chapter
Seven
Since I was working with Iris Hooper every other day while trying to keep her project foreman—my lughead of a brother—from crossing paths with her at all, I decided to dispatch a few of the low-priority, yellow-tabbed clients.
Some of those were nitpicking, trifling specifics like an outlet placed a foot farther left than they thought it should go or cabinet hardware that looked a shade darker than they recalled. With clients like that, I indicated on their contract where they’d signed off on said outlet or knob finish and then explained the cost they would incur and the amount of damage it might cause to alter the original, agreed-upon plan. I exaggerated a bit for effect when required.
When those efforts failed or a client had an understandable complaint about work done shoddily or incorrectly or not at all, I worked with them to order the changes. That often meant shielding them from construction division wrath and reminding foremen in particular that if we (he) had screwed up or the client was paying to have something changed, it was part of his job to make the change without going into a man-baby sulk. (The man-baby was Leo four times out of five. Shocking.) Alarmed that my brother had his big, dumbass hand in so many of our miffed to hopping-mad client files, it was all I could do not to tattle on him. Nose to nose over a mistake one of his subcontractors had made in the Hooper’s kitchen, I made that very threat, which worked as well now as it had when we were five and fifteen.
By the end of my first month, I felt like I was doing work that mattered to my father’s company. Work that no one had been able to do before I arrived. I grew more confident with every mollified or downright delighted homebuyer. The green-tabbed client list grew, and with it my cockiness. My parents hadn’t believed in my ability to use my powers of negotiation and persuasion for anything but getting my own way, but I was kicking ass and carrying my own weight. Joshua had confided that Cynthia Pike wanted to steal me for the sales team.
I’d declined. I had come to relish the way Isaac Maat’s jaw hardened when he knew my psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo had resulted in another satisfied client. Not that he wanted disgruntled clients, he just didn’t want me to be right, especially when it made him wrong. He never stated any of that explicitly—his body language and facial tics spoke for him.
Being right became my new favorite thing.
No surprise then that when my comeuppance came, it didn’t blow in gently—a storm moving in from the horizon that gives you time to batten the hatches and soften the damage. Oh no. It was the thin funnel of a tornado at the moment it descends from the sky like an accusatory finger—dooming one unfortunate structure to wreckage and leaving another intact. There was no moderating the devastation, though I couldn’t say there was no foreseeing it had I not been drunk with my own success.
I just wish it had been an actual tornado so it could have been an act of God and not an act of Erin.
The Andersons had never been cause for concern. Recently retired, with West Texas oil money out the ass, they were “downsizing” to a six-thousand-square-foot, five-bedroom home with a meticulously landscaped garden for her to putter in and an air-conditioned, eight-car garage to house his vintage sports car collection. They could have been a perpetual pain in the ass. But all through the design phase, they were model clients, deferring to their architect’s expertise with a balanced amount of trust and involvement. Likewise, their build had moved along beautifully until they wanted permission to make an artistic modification just before the house was complete.
A world-renowned artist was in the area for an exhibit of his early work at The Modern, and somehow they’d managed to get him to agree to paint a mural on their towering great room wall, which they technically wouldn’t own until August. When their request was summarily denied—clients were never allowed to make non-JMCH customizations to the property until they owned it—they dug in their heels. As days passed, they began calling or emailing every day and were beginning to rumble to Cynthia about making their complaint public.
During the weekly planning meeting, Uncle Hank didn’t seem worried. “We’re just following the rules in their contract. There’s no valid grievance to make public.”
“Sheila Anderson is a piranha in a sweet-little-old-lady pantsuit from Neiman’s,” Cynthia said. “She was an executive editor for the Star Telegram in her former life. Those warning shots aren’t blanks.” She passed me the file. “Work your magic, Erin!”
I caught Isaac’s furtive eye-roll though he pretended to concentrate on flicking a crumb from his cuff-linked shirtsleeve in an effort to hide it. When he glanced up, I stared straight into his insufficiently stunned face and said, “Done!”
As though I would reach into my oversized bag, pluck out a wand wrapped in enchanted unicorn mane and glitter, wave it around a bit, and poof, obstacle dissolved. I think my dumb ass half believed my own mythical hype as the Cranky Client Wrangler.
When I contacted them, Harold Anderson harrumphed and handed the call off to his wife.
She was all charm, sensing the probability that someone with the title Client Liaison could be persuaded to her side of the dispute. “His work is ahh-mazing and highly distinguished! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us and for McIntyre Homes! He’s legendary, and a friend of a friend, you know.”
I didn’t know, nor did I have a clue who this legendary guy was, but I googled him and was duly impressed. My brother and everyone else at JMCH, not so much.
“He’s never even had an exhibition in Texas before and may never again! He’s returning to Stockholm in three weeks, and we aren’t set to close until mid-August!” Sheila Anderson had contagious enthusiasm. “Surely these are the sort of extenuating circumstances calling for laxity in the usual policy?”
I tried to resist, I swear.
“Well,” I said, not indifferent to her cause and aware what a coup it would be to include images of that room’s incredible focal point on the JMCH website and in future promotional brochures. She seized my Well and made it as close to a yes as a word that is not yes could be.
“Hurrah! I just knew if I could find a fellow devotee of art and culture that he or she would champion our cause with management!”
Uh-oh bounced around inside my skull like an internal warning of an impending malfunction. I could already picture my boss’s tightly contained smile and shaking head. He was going to say no and keep saying no, and he would enjoy doing it; the rules were on his side. “I’ll have to run it by my supervisor before I can confirm—” I began, my brain speeding toward and discarding tactics that might change Isaac’s mind.
“Of course, of course! These men build opulent, impressive homes, but they clearly lack the refinement essential to appreciate the magnitude of this fortuitous chance.” Did she—did she just play the fellow-woman card? “I can tell that you know just what to say to persuade whomever needs persuading.” Okay, so her woman card was a bit outdated and veering toward sexist.
Leo had grown up in Southlake but had no concept of artistic refinement, and he only broke rules when they applied to him. Of course he’d said no. But why had Isaac Maat refused to listen to reason? He struck me as a thousand times more cultured than my brother—not that it would have been a difficult feat. Surely my supervisor could be made to see the advantage in approving the Andersons’ request? Even if it meant making me look right. Again. Ugh. He was going to say no so hard I would feel it.
I gave myself a stern talking to. I could do this. I would do this.
It was too early for celebration, no matter my burgeoning confidence in the outcome. “I’ll do my best,” I said, smiling into the receiver.
• • • • • • • • • •
Isaac Maat wouldn’t budge. “We have rules about things like this for a reason,” he said, wearing a satisfied, pig-in-shit smirk while issuing his we have rules decree. “He could damage the property.”
I stood in front of his desk, my head tipping to the side in honest-to-God disbelief. “You think a brilliant, distinguished artist is going to damage a wall.”
He shrugged one shoulder, up-down, as if he couldn’t be bothered to shrug both. “Our workers and city inspectors will be in and out of there every day toward the end of this project, finishing up, checking code compliance. Someone could damage his… art.” He made air quotes.
He had a point, but I loathed disparaging air quotes, particularly where the derision was invalid. “So we’ll block it off. Screen it from the workers with plastic sheeting or something.”
He shook his head, unmoved. “Nope. Sorry.” He was the most unsorry man on the face of the earth. “You’ll have to find some other way around this one. Maybe you can hypnotize one of the Andersons and instill an aversion to murals. Or pretentious artists.”
Oh he did not. My mouth dropped open and I snapped it shut. I left his office without replying, convinced, now, that he was just dying for me to be wrong. I couldn’t prove myself right without the mural’s ultimate completion and he knew it, the jerk.
• • • • • • • • • •
That thing I said I would never do? I did it. I went over his head. I wasn’t proud of one-upping him like that, but desperate times, et cetera. I would wheedle into his brain later—if his head didn’t explode first—to figure out why he stubbornly continued to despise me no matter how well I did my job. I didn’t have time for that bullshit now. I was too busy impressing everyone else.
I didn’t run directly to my father, who would undoubtedly hold the same unqualified, overly conservative opinion that Isaac, Hank, and Leo did, if not worse. Instead, I confided in Mom, who (hallelujah) knew the artist and immediately flipped out over the notion of him custom painting a one-of-a-kind mural in a JMCH home. Feeling a slight bite of self-reproach—even though it was for a good cause—I left her to it. I was Pontius Pilate washing his hands.
“I don’t make a habit of butting in on these sorta decisions,” I heard my father say, while eavesdropping on my parents like a manipulative child who just set off a parental squabble to further her own conniving scheme. A scheme that will benefit everyone, I assured myself in an attempt to mollify my conscience. I could imagine Isaac Maat’s dark, narrowed eyes and clamped jaw of fortified steel. I swung between surging dread and the desire to laugh out loud, but the latter was less genuine glee and more hysterical surplus from the former.
“Jeff, this is the definition of an extenuating circumstance! This isn’t a client who wants some would-be trompe l’oeil yahoo to sponge on a tacky faux texture. This is a client who’s chummy with a gifted contemporary artist. Do you want Jeffrey McIntyre to be known as the clueless hick who wouldn’t allow a highly acclaimed artist to contribute to the magnificence of one of his homes?”
Wow, Mom, below the belt. On target, but damn.
“Jesus, Cheryl—”
“I’m sorry. But is it your company or not?”
She was as not sorry as Isaac Maat, but Daddy must have just glared at her over his coffee before giving some sort of affirmative gesture because she continued.
“Then simply tell this Isaac person that you’ve approved the exception. Done and done. You don’t have to explain yourself to an employee, especially one who isn’t even a direct report. Perhaps he needs to be reminded who the real boss is.” Shit. Mom was veering off course. “He’s the—you know—” Her voice lowered. “African American, right? Are you sure Erin should be working under him? Hasn’t Leo had trouble with him?”
Oh. Hell. Leo was a boneheaded dipshit who had trouble with everyone. Isaac Maat and I just had a difference of opinion, and I had access to a higher authority, which I’d used.
“Hank hasn’t had any problems with Isaac, and his opinion is the one I give a crap about. From what I hear, Erin is doing a bang-up job, but she’s still new. Her boss is a stickler for following rules. I like that in an employee.”
“But you’ll veto his verdict on this.” Her tone made that a declaration, not a question.
This exchange was the audible version of a rapid-fire game of Ping-Pong. Not the game we all played badly as children or drunken undergrads—more like unsmiling competitors in the Olympics and a match of furiously slammed white missiles that could put an eye out.
He sighed. “Yes. If you feel this strongly about that artist doing that mural. If this isn’t about your little girl getting her way, or because he’s her supervisor and he’s— Some other reason.”
“Of course it’s about the artist. What do you mean, some other reason?”
“You know what I mean and how I feel about it. We’re not going there again. I always respected your father as a businessman, but we’re not going there again.”
“Good Lord, Jeff, will you ever just move past that? It was more than thirty years ago and wasn’t even your decision – not really. You have nothing to feel guilty for.”
“Drop it.”
“The world is a different place now—”
“Drop it.”
A chair squealed across the kitchen tile, and I slinked back up the stairs, my brain churning. I should be ecstatic. I’d fought for my client’s perfectly reasonable request and won.
But the rest of my parents’ conversation didn’t pertain to the client, or the artist, or the mural. What had happened more than thirty years ago and involved Grandpa Welch? What could it have to do with Isaac, who hadn’t been born yet?
My grandfather was one of those old guys who said some racist shit sometimes, and you just hoped it was over Thanksgiving dinner and not out in public. But he had retired and become a silent partner long before Isaac came along, so he couldn’t have had anything to say about the one black man who worked at JMCH in a professional capacity. Right?