Just in Time by Marie Bostwick (12)

Chapter 12

Grace

Ten minutes after my conversation with Ava, I stood in the hallway, staring at Gavin Nutting’s office door. A pounding sound was coming from inside. I tried to think of things that might make me indispensable. None came to mind. I took a deep breath and knocked.

“Enter!”

I poked my head inside. “Mr. Nutting? Can I speak with you for a minute?”

Gavin was wasting no time settling into his new office. Along with a couple of award plaques, he’d already hung several framed motivational posters on the walls, the sort you see for sale in the back of business magazines, with high-resolution photos of redwood forests, eagles in flight, sailboats on stormy seas, and the like. Beneath each picture were urgent, single-word captions that screamed . . .

“Have a seat,” he said.

While Gavin put down his hammer and rolled down his shirtsleeves, I continued looking over his new office.

He had a personal coffeemaker on his credenza, the kind with plastic pods. Though he wore a wedding band, there were no signs of a wife or kids in his desk photos. Instead, each of the very professional-looking pictures showed him engaged in some sort of athletic pursuit—skiing, surfing, golfing, etc.—and looking so good doing it that I wondered if they’d been staged. There wasn’t a single candid-looking snapshot in the bunch, nothing that made him look goofy, or happy, or even particularly human. I’d never seen a desk gallery quite like it.

Still, I wasn’t so much concerned with Gavin’s office décor as I was with reminding him of why I very much wanted and needed to keep my job. I needed to convince him that I was indispensable, but also figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him that I was a woman in dire straits, just in case he turned out to have a hidden streak of compassion. You can’t judge a book by its cover, right?

Except, in this case, you could....

When I finished, Gavin stared at me across his desk, laced his fingers together, and tapped his thumbs. “Yes, I understand that your personal situation is difficult. But as I said before in the meeting, I’m not planning on making any immediate changes. Now, what can I do for you, Grace?”

Allowing for variations in vocal tone and inflection, there are about ten different ways to ask that exact question. Probably nine of them are kindly meant. Gavin Nutting asked the tenth way, making two things crystal clear: first, that he didn’t give a rat’s rear end about my personal problems; and second, that I was one of the first people he planned to fire.

How could I change his mind? What would somebody indispensable say in these circumstances?

“Mr. Nutting, I’m not stupid. ‘No plans for immediate change’ just means that you’re not going to fire me this week. Next week could be a different story. And, obviously, my personal situation is just that—personal. You have a company to run. That is your first, your only priority. And my problems are mine, not yours. And certainly not Spector’s. But I . . . what I mean is . . .”

His unwavering stare shook what little confidence I had, made me lose my train of thought. My mind was racing, trying to come up with some way to convince him of my value, but I kept coming up empty. And then, hanging just above his head, I saw the posters and the captions beneath, bold as billboards.

“What you may not have considered is that my personal problems make me a highly motivated and focused employee who is eager to learn and willing to work hard. Somebody with an exceptional attitude and commitment to excellence.”

I leaned closer. “What you can do for me, Mr. Nutting, is teach me what it’s going to take, not just to keep my job, but to succeed as a member of your team.”

“My team?”

My knees were actually trembling. I was afraid he’d fire me then and there. But then he hitched himself up in his chair and I knew I had his attention.

“Do you have an admin yet, Mr. Nutting? If you don’t, I’d like the job.”

“You?” His face twisted into an expression that was somewhere between bemused and amused. “Huh. Didn’t see that coming. Have to say, Grace, I’d already written you off as kind of a . . . Well, a nice girl. And the thing about nice girls is—”

“They finish last.”

“Right.”

He laced his fingers again, tapping his thumbs together. His eyes became slits. He looked me over like a car he was thinking about buying. I sat very still.

“Huh,” he said again. “I planned to tell HR to start looking for my assistant today. But maybe this would save them the trouble,” he mused, his voice so low it almost felt like I was eavesdropping on his inner monologue. “If we do it right, it might save the company some money to boot. Can’t hurt to try. Can it?”

He sat there for a long moment. I barely breathed. Finally, he unlaced his fingers.

“Okay, Grace, here’s the deal. You can stay on as my assistant—”

“Thank you, Mr. Nutting! Thank you!”

“Hang on, hang on,” he said, holding up a hand to stave off my flood of gratitude. “Don’t thank me until you’ve finished listening to what I have to say. I want you to continue in your current position, taking care of the administrative work for Peter, Ava, and the rest of that team. In addition, you’ll be my assistant.”

He wanted me to do my current job and take on a new one? I’d have five bosses instead of four? I bit the inside of my lip. Five bosses . . . Well, okay. Ava and the others were pretty self-sufficient. Mostly I took phone messages, made copies, and followed up on paperwork for closings. Twenty percent more of that should be doable. If that was the price of being indispensable, keeping my job, my insurance, and keeping Jamie in Landsdowne, so be it. I could do this. I had to.

“That’s fine, Mr. Nutting. Won’t be a problem.”

“Not so fast,” he said. “Working for me won’t be like working for the rest of them. I get to the office early and leave late. Ten hours is a short day for me, most days it’s twelve, even fourteen hours. When I’m here, I’ll expect you to be here, too, placing my calls, keeping my calendar, and taking care of all of my personal business—picking up my dry cleaning, taking my car in for service, that kind of thing.

“I know,” he said, reading my mind. “It sounds crazy. Nobody has their assistant do all of that anymore. But juggling calendars, organizing conference calls, typing my own memos, and handling domestic chores isn’t a good use of my time or the company’s money.

“I’m sure this comes as no surprise, Grace, but I make exponentially more per hour than you do. So I make sure that every minute of my day is spent focusing on the big picture, doing the things only I can do, steering the ship. Before I do anything, I ask myself, Is this the highest and best use of my time? If the answer is no, I delegate the task to someone else. If you decide you want this job, then a lot of the time, that someone will be you. There would be no salary increase. But you’d keep your benefits, which, as you’re aware, are more than generous.”

I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the scope of the work that bothered me. What did I care what he wanted me to do, as long as I got paid? Work was just work to me. It always had been. I’d never had a career, only jobs. They weren’t fulfilling, but they paid the bills.

But . . . ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days? How was I supposed to manage that? I already got up at five every morning so I could visit Jamie first thing, then went back right after work. The staff at Landsdowne was great, but I still needed to keep on top of Jamie’s care and be his advocate. And I needed to talk to him . . . I needed that. But Jamie needed to stay at Landsdowne, so I had to make this work. But how?

“I do want the job, Mr. Nutting. Really,” I assured him, responding to the look of doubt in his eyes. “I won’t have any problem doing anything you ask me to. The only thing is . . . the hours. Would it be possible to limit my schedule to, say, ten hours a day? I go to see my husband every evening and—”

He started shaking his head even before I had a chance to finish.

“I’m sorry, but when I’m here my assistant is here. That’s the deal. If you want to keep working at Spector, you’re going to have to spend less time with your husband and more time at the office.

“I don’t mean to sound cold, but you’ve got a choice to make, Grace. And you’re not the only one. Spector is a company that runs lean and mean, always has. That’s why we’re successful. Anybody who wants to work here has to pull their weight and then some. If they can’t, they can’t stay.”

He laced his fingers again, propped his elbows on the desk, and looked at me. “So? What do you think? Do you want the job?”

“Yes, sir.”

What else could I say?

“Good,” he said. “I’ll be honest—I’ve still got doubts about you, Grace. If you can keep up with me, then you have a future at Spector. If not? I’m sure there are plenty of places that’d be happy to have a nice girl on the payroll.”

He placed his hands on the edge of the desk and pushed himself into a standing position. “You’ll start tomorrow morning. Sound good?”

“No, sir.” I picked up the hammer he’d left on the desk. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to start now. Hanging up posters doesn’t seem like the highest and best use of your time.”

* * *

I stayed at the office until almost eight o’clock that night, hanging up Gavin’s pictures, organizing his files, trying to prove my worth. After a quick trip to the condo to pay the neighbor who feeds and walks Maisie every afternoon, then walking her myself, I finally made it to Landsdowne.

“Sorry I’m so late. You wouldn’t believe my day,” I said after kissing Jamie on the forehead. “Remember my old boss at the bank? The one who used a stopwatch to time employee lunch breaks? Well, my new boss makes him look like Santa Claus.”

Jamie grimaced and yelped out a noise that was somewhere between a bark and a laugh. I knew it didn’t mean anything—he made similar sorts of vocalizations all the time, usually while I was still speaking. But when his noises came at a break in my commentary, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if he might actually understand what I was saying—not my words so much, but possibly my tone?

“Don’t worry,” I said, making an effort to sound more cheerful, “he’s no match for me. You’re looking at a woman who once picked ten bins of apples in a single day.”

Jamie let out another yelp.

“Okay, fine. You’re right. I was so sore I could hardly move the next day, but the point is, I’m no stranger to hard work. If Gavin Nutting thinks he’s going to scare me off with long hours, he’d better think again. I know he thinks I’m just ‘a nice girl,’ but I’m tougher than I look, right?”

Jamie twisted in his bed, making an undulating motion with his head and shoulders. I bent down, scooped my arms beneath his torso, and rolled him onto his side.

“There you go. Better?” I asked, looking into his eyes.

As usual, he looked right through me, but his expression seemed more relaxed. I sat down and pulled the plastic bag with my quilt patches from my purse.

“Do you remember the year I picked those ten bins? Your dad could hardly find any pickers that year and the fruit was going to rot on the trees, so your mom got on the phone and called every relative within three hundred miles. Everybody worked as hard as they could from dawn to dusk, but nobody harder than you. You picked fifteen bins. Three years before, we thought you wouldn’t live to celebrate your twenty-first birthday, but there you were, climbing up and down that ladder with forty pounds of fruit in your picking bag, leaving the rest of us in the dust. It was hot and miserable, but we got it done, didn’t we?”

I slipped a length of gray thread through the eye of my needle and smiled, thinking about the satisfaction I’d felt when Jerry, Jamie’s dad, drove up on the tractor to tell us that the last bin had been filled and the whole orchard picked. I’d never felt so tired, or so proud.

“Maybe working for Gavin will be like that,” I said, looking up at Jamie.

His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open. He was snoring softly. I was tired, too, but decided to stay and finish my quilt block, one of the Delectable Mountain blocks I was making to represent the many, many challenges Jamie and I had faced since we’d met—the mountains we had climbed and conquered together.

The one I was working on that night was made from a pair of dark blue size twenty pants I owned when Jamie and I first became friends.

He’d been very nice to talk to me that day at the medical center, but I figured that was the end of it. I never expected him to show up at my front door.

“The doctor says I’ve got to give the knee a rest,” he said, “so that’s the end of my cross-country season. But I want to stay in shape for spring and he said it was okay to walk, so I was wondering if you felt like coming along? It’s kind of boring walking by yourself.”

He made it seem like I was doing him a favor, keeping him company and helping him stay in shape, but I’d barely been able to walk a mile on that first day, and huffed and puffed so hard that I couldn’t really carry on a conversation.

But the next day after school, there he was again, and every day after. We started with one mile, then two, then three. Pretty soon I was able to talk and walk at the same time. We got to know each other really well, sharing intimacies and inanities with equal enthusiasm, the way teenagers do, as if it was all so important. To me it was. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a friend, someone who looked at me instead of past me, and liked me in spite of what he saw.

Pretty soon, we were talking all the time, not just on our daily walks but at school and on the phone. One day, about a month after we started walking, I called him at home.

“Jamie, guess what? My blue workout pants were feeling kind of loose so I got on the scale. I lost nine pounds.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Jamie said.

“Are you crazy? It’s nine pounds!” I squealed. “I haven’t even been dieting!”

“But the doctor said you weren’t fat enough to be able to get that surgery, right? So this means you’ve got even more weight to gain before you can lose it all.”

“You jerk. I can’t stand you,” I laughed, meaning the opposite.

Unless I brought it up, we never talked about my weight. But after that first nine pounds, I began paying more attention to what I ate. That was when I got into the habit of dividing things I liked into two portions and saving half for later. Slowly, the weight came off. Whenever I reported my progress to Jamie he was happy, but only because I was. I never felt like his approval or friendship fluctuated along with the scale. By the time we graduated, I’d lost seventy-seven pounds. It wasn’t easy, but Jamie was with me for every step of the journey.

Delectable Mountain blocks have a set of increasingly steeper stair steps, up one side of the block and down the other. My plan was to make four blocks and stitch them around the big blank center block, to create a continuous ring of ascents and descents.

It seemed like that was the way things always were for Jamie and me. We’d conquer one mountain only to find another waiting for us. We didn’t know then that Jamie’s leg pain was an early symptom of osteosarcoma, the bone cancer that was quietly spreading through his body. It wasn’t discovered until, weeks before Jamie was to start his freshman year at Minnesota State, he collapsed in pain in his own living room, the leg broken.

At first, everyone in town was talking about Jamie and he was practically overrun with visitors. But when summer came to an end a lot of Jamie’s friends went away to college. Not me.

I came to visit every day. I played cards with him, read books to him, and watched movies with him. When he was too worn-out for that, I was just there, in the room, holding his hand or watching him sleep. When he went through chemotherapy, I shaved his head.

When he started radiation, Jamie asked me to marry him and I said yes. It was the happiest moment in my life, also the saddest. No one thought he would last more than a few months, including me.

Jamie had different ideas.

I won’t lie; there were days when we wanted to give up, but, fortunately, those days never occurred at the same time. We climbed that mountain, step by step and day by day, together. Three years later, when Jamie picked more apples than anybody else, I was so happy I felt like I was floating, because I knew it was over. He’d climbed the mountain and come down the other side, even stronger than before. It was Jamie’s moment of triumph. Mine too.

That’s the thing I’ve learned about mountains: the joy you feel at scaling them is in direct proportion to how high and impassable the peak appears to be once you’re on the other side of it.

“Maybe this will be like that,” I said again, thinking about Gavin Nutting as I set a final backstitch into the block.

Maybe.

But as I snipped the thread and looked up to see Jamie, eyes still closed, hands fisted and curled under his chin, I couldn’t help but recall that it was different this time. This time, I was climbing alone. It was up to me to carry Jamie safely over.

I had to keep going, no matter what. It was all on me. I couldn’t fail him.