If You Can Get It

by Brendan Hodge

  “You’re certainly welcome here, Paul,” she managed. “We’d love to have you, if you don’t mind. But don’t feel pressured. Mom is just so . . . generous. Sometimes, she can be a bit overpowering.”

  Paul looked from Jen to Katie and then back to their mother. “Well . . . okay then. Thank you. I would be glad to come. Is there anything I can bring?”

  That night, when Jen and Katie were lying next to each other in the dark of Jen’s room, Jen asked her sister, “What do you think?”

  “It’ll be nice to have Paul over for Christmas dinner,” Katie replied. “But . . . that was just so weird! What is it with Mom?”

  Oddity aside, the meal proved to be a social success. Paul arrived at three with two bottles of wine as his contribution to the feast. Katie and Pat had been in the kitchen since ten that morning and laid out, when the time came, a ham, mashed potatoes, curried vegetables (according to Katie’s recipe) and green-bean casserole (according to Pat’s), cranberry sauce, fresh-baked rolls, and three kinds of pie. Jen had pointed out that this amounted to more than half a pie per person, but Katie had countered that pie leftovers make the perfect breakfast and predicted (accurately) that Jen would sample all three kinds.

  Conversation ranged freely and, to the relief of both sisters, did not consist unduly of their mother’s probing Paul for personal details or relating embarrassing stories about their youth. At last, Tom, Katie, and Paul retired to the living room, and Jen and Pat gathered the dishes into the kitchen and began to clean up.

  “I’ll be glad when Paul gets the dishwasher installed in here,” Jen said, at a juncture when the silence had stretched to several minutes between mother and daughter.

  “A dishwasher is a very nice thing to have,” Pat agreed, “though Grandma never got one. She said that she had five dishwashers.”

  This oft-repeated story elicited its usual laugh.

  Silence descended again, except for the clinking of items in the sink and the running of water, and Jen felt that intimacy that dishwashing sometimes brings between female family members.

  “What do you think of Paul?” she asked, failing to imbue the question with the casualness she had intended.

  Her mother contemplated her for a moment. “He’s a very nice boy,” she replied. “I like him.”

  “I’ve been thinking about him a lot the last few days,” Jen confessed. “He’s not like other men I’ve known, certainly not like the kind of man I would have imagined being interested in, but there’s a lot I admire about him.”

  Her mother made a prompting sort of noise but did not reply. Jen plunged on. “But, even if he’s not the sort of guy I’d pictured . . . Maybe I’ve been unrealistic, or maybe my ideas haven’t been right. I’ve been thinking lately that Paul’s a really good guy. Maybe I need to forget all the ideas I’ve had and settle for someone like him. Maybe having too many ideas ahead of time just results in passing up guys you could be happy with.”

  “I really like Paul,” Pat replied after a moment, but her tone already indicating the “but” that was coming. “But I’m not sure anyone wants to be settled for. You’d better work it out in your mind whether Paul himself is what you want most, and if not, no kind of ‘settling’ will make up for it.”

  “No, you’re taking it all wrong. I don’t mean settling for something I don’t like. I mean, dropping my preconceived ideas and just looking at the person.”

  “Well, if that’s what you mean, make sure you say that. No one wants to hear ‘I’m settling for you’. And there’s just one other thing you should probably think about a bit too.”

  “What?”

  “Is he interested in you? It does take two, they say. Has he shown any interest?”

  Having started at Schneider and Sons late in the year, Jen had not yet accrued enough vacation time to take off the whole stretch from Christmas to New Year’s. Even had this not been the case, she had always found that week to be an ideal time for getting things done, since the number of other people taking vacation kept distractions and meetings to a minimum. And while, thus far, the experience of all four family members sharing the small bungalow had been surprisingly peaceful, after three days of close quarters, Jen was looking forward to the eight hours of comparative solitude that each workday promised.

  It was thus with a certain eagerness that Jen set her alarm Christmas night and set off early the next morning for the office. Only the first row of the parking lot was full when she arrived. The fountain was still running in the corporate lake, but ice had advanced to within a dozen feet of it on every side. A singularly determined duck could be seen waddling across the ice to the open water.

  Inside, the halls were uncharacteristically silent. Jen was the only person present in her row of offices. Out in the bay of cubes across the hall, she could hear someone in the IT section playing Punjabi dance tunes at full volume, secure in the knowledge that there was no one to disturb. Jen paused for a moment in the doorway of her office, listening to the music and trying to imagine a Bollywood movie that featured its hero or heroine leading a dance number through the maze of cubes of a corporate headquarters nestled in the American Midwest. Then she went inside and shut the door so that she could concentrate.

  Immediately after New Year’s, she was scheduled to spend three days in Washington, D.C., on LeadFirst training, so these days between Christmas and New Year’s represented Jen’s best chance to get line-review materials finalized before she began the long slog of convincing leadership that she had developed a sales and trade program that would both be attractive to the home-improvement box stores and profitable for the Schneider line.

  When she got home that night, Pat and Katie were in the throes of disassembling the kitchen. Cardboard boxes from the move-in had been reassembled and stood in huddled clusters on the floor. The countertops were piled high with dishes and gadgets. Mother and daughter were discussing spiritedly, though surprisingly cordially, the merits of various items—which should be packed and which would be needed during the renovation.

  “I need at least one cookie sheet,” Katie objected, pulling one out of a box. “And the hand mixer.”

  “The kitchen will be all torn up,” Pat said. “You won’t want to be baking.”

  “We may have to live on takeout eaten off paper plates, but if the house is in chaos, we will need fresh-baked cookies,” Katie countered.

  “I still think you won’t want to be cooking in here, and no one is going to want to have to clean up.”

  “Jen,” Katie said. “Should we pack the coffee maker or leave it out?”

  “Leave it out if you don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Jen said, depositing her laptop bag on the dining room table and heading off to her room to change into casual clothes.

  “See?” Katie said. “Sanity comes first. That goes for baking the same as coffee.”

  “Wait and see how you feel about it when this place is all lumber and sawdust,” Pat warned.

  Paul arrived early the next morning and was already moving tools and wood into the kitchen as Jen left for work. When she returned at six that night, the island stood complete—though the drawers and cabinet doors were as yet missing, and the wood was unfinished—and Paul and Tom were busily engaged in pulling apart the old wall cabinets. Jen stopped to watch for several minutes, but the two men were deeply immersed in their work and communicating in the sort of worker’s shorthand that made little sense to those not familiar with the task at hand.

  “Studs again?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Driver?”

  “Thanks.”

  Jen left them to it, wiping the sawdust off her shoes on the rug someone had thoughtfully placed in the kitchen doorway, and passed through the dining room into the living room. Katie was curled up in one of the armchairs, reading a book. Jen deposited her laptop bag on the couch and sat down next to it. Her sister, contrary to usual practice, did not move or look up from her book.

  “What’ve you got there?�
�� Jen asked.

  Katie lifted the book so she should see the title: The Unsettling of America.

  “What is it? A novel or something?”

  “It’s about farming and culture. By a guy called Wendell Berry,” Katie explained, with the short sentences of one who is trying to continue reading while conversing.

  “What got you interested in that?”

  “Paul was talking about it. Got it at the library.”

  Jen waited a moment to see if any more comment would be forthcoming from Katie, then got up and started toward her room to change. “Do I need to go pick something up for dinner?” she asked from the doorway.

  “Mom went out to get sandwich fixings.” Katie paused but didn’t look up from her book. “I told Paul to feel free to join us if he wants to keep working. He and Dad are having a blast.”

  Conversation at dinner centered on the kitchen. Paul and Tom discussed the ongoing removal of the old cabinets. After a time, Katie broke in on this to ask how they would go about finishing the cabinets and whether a different finish was required for the wood counters than for the cabinets and drawers. Pat advised that they work through the job one wall at a time, rather than removing all the old cabinets at once, then doing all the building at once.

  “It will be a lot easier if all the storage is not out at once,” she explained.

  Katie opined, rather bluntly, that this was a stupid idea and would take longer—necessitating a much longer and more tactful explanation from Paul and Tom than would otherwise have been necessary, punctuated by Pat’s repeating, “I don’t know anything about building cabinets; I’m just telling you what people like.”

  Finally, Tom changed the subject entirely. “What about you, Jen? How are things going at the office? What are you working on?”

  This was the sort of query Jen would normally have brushed off with an “Oh, you know. Just taking the chance to get some projects done when there’s no one around to interrupt me”, but this seemed an appropriate time not to skimp on detail, regardless of whether it proved of general interest.

  “I’m trying to come up with a workable strategy to pitch during line reviews at the big-box retailers—that’s Home Depot and Lowe’s—in a couple months. Schneider and Sons has always wanted to get the consumer-tools line that I manage into the big retailers, but they’ve never been able to come up with a strategy that stays profitable, keeps our current retail partners—the specialty carpentry and woodworking retailers—happy, and satisfies the big-box stores.”

  “Why is it different selling the products to Home Depot and Lowe’s than it is selling them to Woodcraft?” Paul asked. “They are the same products.”

  “They have different selling strategies,” Jen explained. “The specialty stores have staff that can make a feature-based sale and customers who are willing to pay a premium price for a premium product, so they’re willing to pay a relatively high wholesale price and sell our products at full MSRP. They seldom do discounts or promotions. Home Depot and Lowe’s are all about volume, and while we can count on the customer to understand that our products represent higher quality than the other products on their shelves, they don’t have staff who can explain the differences in detail and make a value sell. They also focus heavily on periodic discounts and promotions. Plus, for a product that’s going to sit on the shelf a long time and have slow inventory turns, they want a higher profit margin than on their other products. So, they demand a lower wholesale price than our other customers are willing to pay, and then they’re going to want trade dollars so that they can promote the products at prices lower than our other customers charge. All that is going to disrupt our existing channel, so while the increase in volume would be great, and our total margin dollars might go up, my go-to-market plan has to account for blowback and still be profitable.”

  “What are trade dollars?”

  “If the retailer wants to do a promotion, like putting the product on sale or featuring it in an advertising circular, they ask the vendor to pay some of the cost. That money from the vendor is called ‘trade’. If you go into a Lowe’s or Home Depot, virtually everything that’s on an end cap or sitting on a pallet out in the middle of the aisle is something that the vendor paid trade dollars to have featured more prominently.”

  “Wait,” said Paul. “Do you mean that they ask you for bribes in order to sell your products?”

  “No, it’s not a bribe, it’s—they have only a limited number of products that they can feature prominently, rather than just on the shelf. And they have expenses they have to meet, like leases on the building and pay for their staff and so on. The vendors whose products get featured prominently stand to benefit the most from the retail relationship, so they ask those vendors to provide extra funds to help meet those expenses. In return, the vendor gets higher sales from the prominent placement. It benefits both.”

  Paul seemed to find each explanation a further source of indignation. “And then, on top of that, they want to engage in predatory pricing and steal business from the stores that currently sell your products? Why would you even want to do business with them?”

  “They’re not trying to steal business, exactly. I mean, sure, they’d be happy to have people buy from them instead of specialty stores (and the consumers would probably be happy to pay less), but mainly it’s just that the big-box stores have a different kind of customer than the specialty retailers, and a different kind of business model, so they have different needs.”

  “But surely there’s only one fair price for a product. The product itself is the same. Why would you charge two retailers different amounts, or let them charge their customers different amounts, for the same product?”

  This was an objection to a principle so basic that Jen was not at first sure how to answer it. “I don’t know. Different consumers are just . . . different. Some are willing to pay more than others. By working through different retail channels, we’re able to reach more consumers at prices they can afford.”

  “But it’s not honest,” Paul objected. “That’s not charging the fair and honest price.”

  “The problem is,” Katie observed, as if this got to the heart of the matter, “that there are these big companies that only care about profit. In a more human economy, the price would be based on the real value of the product, and everyone would charge the same.”

  Jen responded to these newfound convictions of Katie’s with a derisive snort.

  “Would anyone like dessert?” Pat asked. “I bought an apple pie at the store. I could even warm it up for a few minutes. How about hot apple pie?”

  Friday passed much as Thursday had. By the time Jen got home from work, the old cabinets had been removed and the skeletons of new ones had risen on one wall. The renovation continued on Saturday—Paul insisting that he was used to working six days a week and Tom saying he didn’t consider it work at all and was glad to help. Katie sat in the doorway, alternately watching and reading her book, occasionally reading aloud sections that she thought were particularly interesting. It had begun to snow, and the light from outside that filtered through the windows was dim and bluish, the sort of light that makes one glad to be inside and makes the lights inside seem brighter and the heat warmer. When people say they love winter days, they often mean not the winter day itself but the sense of warmth and security that one feels when sitting inside and reflecting on the contrast between one’s surroundings and the weather outside. Jen felt this warmth and security strongly as she sat in the dining room with her newspaper and her mug of coffee, listening to the work and talk in the kitchen, and reflecting that she had seldom felt so strongly the draw of family.

  In the afternoon, Pat received a call from someone at the apartment complex she and Tom would be moving into in the new year, alerting her that their apartment was now empty and could be viewed. Pat was clearly eager to go but was hesitant about driving in the increasing snowstorm. Jen, crossword completed, offered to take her, assuring her that the BMW did well in a
ll driving conditions.

  The apartment, all white walls and white carpeting, seemed bare and sterile to Jen’s eyes, which had become accustomed to the wood and age of the bungalow. Her mother, however, saw only her plans. “I think the hutch will go here. And the sideboard over there. We’ll leave the couch in storage and just put the recliners in the living room here with the coffee table. There’s just room. It’s small, but it will be cozy, and we’ll find a house before long. I’m so glad to be near you girls,” Pat concluded. “This last week has been . . . Oh, Jennifer, you can’t imagine how much it means to your father and me to be with you girls and have everyone getting along so wonderfully. We’re all so blessed.”

  Pat and Katie were united in their determination to hold a New Year’s Eve party. Pat explained (as she did every year) that she had watched the ball drop in Times Square on television every year since she was sixteen and, to that end, procured a bottle of inexpensive sparkling wine, plastic champagne flutes, party hats emblazoned with the year, and noisemakers. Katie invited Paul, announced that the food would be Mexican, and forsook her own Little Kings slim cans to lay in a case of her father’s favored Budweiser longnecks and a case of Guinness in honor of Paul. Jen urged Paul to bring his guitar, but he repeatedly demurred.

  The New Year’s party, more than any other point during her parents’ stay, felt to Jen like a throwback to her youth; she felt more like a child living with her parents than an adult whose parents were visiting. Katie made delicious enchiladas and chile verde for dinner, Jen mixed cocktails, and Paul drank beer and chatted with both of them, but once the lead-up to midnight on the East Coast began, the parents and the television became the centers of gravity for the evening. Tom dozed in his chair with a bottle of Bud in his hand, while Pat provided running commentary on the televised proceedings from Times Square. The ball dropped in New York, they switched to local programming for the last hour, and Pat bustled around, distributing hats, noisemakers, and champagne glasses as the moment approached.

  The local countdown did not have the sense of its own limitations that New York’s did and began with fully ten minutes to spare. As the numbers changed and the local anchor provided patter, Jen found herself contemplating, through the soft focus of her Manhattan, the last year and the changes it had brought: Katie, China, Schneider and Sons, the new house, Paul, her parents. She looked around at all those assembled with a feeling of warmth for all of them and upward-spiraling hopes for what the new year might bring.