If You Can Get It

by Brendan Hodge

  “I am the sort of girl who never found herself yelling drunkenly at a cop before,” Katie replied with a touch of sullenness.

  “Well, then we just have to make you look like you, right? Would you have gone out and bought that suit for $1,200?”

  “You paid $1,200 for this? How can you wear that kind of money?”

  Jen shrugged. “I’ve worn it to the interviews for my last three jobs, and I got the job each time, so I guess it worked. For you, however: How about if you pick out a skirt and top you like rather than a suit? Or, if you feel more comfortable with another layer on, pick a cardigan or a jacket. If you really like that suit, you can borrow it some other time.”

  Katie snorted as she headed back into Jen’s room. “I’d be terrified I’d spill something on it.”

  Jen laughed silently and wished that she could see, other than in her mind’s eye, what she had looked like riding around the Schneider and Sons campus on the adult-size tricycle while wearing the suit.

  The fashion crisis having been resolved to the satisfaction of all—after Katie had found an outfit she felt radiated “let me off with a warning”, Jen decided to exercise her concerned-older-sister prerogative and wear the interview suit for luck—the two sisters drove to the courthouse together the next morning with plenty of time to spare and met Dan there.

  Dan gave them a brief description of the judge Katie would be in front of, then excused himself to continue reading a stack of legal briefs he had with him.

  After what seemed like hours of anxious waiting, it was all over very quickly. Dan conveyed Katie’s contrition and resolution not to make such a mistake again. The judge asked Katie several questions in a severe tone. She responded meekly. The judge agreed to suspend the prosecution and explained that this meant that if she were charged with another crime within three years, she could face both charges, but if she avoided trouble, she would have no crimes on her record. Dan thanked him and guided the sisters out of court.

  “See? No problem at all,” Dan said.

  “I feel like I’m shaking all over,” Katie confessed. “I need to go sit down.”

  Dan looked mildly nonplussed. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s not used to dealing with this kind of thing like you are,” Jen said. “Thanks. This really was a huge help. I’m glad I didn’t have to worry about it at all, with all this relocation stuff going on.”

  “No problem. You can expect my bill shortly.” Dan grinned. “Everything going all right? You staying sane while you get ready to move?”

  “Yeah. Actually, they make it amazingly cushy for you. It’s easier than planning a business trip, until you start to think about everything that’s happening. The guy who came out to look the condo over for the moving company said, ‘Now don’t pack anything. Any boxes you pack yourself won’t be insured. We’ll get it all done when the time comes to pack and load.’ ”

  “So, are they packing all your stuff before you fly out?”

  “No. I fly out next Saturday with basically just luggage. They’ve got a furnished apartment for us in Johnson and a rental car while they bring the cars out on a trailer. Katie’s going to stay another week to tie up loose ends, and then she’ll fly out too. Our stuff stays in the condo while we find a permanent place out there, and then they pack it up and move it for us.”

  “Crazy. Are you worried?”

  “Oddly not. I’m still waiting for that to set in.”

  “Well, good luck. Am I likely to see you again before you leave?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping to do some kind of a going-away thing.”

  “Well, in case you don’t: Good luck. Keep in touch.”

  There was an awkward pause. Dan extended a hand to shake. Jen started to take it, then reached out both arms and hugged him instead.

  For a moment, some faint whiff of sexuality, unwelcome, unlooked for, passed through her at the feeling, so long absent, of a male body held close against her own. Briefly—so briefly, she hoped afterward, as to have registered only with her—she pulled him tighter, soaking up the physical closeness. But almost as soon as she felt it, she pushed him away, sensing the violation of using someone so long a comrade, whom she had never sought to make anything other than a comrade, to fill the long unsatisfied need for touch. She released him with a couple of “just pals” slaps on the back.

  “Thanks, Dan. I’ll be in touch. I’m going to miss having you to watch out for me.”

  “All right, well . . .” There was an awkward pause during which Jen wondered if her briefly fierce hug had been more obvious than she had hoped. “I better get going. More cases to deal with today. Good luck.”

  He left, and Jen turned to her sister. “How’re you feeling, Katie? Want to go pick up some lunch?”

  7

  “Our last night together here,” Katie announced. The condo showed little sign of it, aside from Jen’s luggage sitting near the door. “I should have planned something special for dinner.”

  “Let’s go out,” Jen said. “I could go for some sushi. That seems a fitting way to say goodbye to the coast.”

  Katie agreed.

  “Should I call an Uber?” Jen asked. “We could make it a sake night. Big send-off.”

  “No. I can drive. I may be crazy, but I’m not crazy enough to mix raw fish and hard drinking.”

  In the end, it was a quiet night that ended early.

  The next morning, they both got up early, and Katie made breakfast.

  “I could just call for a ride,” Jen offered one last time. “You’ll get stuck in all kinds of traffic.”

  Katie shrugged. “I’ve got the time.”

  It was good to have the company. Up to this point, the move had hardly seemed real. Now the reality of leaving her home and the city in which she had built her career came down with crushing force.

  At the airport, as she unloaded her bags curbside under the watchful eyes of airport police, who blew their whistles and waved on any cars that tarried long, the immediacy of their household dissolution gripped Jen. She tapped at the driver-side window.

  “Did you forget something?” Katie asked, as the glass rolled down.

  “No, you idiot. Come here.” Jen reached in and enveloped her sister in a hug. “I’m going to miss you.”

  A policewoman whistled loudly at them and waved the car on.

  “Sorry. I’ll see you in a week.” Jen stepped back and waved as Katie pulled away from the curb.

  The furnished apartment in Johnson was a sort of architectural white noise, drowning thought. The possessions she had unpacked from her two suitcases did nothing to make it homelike. The effect was so lonely that Jen turned on the TV for company.

  The kitchen provided no comfort. Under Katie’s care, her own cupboards had become packed with ingredients, the shelf stacked high with cookbooks. The few items here were studiously generic: salt, pepper, a package of microwave popcorn, and a Snickers bar in the cupboard; in the freezer, a lone turkey-and-mashed-potato microwave dinner and a pint of mint ’n’ chip ice cream. Did they expect the resident to dine on turkey and Snickers her first night, or were these items merely intended to avoid the offense of a completely bare shelf?

  She consulted the phone book and discovered she could order Mad Jack’s World-Famous Wings, pizza, or Mamma Ming’s Chinese food. For a moment, she contemplated getting back in the car, driving to Chicago, and abandoning small-town life and her new job. But that would be failure.

  Not long ago, an evening alone with a frozen dinner or takeout had been a normal routine. Had she become so dependent on Katie in the last few months?

  The question, as it formed, had an offensive sound to it. Why not be dependent on her sister? Who else should she depend on? But Katie would be there soon enough. In the meantime, she needed to eat and get ready to begin her new job. With a new feeling of determination, she put the turkey dinner in the microwave.

  On Monday morning, Jen was just heading out the door, feeling commanding and
ready for new things in a grey wool skirt and blazer, and heels that brought her up to five foot ten inches, when her cell phone rang with an unfamiliar number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there. Jen?” asked a vaguely familiar voice.

  “This is she.”

  “This is Andrea Gomez. We had lunch when you were out interviewing.”

  “Yes! Hi, Andrea. I was just heading out the door.”

  “Good, I’m glad I caught you. Getting the kids off to school, I almost forgot to call. Did anyone tell you about the orientation this morning?”

  “Uh, no,” Jen replied, fighting down a sudden feeling of panic.

  “Figures. I don’t know if it’s the gals or the guys who find it funny, but somehow everyone forgets to clue the new girl in. There’s an in-depth factory tour as part of the orientation. Do not wear a skirt, and do not wear heels. You’ll be up and down ladders, and there are a bunch of those anti-fatigue rubber mats. Heels get stuck in them something awful.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks for the warning.”

  “Aw, poor thing, you probably had something real cute picked out. Well, have a good orientation. I’ll try to drop by your office this afternoon and say hi.”

  “Thanks, Andrea. See you then.”

  Jen swore as she ran back to her room, shedding clothes as quickly as she could. Orientation started in twenty minutes, which, even though the Schneider and Sons campus was only five minutes away, gave her far too little time.

  Somehow, within ten minutes, she was walking out of the apartment again, this time in pants, a fitted oxford with pale pink and gray pinstripes, and flats, but with her sense of composure somewhat rumpled.

  With only a moment to spare, she presented herself to the front-desk receptionist and was directed to join a half dozen other new hires milling about the lobby. For all her worry about the time, however, it was not until almost ten minutes later that a harried man from HR, looking barely old enough to be out of college, rushed in, apologized for his lateness, and announced they would start by getting their pictures taken for their security badges.

  The orientation was necessarily less flattering than the interview process had been. Then she had been the center of attention and known to be interviewing for a fairly senior role; now she was just one of the unfamiliar faces being shown where the cafeteria was and advised on the workings of paid time off. A friendly, fiftyish-looking man named Shin, whose newly made badge marked him as belonging to Engineering, sidled up to her and asked, “Is this your first role?”

  Jen blanked at the incongruous question. “Uh, here at Schneider and Sons? Yes.”

  “No, no. First or second role out of college?”

  “Uh, no,” Jen said, unsure whether to take this as an insult or a compliment, except that it was so clearly unintentional that any reaction seemed out of place.

  “Sorry. Sorry. You looked so young. Don’t feel bad! Get to be my age, it’s not so bad to look young.”

  “Thanks.”

  The orientation and tour left the new hires off at the cafeteria at noon. The lines were long, though most people seemed to be taking their food back to their desks. Those who were sitting and talking at tables in groups of two or three were mostly not eating: meetings unable to secure a conference room.

  Jen ordered a salad, which, in keeping with the company’s sustainable convictions—so the tour guide had explained—was served in an opaque compostable container that would not have been out of place back in California. She seated herself at a table to eat and watch the ebb and flow of people move through. As she was finishing, Andrea appeared and waved to her.

  “Did you have a good orientation?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the tip about clothes.”

  “Did they take you through the workshops too?”

  Jen nodded. “I got to use an industrial bolt tightener.”

  “You laugh now, but pretty soon you’ll want one of your own,” Andrea deadpanned.

  “I’ll make sure I find a house with a big garage.”

  “See? You’re going to get along fine here. Now, I just ran into Brad on my way down here. He got pulled into a pre-read for the IBP meeting this afternoon, so he asked if I could catch up with you and get you to your desk. He’ll meet you at 1:30. Let me just grab a salad.”

  “Okay.”

  Andrea returned a moment later. “All right. Walk with me, and since I’ve got you in my clutches, I’m going to tell you how I think the world works while we go. So, you’ve got the Schneider line. You know why you were the one picked?”

  “If it’s going to be a reason besides the obvious, please have it be a flattering one. It is still my first day.”

  “No first-day privileges, sister,” Andrea warned, but then flashed her a smile. “What you need to understand is that the Schneider line ought to be a big seller. Too many of the consumer brands have spent the last twenty years engineering quality out of their products so that you can buy a drill driver for thirty dollars at Walmart. Which is great if you want to use it a couple weekends a year and throw it away after four years when the battery won’t hold a charge anymore. But it’s frustrating for home-improvement enthusiasts who want a tool they can actually love, not just put up with. See, we have that credibility and quality, but what we don’t have is enough of a sense of urgency in the company about what is seen as a stepchild product line to actually make it work. That’s why I advocated so strongly for you (and Brad has this religion too, so don’t worry), because you are a pro, but you’re an outside player who doesn’t have this institutional sense that the Schneider line is a backwater that people are sent to for bad behavior. All of which I tell you—have they told you I talk a lot yet? I do, but I make people listen—because one of your challenges is going to be overcoming that institutional inertia and indifference about the line. Forewarned?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Okay. And remember, don’t let it bother you. I’m going to get you sent off to the LeadFirst training. Have you heard of this one?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t have. It’s not a very Bay Area kind of thing. You’ll enjoy it, though!”

  Exhausted by her first day, Jen promptly abandoned her standards on the way home and picked up dinner at Mamma Ming’s: deep fried and syrupy Chinese takeout of the guiltiest sort. If it was utterly unlike any food she had eaten while in China, the flavors held memories of meals eaten out of folded cardboard boxes on busy nights when she was growing up.

  At the end of the week, Katie arrived, and Jen was so glad to see her that, in a reversal of recent roles, she made dinner for her younger sister. She was so glad, in fact, that she did not feel frustration boiling up when Katie used her free time to install the Xbox and begin playing Mass Effect.

  Sunday saw Katie rooted to the console for much of the day, until she got up and made enchiladas and a pitcher of margaritas for dinner.

  The next morning, a full-body ache and the empty pitcher sitting on the counter accused Jen as she drank a hurried cup of coffee before heading out the door to work. But the tangle of gaming technology on the floor in front of the TV and Katie’s closed bedroom door at last made the apartment seem homelike.

  So great was the pleasure of reunion that it was not until near the end of the week, as Katie’s Xbox binge continued unabated, that Jen threw a real estate catalog at her sister. “If you can’t find anything better to do with your life than blow up virtual bad guys all day, go look at some houses and find us a real place to live. Some of us are busy with work and stuff.”

  “The problem with this place,” Katie announced Thursday night, indicating the apartment in general, “is that it’s all white walls and newness and has no character.”

  “Do you say this because you’ve been looking at places with character, or places without character, or simply because you’re cultivating a new aesthetic sense and need to practice your discernment?” Jen asked.

  “I say this
because it’s soulless,” Katie explained. “Why is it that we have beautiful old houses just five minutes’ walk from here, and those massive apartments above the old storefronts on Main Street, and yet what they’re building is white soulless boxes with green lawns in front of them? What’s wrong with our world?”

  “I think the old places are sometimes a lot of work,” Jen offered.

  “Don’t you think that would be more real, though?” Katie pressed. “To really work on your house? Fix things. Do things. I dunno . . . paint things?”

  “Katie, have you ever done any home-repair work?”

  “No. But you work for a tool company now. It would be good practice for you. And we’d be rooted and stuff.”

  “Whence all this? Did you find a realtor who specialized in old houses or something?”

  “Well . . . no. But I did walk around a lot with my iPhone and pull up listings on Zillow. And some of the old houses around here are really, really cool. Not old like Mom and Dad’s place. Really old—like a hundred years old or more. Seriously, after dinner let me show you some of these listings.”

  Jen called a realtor connected with the relocation company and arranged for them to spend the next Saturday looking at houses. The realtor, a generously proportioned older woman named Carol, arrived at the apartment at nine o’clock on Saturday morning and presented Jen with an elaborately constructed binder with flyers for all the houses they would be visiting.

  “Since this is our first time out, I thought we should look at a range of options in your size and price range,” Carol explained.

  “That sounds great,” Jen replied.

  The sisters piled into Carol’s spacious Jaguar XJ. “This back seat is amazing, but it seems like it should come with a mimosa,” Katie announced. Jen handed her the binder instead, and she began paging through their choices.

  Jen had not been much in sympathy with Katie’s excitement over old houses. When Carol led them through Victorian foursquares, Katie rhapsodized about woodwork and tightly spiraled back staircases, while Jen noted damaged paneling, peeling paint, old-fashioned radiators, and the probable lack of insulation. At the same time, newer houses all seemed to come in little subdivisions so manicured that one almost expected a giant hand to reach down from the sky and arrange plastic people on the lawn. The open floor plans and white walls that had seemed so cleanly natural in California here looked shallowly false.