Chapter Forty-Five
Garrett
The month-six report was the last one he would write as liaison.
He sat at the desk in the room at the end of the corridor on a Tuesday morning in early May with the report on the screen and the window behind him showing the secondary parking lot in the specific green of a Chicago May, which was different from every other month's green, more insistent, as if the city was making up for the winter in one concentrated burst of intention.
He had not grown up with this green. He found he liked it more than the Boston version, which was more restrained, more careful about committing to the season.
He read the report through twice before sending it.
The numbers were the strongest of the six months.
City College cohort completion rate: ninety-six percent, with the first cohort members returning to the floor on September second.
Kelleher arrangement: volume at one hundred and eight percent of the renewable threshold, generating a surplus that had moved the break-even forecast to month fourteen.
Pension recovery: three weeks ahead of the revised schedule, the front-loaded contribution in year one having produced exactly the runway Cait had projected in November.
He had a note from Lehrman, the fund administrator: The Meridian pension recovery represents the most efficiently structured union-management arrangement I have administered in thirty years.
He had forwarded it to Victor without comment.
Victor had replied: Good. Which was two syllables more than usual.
He sent the report. He sat back.
The room at the end of the corridor had accumulated, over six months, the texture of a place he had worked rather than passed through.
There was a coffee ring on the desk, not from his cup, which he was careful about surfaces.
There was a scratch on the left arm of the chair that had been there since January, when the maintenance supervisor Ota had borrowed the chair for a meeting and returned it without mentioning the scratch, which Garrett had noted and had not mentioned either.
There was a mark on the wall beside the window where he had leaned a document tube that had been there one afternoon and gone the next, leaving a faint pale oval on the paint.
Small marks. The kind a place accumulated when it was lived in rather than occupied.
He was going to miss this room. He had not expected to miss a room at the end of a corridor in a steel processing facility on the South Side of Chicago, but he had learned, in six months, that the things you did not expect to matter were often the ones that did.
He picked up the phone and called his father.
His father answered on the third ring with the unhurried quality of a man who had been doing something with his hands and had set it down to answer. "Garrett."
"The community centre in Evanston," Garrett said. "How's it going."
"The wiring is done. Patrick Walsh did good work." His father's voice had the warmth it had when he was talking about something that had been built correctly. "The acoustic specifications for the performance space required a particular kind of attention. He understood what I was trying to do."
"Cait's father."
"A careful man. We've spoken three times now." A pause. "He told me about the plant. About what she did in November."
"She built the case in three weeks before the acquisition was announced."
"He told me. He told me about the spreadsheet." His father was quiet for a moment. "Three hundred and forty families, Garrett."
"Yes."
"You helped with that."
"I followed the data."
"That's what Patrick said you'd say," his father said. There was something in his voice that Garrett had not heard in some time, something that was not pride exactly but was adjacent to it, the tone of a man who had been waiting for something and had found it. "She's good, then. The girl."
"She's exceptional," Garrett said.
His father was quiet again. Then: "Bring her to Boston. When you're ready. Your mother would like to meet her."
"I will," Garrett said. He looked at the pale oval on the wall, the document tube mark, the small evidence of time spent. "I will."
He hung up. He sat in the room at the end of the corridor with the phone on the desk and the window behind him and the month-six report sent and the liaison term ending in two days, and he thought about what his father had said: three hundred and forty families.
He had heard that number so many times in six months that it had become, at some point he could not precisely identify, something other than a number.
It had become a fact in the way that the maintenance log was a fact and Ota's schedule was a fact and the capacity projection was a fact: a thing with weight, a thing that meant something outside of its mathematical value.
He had started with a number and arrived at a fact, which was, he thought, the distance between the person who had read the file on the plane and the person sitting in this room now.
He was glad of the distance. He had covered it by doing the thing his father had always told him was the only reliable method: paying attention to what was actually there, rather than what the model said should be there.
He picked up the report template for the Wisconsin facility, which Victor had sent yesterday. He read the first page. He put it down.
He would read it properly on Monday. Today was not Wisconsin. Today was this room and this building and the last two days of the thing he had built here, which deserved his full attention for as long as he had it.