31. Gavin
GAVIN
The board doesn’t make a ceremony of taking my job, and I’m grateful for that.
They do it on Tuesday morning in the conference room on the top floor of our Manhattan offices, the one with the good coffee and the photographs of every plane we’ve ever bought.
The very first one is by the door, a secondhand jet parked in front of a hangar with a blue tarp over half the roof.
Rebecca and I are standing in front of it in borrowed coveralls, grinning like idiots.
Nobody’s taken it down yet. I don’t ask them to.
The chairman doesn’t dress it up. “We told you to go or we’d find somebody who would,” he says. “You didn’t go. So we’re going to find somebody.”
“I know.”
“Until we do, I’ll run things myself. You’ll keep your seat at this table. But you don’t run it anymore.”
I could argue. I built the place from one leased plane and a leaky roof, and I know more about it than everybody else in this room put together.
I could call in favors and make phone calls and make this ugly for months.
A year ago I would have, and I’d have won, and I’d have called it standing up for what I built.
“All right,” I say.
He waits for more. There isn’t any.
Dom’s waiting in the hall when I come out, in his work jacket, with a coffee from the cart downstairs.
He flew home last night, ahead of his wife and the boys, to help pack up this end, and he took the train into the city instead of waiting for me to come to him.
He rides down with me and doesn’t say anything in the elevator. At the lobby doors he stops.
“I heard you ruined a good pair of shoes,” he says.
“And a coat.”
Dom nods like he’s filing that away for later. “See you at the hangar.”
That afternoon I drive out to Teterboro and talk to everybody at once in the big hangar, because they deserve to hear it from a person and not from the news.
There’s no stage. The mechanics sit on toolboxes and the pilots lean on the wing of a jet that’s in for new brakes, and the office staff drove out from the city and are standing together near the door in their good shoes, looking at the oil on the floor.
London’s on a big screen on a rolling stand, and I can see them sitting in their own hangar at Farnborough, the crews I hired and moved across an ocean, in the jackets with our name on the back.
I keep my hands at my sides so nobody sees them shake.
I tell them the London base is closing. I tell them our biggest client over there walked because I didn’t show up in person the way they asked, and that he only wanted me because I never let him get to know anybody else.
I tell them I’m not running the company anymore.
I tell them Deb Kowalski is staying in Farnborough to run what’s left, the last flights and the shutting down and the small crew that’ll stay on to meet our New York clients when they land in England.
I tell them the people in London will get paid through the end, and anybody who wants to come home gets their move paid for, and we’ll find as many of them jobs over here as we can.
I’d love to tell them it’ll be everybody. I can’t.
Dom’s sitting on a toolbox up front, and when I’m done, he puts his hand up. He’s known me since the leaky roof, and he taught me how to change a tire on a jet back when I thought I knew everything.
He crosses his arms. “I’ll say what everybody’s thinking. Did you pick a greenhouse over us?”
Nobody moves. On the screen, a woman in the front row in Farnborough has her arms folded so tight her knuckles are white.
I could dress it up. I could talk about the client being unreasonable, or the timing, or how nobody could have seen it coming. Some of that’s even true.
“I picked my wife,” I say. “She called and said she needed me, and I turned the car around, and I’d do it again.
” I make myself keep looking at him. “But she isn’t why London failed.
London failed because I never let anybody else run it.
Deb asked me for months to take that client’s meetings, and I kept saying later, because I wanted every piece of it in my own hands.
If he’d known her, one missed dinner wouldn’t have sunk you.
That’s on me. It isn’t on my wife, and it isn’t on anybody in that hangar. ”
Dom doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he nods once, and uncrosses his arms, and that’s as close as Dom’s ever come to a hug.
The woman on the screen doesn’t uncross hers. She shouldn’t. Nobody claps, and I’m glad. When I finally walk back out to the car, my shirt’s stuck to my back.
That night and the next night, I call every person I moved to London, one at a time.
I sit at the kitchen counter in my apartment with a list, and a glass of water I forget to drink, and I call them in the order I hired them. It’s morning over there. Some of them are making their kids breakfast. Some of them are in the hangar, packing up tools they only unpacked last year.
Dom’s wife picks up in Farnborough with one of their little boys yelling in the background.
She tells me the boys finally stopped crying about their friends back home, and now they’ll start crying about their friends over there.
She isn’t cruel about it. She just tells me.
I tell her I’m sorry, and she says she knows, and that it doesn’t help, and she’s right on both counts.
Then she asks if Dom’s job back here is real or if I was just being nice at the hangar, and I tell her it’s real, and I mean it.
Tanya, who sold her car and all her furniture to go, tells me her mother’s thrilled and the only person who’s going to be upset is her landlord.
Then she tells me I’m buying her a couch.
She makes me laugh, and I didn’t think anybody was going to make me laugh this week.
Right before she hangs up, she asks if my wife’s flowers made it, and I have to put the phone down on the counter for a second.
A captain I hired away from a big airline hangs up on me before I’ve finished my first sentence. I call him back later and leave a message saying the same thing I said to everybody else, and I don’t blame him.
When I’m done, it’s the middle of the night here. I sit in the dark kitchen and don’t turn on the television.
My mother sends me one message, on Wednesday.
You chose this.
It hurts less than I expected, and it keeps hurting longer. I write back the only true word I have.
Yes.
Thursday is one of my visits. Allison lets me in without a word about the gate or the board or anything I said in front of the cameras. Her ring is still on its chain under her sweatshirt. I know because Henry grabs it when she hands him over, and neither of us says anything about that either.
He’s decided this week that bottles are beneath him unless he’s holding them himself, and he glares at me over this one like I’ve done him a personal wrong.
I’ve never been so happy to be glared at.
Through the glass behind Allison, the frost cloth is folded in a stack on the loading dock, and Luis is loading the first Easter lilies onto the truck.
When he needs changing, I open the clean diaper before I take off the dirty one and keep a hand over his stomach, because I learned that lesson the hard way.
Allison sits at the table with a stack of supplier invoices while I snap him into his sleeper.
When she leans over to look, I catch her shampoo, and my whole body tips toward her before I can stop it.
“Too tight?” I ask.
She checks one snap without getting up. “No.”
We talk about Henry and the calendar and nothing else. He refused a bottle from Janet until she swapped the nipple. Allison asks if I can push Sunday back an hour because a supplier’s coming, and I check, and I say yes.
At the end I sit down with the notebook and write what he ate and when he was changed, and the time on his play mat, and then, because it’s true, found his own feet today and couldn’t believe his luck.
I want to ask her what the walk up the drive meant to her. I want to ask if walk with us was about one stretch of gravel or about more than that, and whether she’s thought about the divorce, and whether I’m allowed to hope. My shoulders ache from not asking.
I put on my coat when my time’s up and say good night. She says, “Good night, Gavin,” and I go.
At my apartment I heat up soup and eat it standing at the counter. I’ve lost London, and my job, and a lot of people’s good opinion of me, some of them people I respect. I might still lose my marriage. Henry will still need me on Sunday either way.
I’m rinsing the bowl when somebody knocks. I figure it’s the doorman with a package I don’t remember ordering.
I open the door.
Allison’s in the hallway in her work coat, with her car keys still in her hand and dirt on the knee of her jeans.