by Penny Wylder
Finally, he clears his throat and nods. “Well. I did ask you to be honest, didn’t I? Be careful what you wish for.” Then, to my utter confusion, he bursts into laughter.
“I apologize, sir,” I stammer, unsure what’s happening. “I should have, um, I mean… I know you must be under a lot of pressure—”
“Oh no, no.” Mr. Hastings waves a hand at me to cut me off. “Don’t you go walking that back now. It’s the first time in a long time someone’s had the balls—ah, pardon the expression—to speak like that to me.” He continues chuckling as he reaches for a folder on his desk and flips it open. “Well, Ms. Rider, I was going to give you this option anyway, but now, knowing your temperament, I think it’s safe to say this would be an appropriate opportunity for you.”
Here it comes. My stomach sinks, and I dig my nails into my thighs now too, in order to brace myself. You want this, I remind myself. Severance pay will give you enough money to go home to Atlanta. To start over. But no matter how much I know that mentally, it doesn’t prepare me for the emotional turmoil of facing a firing. I’ve never been let go from a job before.
And then… “I’d like to transfer you.”
I blink. Squint from Mr. Hastings to the file he’s got open on the desk between us, then back to him. Is transferring code for firing? “To where?” I ask.
“To another branch.” He folds his hands on top of the desk and levels me with a stare. “I’m not going to lie, it won’t be much better than here. Worse, in fact, if the reports I’ve been getting are to be believed.”
My stomach sinks again. So I am being punished. “Why send me there, then?” I ask, nails still dug into my knees for support.
Mr. Hastings’s mouth quirks into a little sideways smile. “Because I think you can handle it,” he says. Then he shrugs and spreads his hands wide. “And because we’re desperate. This branch has the worst turnover rate of any location in LA at the moment. The word came from on high to refill it again, give the manager there one more chance to figure his shit out—pardon my language.”
I almost snort with laughter, but manage to stop myself just in time, and shake my head. “I’ve heard worse,” I reply, arching an eyebrow. Hell, I say worse on a daily basis. What does this guy think, I’m some delicate fainting violet? I clear my throat. “So I told you I wasn’t happy here, and you want to send me somewhere worse.” I lean back in my seat, crossing my arms over my chest. “Why should I go?”
“Well, if you’re this unhappy, I assume you’re already seeking employment elsewhere.” Mr. Hastings shrugs one shoulder. “I’ll be honest, your position here won’t much improve. You’re right about the lack of secretarial work—we need more assistants in this office. At least half a dozen of them, truth be told. But we’re prohibited from hiring anyone else at your level until some of the blowhards up at my level quit.” He tilts his head down to level me with a direct, frank stare. “You may have noticed in your hiring papers that we have a rather, ah… attractive severance package on offer. And it gets more attractive the more years you’ve got under your belt at the company. We’re not supposed to get rid of anyone at a high enough level that it would cause us too much financial pain, which leads to us getting into this situation,” he gestures at me, “Over and over again.”
I press my lips together hard to keep from laughing. So I’m not the only one who’s trying her best to get let go around here.
“But,” he continues, “Over at this other branch, things are different. The manager there has been ignoring all protocol about who to let go when he’s gone through an entire round of staff at the branch twice over in just six months. So, if you can manage to hang on by your fingernails over there, the opportunities for advancement into better-paying positions—positions where you’d actually be given real work, no less, which is what you came in here asking me for—is much better.” He sizes me up, in a way that makes me both want to simultaneously sink into my seat and sit up straight to glare back at him. I do the latter, since that approach has seemed to work best in this company so far. He nods with a satisfied grunt when I do. “I wouldn’t send you there if I didn’t think it would appeal to you more than this place has,” he says, while he flips open the folder on his desk.
“I didn’t say I agreed to this yet,” I point out as he lifts a rubber stamp and presses it into an inkpad.
“No,” he admits. “But I am still the manager here. You don’t need to agree in order for me to approve this transfer.” He pauses. Levels me with another of those X-ray stares of his. “Unless, that is, you’d like to quit?”
I swallow once, hard. “No, sir.” I can afford to get fired, but not to voluntarily walk out of here. I don’t even have enough saved up in the bank for a plane ticket home—I’ve managed to set aside a little of my paycheck, but most of it so far has gone into paying back the costs of moving out west in the first place. Plane tickets, moving vans for my stuff, apartment rent, shipping over my car…
“Good.” He smiles, benign once more. “It’s settled then. Next Monday, you’ll begin work at your new location. The branch out in Santa Monica.” He slides the stamped folder across to me, with details written on the front page—address, security information, everything I got when I initially started work here.
My mind races, meanwhile, calculating. Santa Monica. Ugh. My commute just got even longer. I wonder if the metro runs there or if I’ll have to stoop to the bus or driving in mornings. The thought of freeway traffic weighs on my stomach like I’ve just swallowed a bowling ball.
Not to mention, the thought of everything he just told me about this branch. I stand to go on watery legs and shake my former manager’s hand, already dreading the thought of meeting my next one. From the sounds of it, he’ll be even worse than Hastings.
He’s already fired his entire staff in the last six months? More than once?
What the hell did you just get yourself into, Daisy? I wonder as I pace out of Hastings’s office, balancing precariously on my heels. On the one hand, at least from the sounds of it, I won’t be stuck doing secretarial work for very much longer. On the other hand, it sounds like I just jumped screaming out of the frying pan and straight into a bonfire instead…
5
Bronson
“This is your last chance, Bronson.”
I stand, straight-backed and level-eyed as a soldier, at attention in front of my father’s ornate home office desk. It’s even more ridiculously expensive than the one he uses at work—at least that one’s just a Brazil nut wood, which although it’s highly illegal to own much less transport to the United States from Brazil, does just look like a normal desk. This home office one is made entirely of jade, accented with gold leaf at the corners, giving his office the blinding, disorienting sensation that you’ve just walked out of a large LA mansion and into a house that would be more suitable in Singapore or Malaysia somewhere. Between the desk and the heavy brocade on the windows, not to mention the Japanese, Chinese and Korean art jumbled everywhere, it’s a hodgepodge of Asian diaspora in here.
My mother didn’t have a vote in how Father decorated his private office, so he unloaded all his frustrations about not being able to tacky up the rest of the house on this one room.
“I understand, sir,” I say, because it’s what Father wants to hear. And because, deep down, despite the fucking mess my life has become since I got back here to LA, I know I do still owe him. Big time. To the tune of 1.5 million fucking dollars, the kind of loan I’ll never be able to work off or repay.
And he knows it, too. It’s why every time I meet with him, he’s wearing a smug, shit-eating smile. Because he knows that finally, once and for all, he wins. He’ll be able to hold this debt over me for the rest of my life, and I’ll never be able to say a word, because I really would be dead in a ditch somewhere without that lifeline of his.
Doesn’t mean I can’t still disappoint him, though, apparently. “I mean it,” he’s saying. “The tabloids are already all over your every m
ove—I can’t believe you took that hussy to that club last Friday.”
“She’s not a hussy, she’s my friend,” I reply through gritted teeth. “One of the few I retained from my high school years, so I’d rather not completely desert her when she asks me to accompany her to a social event.” She’s also gayer than a three dollar bill, I mentally add, but he doesn’t need to know that. If it drives Dad nuts to see me hanging out with his friend’s “no good party girl daughter,” the very daughter he was so desperate to hook me up with back when we were in high school, then good. He deserves the stress.
Besides, Samantha’s been the one person out in LA since I moved back who’s managed to keep me sane. Probably because she’s dealing with the same shit on her end constantly—parents who disapprove of everything she does, including forbidding her from dating women publicly ever. Her parents, at least, have been thrilled to see us making tabloid headlines again, going to a couple club openings. They haven’t figured out yet that the only clubs we’ve hit up are the ones owned by the model-turned-movie-producer socialite girl who Sammy’s seeing on the down-low.
And okay, so maybe it’s not completely selfless of me. Sammy and her girl Lyra do send Lyra’s smoking-hot model friends my direction every so often, providing introductions and an excuse to dance. But for some reason, the LA model girl crowd isn’t doing it for me these days. Not the way they used to. Don’t get me wrong, the girls are nice and all, and definitely hot as hell, but…
But something feels fake, a little part of me whispers. Ever since Daisy.
I push the thought of her straight out of my mind. I may be disappointing my father in a hundred different ways since I arrived back home, but in that, at least, I’ve done him proud. I haven’t spoken to Daisy since I sent her my goodbye message. I ignored all her calls, deleted her voicemails unopened.
One thing he and I agreed on—Daisy doesn’t deserve to be dragged into the mess of my life. That’s a vow I won’t go back on.
“I just don’t understand how you could think this is okay to do, again,” my father is ranting now, having thankfully drifted off the subject of berating my friendship with Sammy.
“If you ask me, you should be doing it more often, not berating me for it,” I reply, unable to hold my tongue. “Father, this company is a complacent old boys’ club. We’re paying an enormous amount of money to our high-ups, loading the brunt of the work onto the low-level employees, and letting those at the top do fuck all with their days—”
“Language, boy,” my father mutters, more out of habit than anything else. My swearing is the least of his annoyances these days, it seems.
“And the result,” I speak over him, “is that we’re losing profits at every corner, and the people we need to be retaining, the ones at the bottom of the rung, are leaving in droves.”
“Leaving or getting fired by you?” My father arches an eyebrow, gaze narrowed.
“I only fired Bryce and Joanna, you know that.”
“Their severance packages alone cost more than we’ll be paying to restaff this branch,” he counters.
“Well they’re the reason the entire rest of your branch quit in the first place,” I snap. “So you ask me what’s more profitable in the long run, getting rid of two people who tortured half their staff into leaving twice, or continually replacing low-level workers every few months because Joanna treated them like dog shit and Bryce kept trying to make female employees do his laundry and cook him meals in the office.”
“I brought you back to this company to give you a chance, Bronson,” my father says, voice dropping to the low, dangerous level it goes to whenever he’s furious. He’s not a shouter. With my dad, when he gets quiet is when you need to worry. “It’s more than you deserved after the stunts you pulled over the last five years. A lot more.”
“Wishing you’d just let those casino thugs kill me instead?” I reply, arching an eyebrow.
“Wishing I’d instilled a sense of duty and work ethic in you in the first place so you’d never run off to throw yourself headfirst into debt,” my father snaps. “But I mean it this time. I gave you one task—a simple one. Manage one single branch of this bank. It’s much less than you ought to be doing by now, if you’d toed the line and stayed in school, trained like you should have. This is the kind of stuff we hire people to do, not the things we assign our own kids to work. But you couldn’t even handle that much responsibility.”
He shakes his head. Pauses to glare at me again before he continues. “This is the final straw. I’m restaffing this branch one final time. If you lose one single individual employee from the staff this time, whether through them quitting or you firing them, that’s it. You can kiss your inheritance, and your place in this institution, goodbye.”
My fists clench, along with my teeth. “So you’re going to disinherit me over a couple of no-good ungrateful bastards who have been sponging off you for decades—”
“I’m going to disinherit you over your complete and utter failure to act like an adult, Bronson. This is not how we run a company, firing people left and right without warning, loyal people who have stuck by us for decades, as you’ve just pointed out. And we don’t just hire employees we personally get along with or who we enjoy hanging out with after work. This is a business. You are a leader here, and I expect you to start acting like one, from this day forward.”
I continue to glare at him while I salute, mocking. “Aye, aye, Captain. I’ll keep that in mind. Don’t play favorites. Or at least, don’t pick different favorites from you.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Bronson. If you respected your elders, or my expertise, you’d know better than to challenge me like this by now.” He squints past me at the clock over his door. “Now, you’d better get downstairs. Your mother’s serving dinner in half an hour.”
By which, of course, he means the chefs my mother bosses around all day are serving dinner. “I’m going out,” I say instead, grabbing my coat from the back of the chair I’ve been standing behind for this whole meeting.
“You’d better not be seeing that hussy again.”
“You’d better stop calling her a hussy,” I shout over my shoulder, and then I slam his office door behind me. Fuck.
D-day. The arrival of my latest batch of employees—the third one I’ll be overseeing in the short nine months since my arrival back “home.”
I say that in air quotes. LA has never felt like home to me. At first, it was the trap I needed to escape. Then it was a target painted on my skull that I needed to avoid, because it was the first place that the thugs I owed cash to were going to be hunting for me. Now, it’s back to being a trap.
Why did I ever remember liking this city? I wonder as I squeal around a corner, weaving through traffic in my father’s BMW 3 series. Borrowed, just like everything else in my life right now. But it’s not as though he doesn’t have 20 other cars left over to choose from at home.
You can kiss your inheritance goodbye.
I can’t believe he’s threatening to do this. To cut me out of the will, out of a job, all because I was trying to do the right thing for once in my goddamn life. He asked me to work here, so I’ve been trying to do that. To really fucking work. My first couple months here I threw myself into managing this branch of Burke Bank with everything I had. I traced every single cent that came through our doors, and you know what I found?
A lot of those cents went to paying the salaries of people I barely ever saw. People who, when they did bother to pop into the office, mistreated their underlings so badly that four of them quit within the first week I arrived.
Now I’m being punished for getting rid of those people?
I grit my teeth as I peel into the parking lot. Then I grind them more, because someone has parked in my spot, again, even though it says right on it Reserved—Branch Manager Parking. Got to be one of the new kids. Well, I’ll make sure they know the rules by the end of the day today.
>
I climb out my car and pause to straighten my tie in the blacked-out back windows. Inside this building, another round of fresh-faced new hires—or more likely, transfers from other branches who Dad sent to keep an eye on me—await. It’s the second time I’ll be training a completely new staff, with one exception this time. No Bryce and Joanna breathing down my neck, conspiring together to ruin the new employees before they’ve even finished their first day of training.
This time things will be different. This time things will go better.
That’s what I tell myself. But it’s difficult to make myself believe it, staring down at that car window at my own haggard-looking reflection. I’ve got red eyes, bags beneath them. The only sign that I stayed up far too late last night drawing up a game plan for today.
Father might think I don’t give a shit, but he’s wrong. I do care. And not just about my own inheritance. I want this company to be profitable. To make the transition into the 21st century, rather than just limping along as some holdover from Good Ole’ Boys days.
If I’m going to helm this bank as CEO one day, I want to mold it into a company I can be proud of.
Mind resolved, I turn and stride into the building.
Our Santa Monica branch is bigger than most of the other ones, it being the original founding branch of Burke Bank. Way back in the 1920s, my great-grandfather bought this building from a developer with money he earned trading in the nascent Stock Market, and went into business. Since then, we’ve survived everything that could possibly be thrown our way—the Great Depression, all the housing bubbles that burst and ballooned and burst again. The economic downturn of 2008, even the crisis of my leaving the company, which threw my father’s reputation into disrepute.
Since my great-grandfather founded Burke Bank, we’ve branched out into dozens of other industries. Anytime someone who’s taken out a business loan with us is forced to foreclose, we have the option of either selling their company or hanging onto it. My grandfather, and my father after him, were both smart about deciding which holdings to maintain since then. We’ve wound up with dozens of other profitable companies under our belt, like a successful cruise ship line, a Formula 1 racing company, real estate all over the globe, and even a few farms out in the Midwest. My personal favorite is the alpaca farm near Cincinnati.