CHAPTER 22
Excerpt from Petra Polly: Chapter 12—Managing the Expectations of Others: What to Do with a Difficult Client
So your dream client is no longer happy with your company’s work. What to do? Remain calm. Remember that the organization should be seen as a person, body and soul, and what happens when a body needs to woo a wandering lover? Romance. The showering of gifts, both tangible and spiritual. A few mea culpas for not giving your undivided attention. Make the client feel cherished. Adored. Imply you have forsaken all others in order to make them happy.
And then work your ass off to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“We haven’t lost any clients,” Rhiannon said. “We’ve gained some. Why did he make us read this chapter?”
“Maybe because the wooing applies to signing the client as well?” Glynnis said, but she didn’t sound sure. “Then again, that was covered in chapter 4.”
We sat in the conference room, all of us save Lukas, arguing over what would attract a person like Petra Polly to a small advertising agency like ours. Lukas insisted the best route was to follow the instructions she’d laid out in her book to every detail, but I silently disagreed. Why would she need us if we could only provide her with what she already knew? We needed to add significant value to her investment. We needed a little flash and pizzazz. We needed a touch of Big Frank.
“She’s the type to want infomercials,” Byron said with a roll of his eyes. “Am I right? Tony Robbins, that Rich Dad Poor Dad guy, and . . . Petra Polly.”
Rhiannon snorted. “We don’t know what she sounds like. I couldn’t find one podcast or YouTube video. No television or radio interview. Nothing. Why do you think that is?”
“Maybe she’s been too busy?” Glynnis contributed. She’d been more talkative than usual, and a tad more assertive. I didn’t know if she’d talked to Byron at the party, or if she’d spent the evening crying on Seth’s shoulder. She, Jackie, and I attempted to get away at lunch to discuss the party drama, but it was impossible with Lukas monitoring our every move. Petra Polly would arrive in Willow Falls in exactly two weeks. We were anything but prepared, and Lukas was skirting a nervous breakdown. He was downing kombucha like a Brooklyn hipster on a bender and pacing the hallways endlessly.
“Maybe she’s hiding something,” I said, thinking of Mr. Eckhardt, fingering the earrings he forgot to take back. I wondered about his marriage. Had it been a happy one, like mine and Jesse’s? Instinct told me it hadn’t been. Bill Eckhardt was an angry, difficult man. I suddenly had compassion for this woman, this poor soul who married him.
Mr. Eckhardt’s attitude toward other people essentially boiled down to this—leave me alone because you are a lesser human who doesn’t deserve to breathe my rarified air. After a decade of it, I had difficulty finding a soft spot of compassion in my admittedly hardened heart. Still, I had to wonder why it was that a lonely man seemed so intent on ensuring his own loneliness.
“Paige!” Glynnis’s voice brought me from my thoughts.
“What?”
“We haven’t got an idea worthy of Petra. Stop being so distracted. This is serious,” she said. “I talked to Seth at the party about his job search. He said he hasn’t had a single call, and he’s sent out dozens of résumés.” Glynnis groaned. “I can’t go back out there. I can’t lose this job.”
“None of us can afford to,” I said. If Seth—young, hip, and full of energy—couldn’t get a callback, then Jackie and I were destined for a temp agency. I didn’t know how to make decent coffee. Starbucks wouldn’t even hire me on as a barista.
“Then we have to be better than them,” she whispered, nudging her head toward Rhiannon and Byron, who were talking excitedly about . . . something. Though we’d all been hanging out in the conference room, they’d been increasingly distant from the rest of us, sharing inside jokes with Lukas and generally acting like they were from a slightly different species than us. “I need you to focus,” Glynnis stated primly.
“I am focused.”
“No,” she said, that newly minted assertiveness shining through. “You’re not. You’re thinking about your garden and that police officer who’s into you, and—”
“Do you think he’s into me?”
“Seriously, Paige. You are nearly twice my age. Grow up.”
I was acting like a teenager. But then again, it wasn’t exactly my choice. I was dating again, and what came with that was an avalanche of insecurities and second-guessing and forensic-scale analysis of every word or action. I even had acne, perimenopausal, hormone-induced acne, but still. For the second time in my life, I had to put an Open House sign on my heart. I had to accept the risk that no one might be interested. At Jesse’s funeral, a neighbor said to me, “You won the lottery when you met Jesse.” As time went on, I knew what he was implying. This isn’t going to happen again. It might not. Knowing that—and accepting it—was the only thing that told me I was ready.
“You’re spacing out again,” Glynnis said. “Stop it!”
“Okay. Sorry.” I dropped Petra’s book onto the table with a thunk. “Let’s start by focusing on what value we can bring to her organization.”
“Seriously?”
“Okay,” I said, conceding lameness. “How can we sell her better than she can sell herself?”
“She’s not selling herself,” Glynnis said. “Beyond what her publisher is doing for her. She doesn’t have much of a Google presence. For someone who is expanding her company, Petra Polly doesn’t seem to want to be seen.”
That was odd. Maybe it meant she didn’t understand the power of social media? How could it be that we were following her every dictum when she didn’t understand how to use the Internet? It didn’t make sense. Petra was choosing to stay mysterious. But why?
“Let’s focus on the products,” I said, going with a hunch. “Not Petra.”
“But she’s cute and hipstery,” Glynnis said with a skeptical lift of her brow. “Don’t we want to use that?”
It was an easy way to brand herself. If Petra wanted to use it, she would have. “I don’t think that’s what she wants.”
“I disagree. I think you want the easy way out.” Glynnis gathered her things angrily, and then stooped to whisper in my ear. “If I wanted someone lazy and old-fashioned, I would have gone to Jackie.”
“That’s not fair.”
Glynnis’s fair skin had grown ruddy with her frustration. “If you want to keep your job, you need to start thinking—”
“Don’t say ‘outside the box.’”
She shoved Petra’s book into her messenger bag. “Make fun of it all you want, but, yes, that’s exactly what we need to be doing.”
“Giving her the expected response does not qualify as creative thinking.”
“We’ll make it special.” To my horror, her eyes welled up. “We can offer her that.”
“Of course we can,” I said soothingly.
“You’re the most talented, Paige. We all need you. I don’t want to keep living with my parents and asking to borrow their car when I need to go somewhere. I have student loans bigger than a car payment. I—” She dissolved into tears.
“I’ll try,” I promised. “I’ll really try.”
“We should go over there.”
Mykia sat on my counter a week after the party, popping blueberries into her mouth and staring out my kitchen window at Mr. Eckhardt’s house. She brought the fruit with her because my bushes wouldn’t produce enough blackberries to make a jar of jam for at least another year or two. Patience will be rewarded, the garden reminded me. Why was it so hard to listen sometimes?
“I’m trying not to obsess about my blackberry bushes making it next year.”
Mykia told me not to worry. “That’s the beauty of a garden,” she said. “Some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t, and some stuff you think isn’t working ends up producing the following year. Keeps you living in a constant state of suspense, so whatever comes, you’re grateful for it.”
Grateful. That morning, when I got up early to water and weed and do all the caretaking things that had become second nature, I’d found my tomatoes had changed from the greenish-orange slightly tie-dyed look to orange, burgeoning on red, like a really beautiful sunrise. The plants looked healthy and strong, their leaves a deep green velvet. I couldn’t disguise my pride when I showed Mykia as soon as she’d arrived.
“This is good,” Mykia had said with a deep sense of satisfaction. “You did good, Paige.”
No one had told me I’d done well at anything in so long that I’d teared up and hugged her.
She had a sharper expression on her face as she hopped off the counter and went to the window, taking in Mr. Eckhardt’s perfect lawn. “You still have the earrings, right? You didn’t give them back?”
When I wasn’t wearing them, I set them on the small plate that held a few special pieces I’d gotten from Jesse over the years. Mr. Eckhardt’s rage, along with Sean’s presence and the party overall, had me flustered, and I’d forgotten to even think of returning them that night. Had he noticed? Would he show up at my door again, even angrier that I’d kept them to myself?
“Maybe I should give them back.”
“You shouldn’t just return them, no questions asked,” Mykia said. “Don’t you want to know why he buried the dress?”
I did and I didn’t, but curiosity was one of my emotions I could never quite turn down. “Yes, I guess I do.”
“Bring the earrings, but don’t show him just yet. We’ll go over and knock on his door. We need the element of surprise on our side.”
Given that we had to cross the broad expanse of lawn in bright daylight and knock on the door, I didn’t think we exactly had that going for us.
We didn’t. Mr. Eckhardt had the door open before we reached it.
“What do you want?” he said, his tone unwelcoming.
I gathered up my courage. “I apologized to you at the party, but you didn’t apologize to me.”
“Thieves don’t deserve apologies.”
I tried to match his haughty expression. “It was half on my property.”
“And half on mine,” he said.
“I didn’t give you everything in the box. If you tell me why it was buried, I’ll give you the rest.”
Mr. Eckhardt looked like he might be sick. “You are an evil woman.”
“No, I’m not. Just curious about who I’ve been living next to for ten years.”
“Okay,” he said, which I should have realized was not really a promise of anything.
I opened my hand, and the earrings glistened in the sun.
“Where . . . ?” Mr. Eckhardt shot out of the house and stopped cold right in front of me. He took the earrings, cradling them in his palm, and closed his eyes. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“You don’t have a right to ask,” he snapped.
“You promised,” Mykia said, but her tone had lost its bite. She was softer, as if she wanted to offer Mr. Eckhardt a reason he could let his story loose. It obviously pained him greatly.
“You’re talking about my things,” he said tightly.
“Sometimes it helps to talk,” I offered.
“Well,” he said. He opened his eyes and fixed them on me. They were harder now, unyielding. “You have no respect for other people’s property because you have no respect for your own.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? Look at what you’ve done. Do you think you’re honoring your husband’s memory? You’re tarnishing it. Don’t you understand that?”
“Enough,” I said. “Enough.”
Mr. Eckhardt tossed the earrings on his lawn. “Pick them up,” he said.
“What?”
“Pick up the earrings!”
Stunned, I did as he asked.
“Now, take them away,” he boomed.
“Are you sure?”
“TAKE THEM AWAY, PAIGE!”
Mykia and I left him standing there, a totem in the summer sun, casting a shadow over the fence.