Chapter Thirty-Nine
Garrett
Diane Okafor was sixty-one years old, had been with Chicago Workers Alliance since its founding, and had the kind of authority that did not require announcement.
She arrived at the restaurant on Friday before either of them, which Garrett understood immediately as a deliberate choice: she had wanted to be in the room first. He noted this and filed it alongside everything else he had learned about the people in Cait's life, who were, without exception, people who paid attention.
The restaurant was on the North Side, a Nigerian place that Diane had chosen and that was excellent, and the three of them sat at a table that was neither too large nor too small for the conversation, which Garrett assessed as also deliberate.
Diane shook his hand. She looked at him the way Cait looked at things: directly, without the performance of assessment, simply assessing.
"Mr. Knox," she said.
"Garrett."
"Garrett." She sat. She looked at Cait for a moment, the kind of look that passed between people who had worked together for a long time and understood each other's silences. Then she looked back at him. "Cait tells me you've been offered a Midwest portfolio role with your firm."
"It was confirmed this week."
"Chicago-based."
"Yes."
"That's a significant change from your previous arrangement."
"It is."
"Was it your idea or the firm's."
"Mine. The firm approved it."
Diane looked at him steadily. She was not testing him, exactly.
She was doing what Cait did, taking the measure of a thing by looking at it directly rather than around it.
"The Meridian restructure," she said. "You came to Chicago expecting to close a facility.
You left with a partial restructure, a union agreement, and a six-month liaison role.
Most people in your position would have found the deviation uncomfortable. "
"The data supported the revised approach."
"Data usually supports whatever a person needs it to support. The question is what you're looking for when you go to the data."
He looked at her. "I was looking for the accurate picture," he said. "I was wrong about what the accurate picture was. When Cait showed me, I updated."
Diane was quiet for a moment. She picked up her menu. "I know about the Indiana case," she said, without looking up from the menu.
"I know you do."
"And the two labour grievance settlements."
"Those were resolved before my involvement with the region. I'm aware of them. They inform how I approach obligations in the new role."
She set the menu down. She looked at him.
Whatever she had been looking for in the previous five minutes, she seemed to have found it, or not found the absence of it, which was the same thing.
"Cait has been doing this work for six years," she said.
"She is the best organiser I have worked with in twenty-two years at this organisation.
She is also, as I expect you know, someone who gives very few people the access she has given you. That is not a small thing."
"I know," he said. "It isn't."
Diane looked at him for a moment longer. Then she looked at Cait. Something passed between them that was not quite a smile on either side but was adjacent to one. "Good," she said. She picked up her menu again. "Now. Have you had Nigerian food before."
"Once. In London, seven years ago."
"Then you haven't really had it. I'll order for the table."
She ordered for the table. The food arrived in quantities that suggested Diane believed generosity was its own kind of argument, and she was right about that.
They ate and talked, and the conversation moved from the restructure to CWA's broader work to Diane's opinion of the city council's planning committee, which was detailed and not positive, to Garrett's father's architecture, which Diane found interesting in a way that was not polite interest but the real kind.
Garrett watched Cait across the table during all of it, the way she was with Diane: different from how she was at the plant, more relaxed in a specific way, the way people were relaxed with the people who had known them long enough to have earned it.
She laughed twice, the full version, at something Diane said about the planning committee, and both times Diane looked at Garrett rather than at Cait, a small test he understood: do you see her when she laughs, or only when she's working.
He saw her. He had been seeing her since the first morning.
He hoped that was visible. He thought it probably was. Diane Okafor was not a woman who missed things.
On the way out, when Cait was getting her coat, Diane stood beside Garrett for a moment and said, quietly: "She doesn't make mistakes about people. She's very careful. So don't be a mistake."
"I don't intend to be," he said.
Diane looked at him. "Good," she said again. And went to collect her own coat.