by Dani Collins
Chapter Seven
Paige spent the weekend coming to terms with everything, ignoring the phone, sleeping on and off through the day, talking to her employer, then talking to her Dad again, making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. She would trade away her weeks in Palm Springs so he could have the timeshare now; he would give her full control of his share in Roy Furnishings. Full.
She didn’t want to do it, but she kept coming back to what she hadn’t quite said aloud to Sterling: if she took on the partnership in the factory, she could sell when she thought the price was right and take control of how to disburse its value. She could make sure her mother, Olinda, even Rosie if it turned out to be necessary, received what her father owed them.
At least her boss had given her a leave of absence for six months, not wanting her to quit outright.
She sighed, wishing she could have stayed in Seattle and pretended none of this was her problem. Instead she had to work up the courage to leave her car and enter the Roy Furnishings building. It was like staring at shark-infested waters, knowing she had to dive into them and could only pray she would reach land before she was torn to shreds.
Ugh.
Paige unwound her white fingers from the steering wheel so she could run them through her hair and felt the catch of hairspray. Damn it, she’d forgotten she’d pasted it so carefully into place. Now she’d go in there with bed-head, instead of possessing an air of sophisticated authority.
Confidence was ninety percent the outward appearance of it. At least, that’s what she’d always told herself.
Fussing her hair back into place while craning her neck to see herself in the rear view mirror, she acknowledged that she was kidding herself, thinking she could make a worse impression than she already had. Walter was going to welcome her as warmly as a barium enema.
At least Sterling wouldn’t be here. It would be her and Walter, and hopefully six months at most.
Forcing herself to leave the safety of the car, she walked across the parking lot and entered the glass door of the entrance.
To a world of silence. It was like The Quiet Earth in here.
“Hello?” she called.
The computers were outdated and not worth much, so no one was likely to rob them, but this was weird.
“Hello?” Paige called again, reminding herself she worked here now. It was okay to wander through the archway and past Olinda’s abandoned desk, down the hall to glance into the empty break room.
The absence of the hum of machinery inside the factory walls kept her from climbing the stairs. Perhaps something had happened out on the floor?
She cautiously pushed into the world she’d only glimpsed briefly, years ago when she’d worked in the office. The temperature dropped five degrees and it smelled like sawdust and metal out here, with an underlying waft of cool, outside air.
The receptionist she’d seen last week was standing just inside the door. She turned her head and whispered, “Walter expected you fifteen minutes ago. He started without you.”
Started what? Paige followed her gaze to where everyone was gathering in a group.
Oh, goody. Walter had rallied the troops for a public stoning.
She tried to fold her arms against the chill, but her briefcase was too heavy in her left hand and her other one was full of purse and insulated coffee mug.
Walter stood head and shoulders above the gathering, standing on a platform that had been raised by a forklift. He was addressing the crowd like a politician delivering his stump message.
Oh, goody. Worse than a stoning. Speeches.
His voice echoed off the concrete walls and his expression was predictably under-enthused. “...it’s not just our product that is meant to last for generations. The company has been handed down over the years as well. Today we’re in that position again.”
He was reading from something, glancing at people in the front row as he spoke, behaving so not impressed it was hard to watch.
At least he was making an effort to smooth things over. She relaxed a fraction, grateful for the small favor. Unless he intended her to stand beside him and address the crowd herself, at which point she’d hold her breath until she fainted.
“New blood is a shot in the arm...” Walter stretched his arm forward as if struggling to focus on the page, frowned at what he was reading, then, without referring to the written speech, said to the front row, “but it needs to be tempered with experience. So I’ll still be here, taking an active role in the running of the company.”
Was that supposed to be a warning?
Walter wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the people closest to him.
Paige went onto her tip-toes long enough to see the dark curly hair of Evelyn Roy, Walter’s wife, along with some of the long-term Roy employees: Olinda was up there, and so was Quinn, the factory foreman, an enormous African American who had intimidated her back when she’d worked here that summer.
“In fact, I’m not so much handing over the reins as training my successor,” Walter said. “Because one day Sterling will own the company, but not yet.”
Paige felt as though she’d broken off the heel of one of her pumps, staggering a step as she absorbed the shock. And then Quinn shifted and she could see the spikes of Sterling’s blond hair, saw Sterling step forward and say something to his father, and watched Walter scan the crowd until he found Paige.
It hit her like a poison dart, that hostile glare.
“Sterling just reminded me. Grady’s daughter will be standing in for him, but I’ll buy her out as soon as possible.”
All heads swiveled toward her. A hundred apathetic expressions turned avidly curious.
Wonderful. She couldn’t feel more welcome. And since when was Sterling going to be here? Walter hadn’t said anything about that when she’d called him. Although she’d kept the conversation very short, simply stating that Grady was retiring and she would be exercising the option clause until she could determine the company’s value, at which point she would let him buy her out. They could talk more today, she had said.
She was so thrown by Sterling still being here, she couldn’t so much as force a smile, let alone form a response to break the silence.
“Finances aren’t my strength.” Sterling’s boot made a scraping sound as he shifted to stand in front of his father, addressing the crowd and drawing their attention. “So I’m looking forward to having Paige here.”
“I’ll bet you are,” someone muttered to the left, and the crowd’s tension snapped into a ripple of muted snickers.
~ * ~
The look of acute betrayal that Paige sent Sterling hit like a punch in the throat.
“You’ll appreciate her presence, too,” he said, voice ringing with displeasure, “since she’ll be signing your paychecks.” He gave the crowd a second to absorb that. “We’ll both be in your department sometime in the next hour to answer any questions. Meanwhile, Mom is ready to serve the cake.”
He started to call Paige up, but she was bolting, shoulders hunched, head down, briefcase banging against her thigh.
Ah, the first day of work. Always a delightfully low set point from which things could only improve.
He hoped.
He took a step to follow her, but his father clamped a heavy hand on his shoulder and used him as a brace to step off the raised pallet.
“I told you there’d be talk with both of you here,” he muttered in Sterling’s ear.
And his partner, Patty, had told him when he called to ask her to start the job in Texas without him, that he’d regret it.
It was too early to let anyone start the I-told-you-so’s.
His mother approached, a big cake-knife held in front of her. “You didn’t read all of it, Walt.”
His father snorted. “You made it sound like I was handing it over to him.”
“Well, what are you going to do once you’re Mayor? Sterling—”
“—can only stay a few weeks,” Sterling reminded her.
/>
“Exactly,” his father said.
In the row of windows along the elevated ceiling, Sterling saw the light come on in Grady’s office, behind the closed blinds.
The tension eased in him. He’d feared she was hightailing, but she was staying. Good.
If he had to be here, so did she, damn it. This was all her fault.
“Come have the first piece of cake,” his mother ordered Sterling, smiling her company smile at the employees milling around the giant sheet cake she’d commissioned within seconds of Sterling’s stating he would temporarily work at the factory. As his mother moved to stand behind the cartons of bed components that formed the table, she said, “You’ll want some of these roses, won’t you Sterling?”
Patty was right. Sticking around meant putting all the wrong ideas into his mother’s head. He really wished he could have flown out as scheduled, but he could see as clearly as Paige did that the factory was dying from the top down.
If the economy had been killing it, he might have let nature take its course, but better management was what it was crying out for. As much as he hated to acknowledge Roy Furnishings as his ‘heritage,’ he would hate to carry the blame if it folded. Half the town depended on their employment here. His conscience wouldn’t let him turn his back.
As a compromise, he had talked his father into letting him professionally assess the factory, offer a report the same as he would on any production facility in need of a ten year plan. He also promised to head hunt a new sales manager for Grady’s role and an operations manager to run the place after his father was elected.
Exit strategies were paramount when cutting a deal like this.
But he hadn’t believed his father when he had claimed there would be talk. Seriously? That was fifteen years ago.
He was still having trouble seeing himself as being in the wrong with Paige, but if that remark earlier was an example of the harassment she’d been fielding over the years, he couldn’t blame her for hating him.
“Sterling.”
“Hmm?”
“The corner?” his mother prompted.
“Stand in it?”
She pointed at the cake, exasperated.
“Oh, yes, that’s fine. Two please. One for Paige.” He needed to smooth over their bad start.
His mother’s smile faltered. “If she’s capable of auditing the books, I’m sure she’s capable of fetching her own piece of cake.” She handed him a filled plate and a plastic fork.
“Never mind.” Sterling picked up a second fork. “We’ll share.”
~ * ~
“Happy Birthday.”
Paige looked up from her father’s desk to find Sterling had climbed the stairs to the upper floor with a square of cake so perfect it raised the real estate value of her father’s office.
She ducked her head to hide the dampness in her eyes and tucked her father’s scratchy wool cardigan into a drawer, resisting the urge to hug it. She was never going to forgive her father for setting her up like this, but he was still her emotional harbor.
“Are you all right?”
She ignored him and continued her attempt to cleanse by disposing of her father’s old cigarette butts, ashtray and all, into the trashcan on the floor beside the desk. It landed with a loud thunk. After the ashtray went a half-empty package of cigarettes and a rotting can of vegetable juice.
Hadn’t anyone entered this room at all since his heart attack? Hadn’t they noticed it smelled like he had died in here?
“If I put this on the desk, is it going into the garbage, too?” Sterling asked.
She collected all the pens, the stapler and the staple puller and tossed them into the drawer. The photo of Rosie went into the next drawer down, so she would remember to take it with her when she grabbed her purse on her way home, along with the faded photo of her own wedding and the decade-old photo of a beaming Lyle holding Zack after her nephew had lost his first tooth.
“Hi, I’m Sterling Roy. Apparently we’re going to be working together.” He came forward, hand extended.
She had enough control of her emotions to look up at him now, glanced at his hand, shifted her gaze to the plate in his other hand, thought about how satisfying it would be to smoosh that cake into his maroon-colored tie, but she was all the way on this side of the desk and had a lot of fumigating ahead of her. Number one item on the list being to remove this louse because she sure as heck didn’t want to work with him, no matter how much he was looking forward to having her here.
Why, oh why did she have to be so affected by him? These stupid digs wouldn’t have the power to humiliate her if she could quit flashing back to this pathetic desire to be noticed by Sterling Roy.
“Come on, Paige,” he said, sounding patient but insistent, hand dropping.
She stacked some manila files and squared them against the desktop with a muted ripple of thumps. “I thought you were leaving.”
“I told you, change of plans. It’s only a few weeks.”
Outside the office, voices carried from below as people began coming back to their desks. He reached backward to press her door closed.
She set the files aside. Where did he get the ability to project authority like that? Sure, the power suit was an amplifier of confidence and there’d been some superb engineering on the side of nature, but she’d put on her dark plum suit and still—
It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to think about how either of them looked.
“You didn’t tell me about any change of plans. What do you mean it’s only a few weeks? Aren’t you exercising the option clause? Taking over?”
“No. I’m just helping out. Consulting. I left you a message, explaining.”
She opened the bottom drawer again and dug her cell from her purse. Using her thumb, she checked and saw two texts from Anthony, both annoying conditions to her father using the condo in Palm Springs, and one from Britta that she had yet to return.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Not there. Your dad’s place.”
“Oh. I never listen to the machine. It’s downstairs and usually for Lyle.”
“Give me the number for that, then.” He nodded at her cell.
She hugged it to her chest. “Why?”
“Because I might have another message for you while we’re working together.”
Giving him her number would be a lot like agreeing to work together. “I’m extremely selective about who I give this number to.”
“You’re extremely selective about a lot of things, aren’t you?” The look he gave her had male consideration written all over it and made her insides flip-flop.
She dropped her phone into her purse and shoved the drawer shut.
“Paige—” he began.
She turned to face the low, wide shelf over the filing cabinet beneath the window. It was cluttered with knobs and drawer-fronts, tins of wood-stain and stacks of brochures.
“What am I supposed to do with all of this?”
She heard Sterling move toward her and glanced over her shoulder, instantly alarmed as he ventured close. It was silly. She so needed to get a grip.
He set the cake on the desk and snagged a cardboard box from the top of the tall filing cabinet behind the door. The box already had a few broken sticks of doweling in it.
“Put everything in this.”
She took the box and set it on the seat of the chair.
“You might want to eat before you get your hands dirty, though.” He hitched his thigh onto the corner of the desk, nudged the cake toward her, fanned out two forks.
Give him her number. Eat his cake. Return his inviting smile.
“We can’t both work here, Sterling. It makes people say things.” It made her think things.
He carefully set the forks on either side of the cake, then gave her a very sober look. “I do owe you an apology, Paige.”
She tensed, wishing she wouldn’t risk touching him if she brushed past to get to the door.
“In my
defense, I didn’t intentionally start people talking back then. I really did think you and Lyle had set me up. That’s why I never tried to stop it. The gossip didn’t take off until after I was gone so I didn’t realize how bad it became for you. No woman should have to feel threatened like that, especially a kid. I should have talked to you when you called, but I was mad. I’m sorry.”
She couldn’t find her voice. He remembered that she’d tried to call him? She swallowed. Finally managed to nod jerkily. “Okay,” she choked, worried about the burn in her eyes and the back of her throat. She would not cry. No way.
She looked toward the door, silently willing him to leave.
He just sat there staring at her.
“Okay,” she finally said. “I didn’t set you up. Dad was just being a dad. His reaction was sexist and old-fashioned and he was probably drunk. I can’t apologize for him because I don’t think his behavior should be excused, but I didn’t expect or want him to beat you up.” She waited some more, face hot.
Still he didn’t move.
This was hell.
“Are we okay?” he asked.
“I told you, I don’t hold onto things. But other people do.” She looked behind her, toward the window that looked onto the factory floor. This was so hard. “Small town, small minds. People are going to talk if we’re both here. I’d rather you weren’t.”
“They’ll learn very quickly that saying things out of turn isn’t a good career move.”
She snorted, but she wanted to believe him. At the same time, she didn’t want to see him every day. The tension would kill her. She licked her lips.
“I don’t understand why you want to be here, anyway. A few days ago, it wasn’t on your agenda. If you’re not taking over, what will you do?”
“How many sales calls are you intending to take?”
“Oh, please. Hiring a qualified salesman isn’t tough when you know people. Both your father and I do.” She reached for the objects on the shelf and started loading them into the box he’d handed her.
“Could you agree on one?”
“Fair point. We didn’t agree on you.”
He snorted, saying something like, “You’d be surprised,” but before she could do more than glance at him, he was continuing. “You two need someone running interference. Mediation is one of my many skills. Did you know that?”