Carol didn’t say another word. She looked down at her summary like everybody else. She wanted the plant, and she didn’t want bankers. She didn’t want to pay the rates they’d insist on. She didn’t want to give up the control they’d insist she give up. She didn’t want anybody saying she couldn’t go right to the edge, and this plant was going to be on the edge for a while before suppliers and customers developed any confidence. Even in her dreams, this would never be any kind of growth engine, and as long as it was on the edge, it wouldn’t want to pay a penny of its cash flow on debt. If they worked their way back from the edge, they’d want a credit line, and they’d use it, but right now, please, she didn’t want bankers.
She looked at her plant and she walked away from everybody. She could almost hear Baxter laughing.
Anna Rose said, “This is not so much money.” She said it loudly, after Carol, though Carol had not walked very far. The volume was for anyone who thought Elizabeth couldn’t afford its fish plant.
It was working. Carol was closing, and now she felt guilty about it, about Anna Rose. Baxter would feel no guilt. He’d say, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Carol glanced at Easy, who kept his head down over his summary. She told herself that this company was a good thing. It was a good thing, and she was doing what she could to make it happen.
Parks said, “It’s a fair price. The plant can justify it. I have no problem trying to sell shares in this.”
Carol started to turn around to enter the conversation, and Baxter said, “For Christ sake do not turn around yet.”
Ben Garcia, bless his heart, the least likely guy in the circle, the furthest outside outsider, said, “I will invest in this plant, and I know more people who will invest.”
Baxter said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you planted him.”
“I’m in,” Buddy Taormina said.
“What do we need bankers for this?” Anna Rose said. “This is not so much we need bankers. I thought we decided no bankers.”
Carol turned around.
Anna Rose said, “Our town is not so poor. For this much, it is not poor at all.”
Parks said, “I think she’s probably right. We can get this.”
“It is no probably,” Anna Rose said. “What do bankers want with our building here? If they lend to us, they want us to fail so they can have the land and wait for condominiums at the next zoning.”
Carol started to speak, and Baxter said, “Shut up.”
Anna Rose said, “We can raise this much money in two, three days. We need more for emergencies, we can raise that. We better raise that. I am putting in half of what I have, and it is not so little. Everybody else, most of them, we don’t ask so much to risk, and we don’t have to ask so much. And some can give plenty and never notice. Two, three days.”
Easy was staring at Carol. He said, “You ought to be selling used cars, Carol.”
She made herself look him in the eye, but her heart was going oh-gee-whiz.
He said, “I hope you sell fish as good as you sell this run-down factory nobody wants.”
He didn’t say it as hard as it sounded. He was almost teasing, she thought.
Baxter said, “Tell this deltabilly to ante up and go trawl.”
Carol said, “I’m putting my own money where my mouth is,” and wished she didn’t sound defensive.
He shrugged and said, “It’s good, Carol.” He smiled, and she felt relieved.
Then she got hold of herself and turned mercilessly to Anna Rose. Anna Rose dove in. “Easy Parsons can give plenty. He owns that boat outright, and he is a high liner. I hate to say it—I am from generations of fishermen, and Ignacio is as good a fisherman as any of them—but Easy brings in more fish quicker than any captain from New Bedford to Portland. Easy is going to give us one hundred thousand dollars, and then he is going to make us listen to him. Ignacio owns two boats, but not both outright, and he has a family, so maybe he only gives a hundred thousand also.”
Garcia said, “I have family here and much family in El Salvador, and I will give two thousand.”
Parks said, “This is why I haven’t slept,” and he turned away from the group the way Carol had done.
But Carol didn’t think Parks was turning away to manipulate anybody. She expected he was deciding whether to really jump in. He faced the large, abandoned cold-storage building that belonged to the plant but was outside the fence. If Parks, who knew more than anyone else, pulled his rip cord, it was over. All of them knew that, and Carol knew she would not get another chance like this.
He turned back around and said, “I can commit two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We’re core investors, and we’re at the heart of operations. If we’re going to sell it, we better own it.”
Carol couldn’t laugh when Parks had just kicked in a nervous quarter of a million dollars, but she was glad.
When Easy held up two fingers, she didn’t understand until Parks said, “What’s that, big guy?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Anna Rose said. “He will give two hundred thousand, but now he is not talking because I said he would talk too much. Good. You sound best not talking, Ezekiel.”
Buddy said, “I can go a hundred and a half, but I’d rather start at a hundred.”
Carol said, “I can do eight hundred thousand.”
“I will put in three hundred thousand,” Anna Rose said.
“Ma.”
“Mind your own business. You don’t know what I have.”
Annette said, “I have twelve thousand dollars.”
Carol said, “Take a day to think about that. I want you on the team regardless. You, too, Ben.”
Annette said, “I’ve thought about it. If we get close and need extra, I can invest another six thousand.”
“Fair enough.”
“And now,” Anna Rose said, “we all together come to the kitchens.”
Carol laughed and said, “Yes. To the kitchens, Anna Rose.”
Anna Rose said, “I will make meetings for tonight and for tomorrow night, maybe the night after that.”
Garcia said, “I will help with my own people.”
Carol said, “Okay, but you have to come everywhere else, too, Ben. You answer the questions about whether and how the plant runs. I’d be surprised if there weren’t questions.”
Then she said to Parks, “What about the golfers and the Chamber, those people?”
Parks said, “My territory. I’ll put that kitchen together. Some of them will be Mathews’s pals, but I think they may want in regardless. Buddy, you and Easy need to set something up for the harbor guys your mother doesn’t reach.”
“Yes, but also,” Anna Rose said, “we need Ignacio and Ezekiel to come with us to all the kitchens so that people know we have the fresh fish.”
Baxter whispered, “Do not be in a room asking for money while that guy flirts with you.”
Carol told Baxter it was his turn to shut up, and the next thing out of her mouth was “Do we want Easy in the kitchens with us?”
Which she meant to sound like she was teasing him, but it sounded like Baxter. She looked at Easy and laughed so he’d know it was teasing, and even the laugh came out wrong.
Buddy joined in the laughter and pushed at Easy as if they were teenagers.
Easy looked away from Carol as if he were surprised and then right away looked back and grinned as if he couldn’t care less.
Carol blushed with shame. She’d said something mean. And worse, it was true—she didn’t want Easy in the kitchens disrupting her pitch for the money they needed to go forward.
“No,” Anna Rose said. “We need Easy. He is the best fisherman in our harbor and everyone will want to see he is with you. If only we could keep him from talking—you are right about that.”
Carol said, “Easy, forgive me.
I want you in every room where we sell this business.”
She hoped he would say something that forgave her. He left her alone.
She said, “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I wish I hadn’t sounded mean.”
She didn’t care what everyone else was thinking. And then she had to move on.
She told everyone as quickly as she could about two guys arriving late in the day from Baxter Blume to sell off the new plant and set up the stock offering for the old plant. She arranged to meet Parks at the new plant in half an hour to talk to the women on the line there. She told everybody to keep in touch with one another and with her.
She said loudly, a battle cry, “To the kitchens.”
Parks picked it right up. “To the kitchens.”
They, all of them but Easy and Carol, went to their cars calling, “To the kitchens.”
Carol walked next to Easy back along the narrow lane of sheds and the lobster building. Easy went in his lunging stride as if she were not there. He wore a green and blue plaid shirt over a black T-shirt, and he had on jeans and work boots, and Carol thought he belonged in this lane. He swung his boots; he swung the long bounce of his gait and the lengths of his arms.
Carol had a meeting in less than half an hour, and she walked fast the way she did. She was eager for her meeting, and yet this lane of decayed industrial waterfront was as gorgeous to her as the inside of the factory. Potholes held water from last night’s rain, and that water held the blue of the sky in oily iridescence.
She said, “Wait.”
He didn’t stop, and she said, “Please.”
She went half a dozen steps over to a corrugated wall that had been painted and faded to a surgical green only seven or eight feet up its twenty-foot height. The rest of the wall was battleship gray with chalk mottlings of bird splatter and brown runs of rust. She stood against the wall in her dark blue suit, and she spread her arms.
Easy looked at her, but she could not tell if he saw her. She was afraid that if he didn’t see her, no one who mattered would ever see her again. Dominic had seen her. She stayed where she was, as she was. She was a beauty in that lane, she had to be, and she closed her eyes. She heard his boots.
He put a callused finger on her lips. This was what Easy Parsons felt like. Before she could open her eyes, he kissed her. She didn’t even think to put her arms around him before he stopped and said, “You have a meeting at the new plant.” He didn’t laugh at that. She kissed him back, and he said, “Sooner or later,” and took her hand, and they walked around the rest of the harbor like that, holding hands.
Carol felt sick in her stomach because she knew how much effort and time it would take to make her company go. She didn’t mind that. She wanted her company. But she wanted Easy, too.
From Now On
As soon as she connected with Parks at the new plant, Carol put on a hair bag and a smock and shoe covers, and brought all the office staff down onto the floor. Annette was still confused about electricity usage in the old plant, and Carol said, “Okay. Let’s get on it,” and put it out of her mind.
She knew she’d want to stand on something, but she hadn’t planned that out. She looked around at the women who were the regular plant laborers. She looked as many in the eye as she could, and she nodded and smiled without pretending to be friends. She wanted to appear as if she were in charge and as if it didn’t matter what they thought of her. She had been on plant floors before this one, but this time was different.
She stood up straight and let the women look into her, and she hoped they could see she understood what plant work meant. She hoped they could see she was honest and was capable of running a company. She hoped they could see she was nervous but that she was steady despite being nervous.
She stood among them until all of the office staff, including Parks and Annette, was down and had mingled. In her father’s plants, and in almost all the places she’d shut down, the people in the offices were apart, upstairs mostly, so the upstairs was mostly the enemy. Her father called it “the upstairs” and hated and worshiped it.
In the working women’s faces here today, Carol saw envy, judgment, and curiosity, eagerness for a deal, and readiness to do work. She saw kindness and anxiousness and readiness to laugh. She saw assertion and reticence. She saw plain women and strong women and women who had been pretty and pretty girls who were tough. She saw a lot of reluctance to hope.
She looked down at a concrete floor that was so new the gray floor paint still had its gloss. She saw her feet massive in the shoe covers. She had great green hooves.
There had been a face that had looked able to laugh, and Carol tried to remember which one.
She looked up and searched the faces again and found that face, and she engaged those eyes.
Then she lifted one foot.
She looked at her raised foot, the giant hoof, and looked again at the eyes that might laugh. She imagined Baxter on the floor, which would have been a first for him and not a happy one.
She looked at her hoof again, and stood down on it, and then hopped, da-dum, da-dum, from hoof to hoof. She hopped like a kid pretending to ride a horse. She made just the gesture of her hands holding the reins.
It took no more than an instant. But everyone saw.
It was an instant that seemed an hour and made firing people seem a walk in the park.
And she heard Baxter’s voice in her head say, “What the hell are you doing?”
The woman made a low chuckle.
Carol heard that and made one more da-dum, da-dum, with her hands pulling on the reins now and her eyes on her horse and leaning back to stop.
The chuckle became a laugh.
Then Carol looked up at the woman who was laughing and laughed herself. They looked at each other and it was funny and they laughed out loud, and now she could look around at all of the other faces again, and they laughed. They laughed at Carol and they laughed with her. They laughed wondering what was going on, but they laughed.
She stood in her blue suit and her smock and her hair bag and her shoe covers, full of news, and Baxter said, “All right. Screw me.”
She let go of her horse and relaxed from the laughter and let everyone else relax.
She walked toward the first of the lines, and the women let her through, and she said to no one in particular, “Can I stand here on a part of the line?”
She was at a black belt on rollers and its stainless sheathing. She put her hands on the edge and looked around. “Will I break the belt?”
Somebody pushed through to spread a clean cloth over the edge and the belt. One of the Asian women.
Another woman said, “I’ll get a stepladder.”
Carol said, “I’m okay,” and she reached under her smock and hitched her pants and swung a knee up. She could still climb onto something she wanted to climb onto.
She didn’t worry about what she looked like. She was who she was, and this was what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it, and she didn’t give a shit about Baxter.
There were other hands on her, steadying her, some actually pushing to help her up.
She said, “Thank you,” without looking back. She put her weight on her own hands and got one foot beneath her and then the other. She gathered her balance, as much on the edging as she could be, and she stood.
She turned around to face them all, and the Asian woman who had brought the cloth looked up at her and said, “Phwoo,” with a gasp of breath as if she had had to climb up herself.
There was enough quiet that the “Phwoo” sounded out.
Carol said, “Phwoo,” and there was another general laugh.
Then she said, “Take a look around,” and she looked around herself at the fat boys’ new and too-shiny plant.
The walls were as glossy as the floor. Almost everything else but the belts, and there was a lot of everything els
e, was stainless. There was some signage, and some OSHA cautions in small red squares. There were a few yellow components beneath what must have been the ovens. There were lines of orange hosing. There were other stairs and there were gates and double doors for equipment. There were tracks to and from the freezers. There was a small, isolated line in its own alcove that she knew was for experimental products, though she was sure that the fat boys had never done, or imagined doing, any experiments. Overhead, weaving under and through brand-new iron roof trusses, painted a nice Rust-Oleum orange, were the tin and stainless ducts and vents and fans.
It was the opposite of the old plant. It was all whitewalls and chrome next to her bent Mustang. She liked her Mustang and she liked her old plant.
The people before her were quiet.
She said, “It’s a pretty place.” It was quiet, and she said, “You won’t work again in a place as pretty as this.” Now the quiet was listening in a different way. She said, “From here on out, it gets ugly.” Nobody was about to laugh now, and she didn’t smile. She said it and let it sit. All of the faces listened, and she listened with them. She looked once more around the fat boys’ meal ticket, and she heard a few feet shuffle in restlessness. She said, “From now on.” The shuffling stopped, and she said, “From now on, we’re going to be working in the old plant.”
Carol took a deep breath. She hadn’t just said something good—and she knew she had—she had said what she had wanted to say at burial after burial for all those years.
She thought she was fine by the time she got upstairs. She tried to lead Annette and three executive assistants back to the copy room on the executive floor, where they had been working since early that morning. But Annette stopped her, said “Thank you,” and held out her hand to shake, and then the other three said “Thank you” and shook her hand, and Carol teared up. She put an arm around Annette’s shoulders.
She let go of Annette and said, “Okay,” loudly, and everybody laughed. Then they went on and sorted piles and handed paper back and forth and ran copies of the takeaway material for suppliers and customers and anybody else who might be helpful. Aside from the five of them, the floor was empty.
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