by Claire Adams
“Well, it’s not like I knew that I was going to be rehired today,” he says. “Besides, I kind of, you know, already found another job.”
“You really could have told me that,” I scold. “I’m going to look like a fucking idiot when you don’t show up here.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” he says. “I’ll totally quit this job and come back to work for you, only…”
I’m waiting for the end of the phrase, but it looks like it’s not going to come of its own freewill.
“What?” I ask, “Only what?”
“Well, I kind of promised these guys that I’d stay on at least until the job at that store finished up,” he says. “I figured you’d hire me back eventually, but I didn’t know you’d do it so soon.”
“This really sucks,” I tell him. “You know you’re putting me in one hell of a position here.”
“Sorry, bro,” he says. “I need a job, and I didn’t think I was going to have one with you for at least a little while longer. I can talk to my boss here and see if we can—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I sigh. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks, boss,” he says. “If you want, I really do have the day off tomorrow, so I’d be happy to drive up there—you know, assuming that I can get a little reimbursement for gas money.”
I hang up the phone.
Fuck.
How the hell am I going to spin this so I don’t end up looking like the idiot I apparently am.
Sure, it makes sense now that I should have called Alec before giving that ultimatum, but in my defense, Alec’s one of the laziest motherfuckers I know. How was I supposed to know he’d actually go out and get himself a new job?
I walk back into the store, smiling at Linda as I pass her on my way to the newly sunken floor which, after a whole lot of back and forth and more wasted concrete than I’m prepared to admit, now sits level at sixteen-and-a-half inches below the rest of the flooring.
Really, unless Jessica comes out here with a list of changes sometime in the next day or so, we’re pretty much done here.
The old storage room was taken out weeks ago, the floor—well, we’ve already covered that—and my team is now in the process of setting the window.
There are a few more things left to do, mostly small and cosmetic, but maybe this won’t be the end of the world after all.
I really need to learn how not to be optimistic about anything.
Jessica’s door opens and Mr. Burbank comes walking out with a smile on his face. Jessica’s smiling, too, but hers is strained.
She waits for Burbank to pass hosiery before turning toward me and motioning for me to meet her in her office.
This should be fun.
I step into the office and close the door.
“You’re probably going to want witnesses,” she says. “In fact, knowing that someone could see what I would really, really like to do to you right now is probably the only thing that’s going to keep me from doing it.”
“I know I took a hard line before, and I just—”
“I’m not done talking,” she interrupts. “It’s bad enough that you forced that ridiculous decision onto me, but doing it where one of my most important business contacts could potentially hear you was beyond irresponsible and I can’t tell you how livid I am at you for it.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I tell her. “It was wrong of me to do that. So, to make it up to you, I’ve decided not to bring Alec back onto my team until we’ve finished up this contract.”
“Great!” she says manically. “That’s just great! I was so pissed off at you that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what Mr. Burbank was proposing, and I just agreed to a cost structure that’s going to completely gut my profit margin on everything he’s going to supply for me.”
I wince.
“How much does he supply for you?” I ask.
“All told,” she says, “about a third of everything I carry.”
I’m about to tell her that a third isn’t that bad, but then I pull my head out of my ass.
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” she says, “shit is right. Do you want to know what’s worse? Do you want to know what’s even worse than that?”
I cringe. “It gets worse than that?”
“Yeah,” she says. “You know how I wanted you to remodel the plus section so I could expand it?”
“Yeah,” I answer, confused. “That’s kind of why we’re here.”
“Oh, I know,” she laughs. “What’s worse than everything else is that I just agreed to make Mr. Burbank my sole supplier of plus-sized clothing. So now, all of the extra business I was going to do giving women something chic and sexy to wear for a price they won’t have to sell their firstborn to afford is fucked! I have two choices: Either I can keep the prices where I want them and lose thousands of dollars a month on clothes that I’m actually selling, or I can raise the prices on everything in the store—‘cause I’m sure as hell not going to make one demographic of women pay more than another—completely obliterating my whole mission statement, business plan and just about the only reason that I got into this stupid fucking business in the first place.”
It’s certainly not my fault that she blew it in her meeting, but I really didn’t help matters, either.
“But hey, at least you had a change of heart and decided not to follow through with the threat that put me in this position in the first place. That’s just perfect,” she says.
I don’t know what to say to her, but she’s waiting for me to say something.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
At least it’s a true statement.
“You’re sorry,” she says. “Well, that magically makes it all better. You want to know what pisses me off even more than everything else I just told you?” she asks.
“Do I?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” she says. “It’s actually good news for you. I’ve already sunk so much into the whole remodel that there’s no way it would be cost-effective for me to just fire your ass once and for all. So, even after this situation which you and your men caused by breaking into my store, letting the wrong guy quit while protecting the one who actually did it, yelling at me in front of my employees—”
“Hey, we both did that,” I interrupt.
Apparently my attempt at levity is not appreciated.
“Then,” she says, “to top it all off, you all but blackmail me into agreeing to do what you want me to do in the first place which, let’s face it, boils down to me covering your ass for a mistake you made, putting me in a position where I wasn’t in any way prepared to negotiate a business deal with one of the top clothing suppliers in New York, and I can’t fire you!”
“Hold on,” I tell her. “I know you’re upset, and I know it’s because of me, but will you just take a quick walk with me? I want to show you something that might cheer you up.”
“What do you think could possibly cheer me up right now?” she asks.
“Just come with me,” I tell her. “It may not make everything better, but it might just turn things around enough that you can go home tonight with at least one thing to be happy about.”
I would tell her that it’s not my fault she couldn’t stop her emotions from affecting her business transactions but, ironically, I would feel too guilty.
“Just give me a minute,” she says and takes a deep breath.
“Okay,” I tell her.
“Outside,” she says.
I walk out of the office and I can hear her heels behind me. I turn around and she stops in front of me.
“What?” she asks.
“Follow me,” I tell her.
From there, I walk her up to the front where the guys are putting the finishing touches on the window.
“Now, we’re going to keep the grating up on the outside—permanently if you’d like it, otherwise, at least until the window cures—but that’s basically done. I need to get my carpet guy in here to ta
ke care of this section, but I can call him tonight and have him here by tomorrow. Every possible bit of space that we could get without encroaching on another section is here, the sunken floor is set and ready to be carpeted with the rest of it and other than a few things here and there, we’re basically done.”
“That’s great,” she says, smiling. “You guys have done such awesome work. Thank you so much.” She leans in toward me, saying, “So you knew that you were this close and you still went through with your intimidation tactic?”
She has a point.
“It was kind of a principle thing,” I whisper back, hoping the guys aren’t paying too close attention to what Jessica and I are talking about. “I am very sorry about that, though. I should have thought it through.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “Hey guys. Everything looks great, but seeing all of your amazing work has given me a few more ideas that we can do to make this space even better than it is right now.”
“What are you doing?” I murmur into her ear.
“You’ll be doing a few upgrades free of charge,” she says. “If you don’t like that, I’ll simply nullify your contract for unwillingness to complete the project as requested.”
“You can’t do that,” I tell her, becoming acutely aware that it’s not so fun to be on the business end of a personal vendetta. “The project that was requested is hardly the project that we ended up with. If anyone violated the contract, it was you.”
“Actually,” she says, turning toward me seemingly just so she can look me in the eyes when she says it, “I had my lawyer add in a clause before we signed that changes to the initial plans could be made at my sole discretion at any point during the contract. So,” she continues, “here’s an ultimatum for you: You either do exactly what I tell you to do, free of charge, or we tear up your contract and you and your men are going to be getting a much smaller paycheck than you thought you had coming, and I’m not just talking about a few bucks either. I’m talking six figures.”
This is why you shouldn’t let a client pay you in installments and why you always, always read a contract twice.
Chapter Seven
Setting Boundaries… Or Not
Jessica
“So why don’t you want me to know your name or age?” he writes.
“Just because and you haven’t told your name or age either.”
My new phone buddy and I have been chatting it up on a daily basis, and I think Kristin is onto me.
“Well I’m just around thirty but my name…I like to keep the suspense.”
“Same here…”
“Why don’t you want to talk about what you do for a living then?” he writes.
“At this point, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t talk about it without coming across as bitter and, really, there are better things to talk about.”
He writes back, “Yeah, I can understand that. So, what do you want to talk about?”
“What do you do when the thing you love doing gets soiled by someone who can’t help but ruin everything?” I ask.
“I thought we weren’t talking about work,” he writes.
“You’re right, of course,” I respond. “How long was your longest relationship?”
“One year,” he writes. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I really thought she was it. You?”
“I really wouldn’t feel bad about that,” I answer. “My longest relationship was for a couple years with an older guy.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“It turned out that he didn’t really like me, so much as he wanted to make someone else jealous. It kind of sucked figuring that out.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” he writes, “my last relationship ended when I came home to find my girlfriend packing up my things.”
I smile. “Yeah, that might be worse.”
“Oh, what’s worse is that she’d apparently been ‘dating’ someone else for a large portion of our relationship. He was there helping box up my stuff.”
“All right,” I type, “I think you win this round.”
“So, have you ever gotten close to tying the knot?” he writes.
It’s really not a question I want to answer, mainly because it’s one of the few questions to which I really don’t have a good answer.
“Work always seemed more pressing,” I write. I send another, saying, “Of course, I always thought that work was going to be the catalyst for the right kind of life, but apparently that’s not exactly as advertised.”
“Isn’t it great how we’re always told that work is going to make our lives the most livable, but it just seems to get in the way of everything else?” he writes. A few seconds later, I get another message from him, saying, “I know it’s trite by now, but aren’t we supposed to work to live, not the other way around?”
“That’s what I’ve always heard,” I write and laugh as I continue, “but I have a sneaking suspicion the people telling us that are the ones who are actually benefitting from the work we do.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about work?” he writes. “It seems like that’s what’s really on your mind right now.”
“I’m sure. I’m sorry. I’m just trying, although failing, to think of something else to talk about. Work is really the only thing I do anymore.”
“No sorries,” he writes. “You said ‘anymore’ what did you do before you worked all the time?”
It takes a minute for me to recall, but my mind finally settles on a vague, hazy memory, “I used to paint. I was never really that good at it, but I really enjoyed doing it all the same.”
“Why don’t you paint now?” he writes.
I’m sitting on my couch, and I look out the window at the night. There are a lot of things I’ve had to push to the side in order to make it work at the store.
This is what it’s like to own a business and not be super rich.
I type, “Sometimes, to fulfill one dream, you have to give up on others.”
It’s the most depressing thing I could think to write, but it’s also the most accurate.
People don’t get ahead by trying to follow all of their dreams at the same time. It’s like multitasking: Yeah, you can work on multiple things at once, but it takes longer and nothing gets done nearly as well. It’s all about focus.
The phone beeps.
“I understand that you have to refine your plans, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose who you are and the things you love in the process,” he writes.
Yeah, I kind of do.
Who knows what would happen if I wasn’t there all day every day? Someone would probably end up breaking in and I’d end up getting a phone call from the security provider on my way homes from my cancer-ridden mother’s house.
Wait.
It’s not that I don’t trust my staff—I wouldn’t have hired them if I didn’t. It’s just that they have a way of doing things and I have a way of doing things.
While I’m there, I can oversee them and correct their course, but if I’m not there, they’ll just do things the way they think they should be done, rather than the way I know they should be done.
My phone beeps again.
“Still there?”
I write back, “Yeah. I guess I just don’t trust that things would get done if I wasn’t always there to oversee it.”
I flip on the television, not so much for the entertainment value, more for the fact that it’s just nice to hear another voice than the one through which my thoughts come. Mine.
“Bad staff?” he asks.
“No,” I write, “they’re great. They helped me build this thing. They just don’t have the inside experience to deal with everything that could come through the door.”
The more I’m watching myself explain this, the less convinced I am that it’s the right course of action. The problem is that I don’t know how to do it any other way.
My phone beeps, and I read, “Why not?”
I sit there a
nd stare at the phone.
It’s a simple question that really should have a simple answer, but I’ve got nothing here.
I write back, “What do you mean?” just to by myself some more time, but I don’t think that’s going to work.
My phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jessica,” it’s my dad. “I don’t want to worry you, but your mother and I are in the hospital. She’s fine, but she’s in a lot of pain. I was wondering if you might be able to come and sit with her a bit tonight.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Of course, Dad, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“All right,” he says. “They’re going to go ahead and keep her here for a few hours. I guess they’re just going to go ahead and do the bone scans they had planned for her next appointment so she’s going to be here for a while. I just don’t want to have to leave her here all alone.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I have to get back to the house. A young couple made a late appointment for a walkthrough, and if they can’t see it tonight, they’re not going to be able to see it for at least another month,” he answers.
“A walkthrough? What are you talking about?” I ask.
The line is silent for a minute.
“We’re selling the house, dear,” he says quietly.
“What?” I ask. “Why?”
“Between my medical bills and your mother’s medical bills, I just don’t think we’re going to be able to keep up with the mortgage payments,” he says. “Don’t worry, though, we’ll be fine.”
“Let me help you,” I tell him. “I’ve got money saved up from the store. I can pay your mortgage until you two get back on your feet.”
“We couldn’t let you do that, Jessica,” he says. “You’ve worked hard for that money, and we really don’t need a house that big anymore. I think this is going to be for the best. With my health and your mother’s health, we’re not really going to be able to take care of all the upkeep on it anyway.”
“Dad, I can’t just sit by and watch you and Mom lose the house,” I tell him.
“It’s already done,” he says. “We’ve found a realtor and put it on the market. If this couple likes it as much in person as they did on the website, I think we might just get an offer tonight, maybe tomorrow.”