room at the end of the corridor.
He had a call with his Minneapolis account at noon and a pension review with Lehrman at two and a report to draft before the end of the week.
He did all of them. At five-forty-five he found a recipe on his phone and made a shopping list, and he went to the market on the way home and did not think about May with any particular urgency.
He thought about Sunday instead. Which was the correct order.