Ben
I’ve got a job for you, he’d said.
I pull another stack of slate from the bed of the truck, trying not to slam it down onto the pallet, which is what my hands are itching to do.
It’ll be easy, he’d said. Won’t even take a full day.
Another stack, another half-hearted attempt not to be aggressive with it. We’ve already made contact several times, he’d assured me. The groundwork has already been laid.
I straighten the pieces I’ve put down and turn back to the truck bed, still half-full. Fuck, I think. I’ll be out here all morning. I’m restless and pissed, and doing this kind of work should help, but so far, it’s not doing shit. I’m mad about yesterday, I’m worried about my dad, and I’ve been up since four a.m. so I could drive the fifty miles I needed to go to pick up all this slate and bring it back here. It’s almost funny—thirty-one years old, and I’m home to take care of him, but my dad still bosses me around this yard like I’m his fifty-dollars-per-week employee.
Strangely, though, I don’t feel like laughing.
I hear the muffled sound of my phone ringing from my back pocket, and I already know it’s Jasper, because he’s called three times since yesterday, and I haven’t picked up once. It’s hot as hell out here already, only ten a.m., and my arms are tired from all the lifting.
Might as well get this over with, I decide, and yank off my gloves, tossing them on the truck bed before yanking out my phone. Just to make sure, I check the screen before saying, “Jasper, you are an asshole.”
“That’s some greeting for your best friend, Tucker.”
“It’s what you deserve. I’m fucking pissed, Jas.” I resist the urge to kick at the pallet beside me. Though I’ve been keeping it together in front of my dad, being back here seems to rouse all my adolescent instincts.
“I’m guessing it didn’t go well with Averin.”
“You’re guessing right.”
“Goddammit. Global Chem got to him first,” Jasper says, his voice frustrated. Global Chem is our biggest competitor, and we’re always chasing down the same talent.
I snort a sarcastic laugh. That would maybe be easier. I could play good cop if I was up against Global Chem. But what happened yesterday—there’d be no way E.R. Averin was ever going to see me as a good anything. “She’s not a him,” I snap. “I mean, she’s—Ms. Averin, she’s a she.” I sound ridiculous.
“Oh,” Jasper says, and I’m surprised to feel annoyed on her behalf. I’ve been annoyed with myself since yesterday, having blown it so thoroughly with her, but Jasper can take most of the blame on this one, as far as I’m concerned.
“You should have done your research,” I say to him.
“That’s your area.”
“Not right fucking now, it’s not. I told you, I needed a couple months here to deal with my dad. You call me, you want me to deal with a recruit that’s in town, fine. But you needed to do the legwork.”
I exhale a frustrated breath, hunch my shoulder to hold the phone against my ear so I can tug on one of my gloves. I’m too mad to be standing here doing nothing. What I said to Jasper, it’s only partially true. I am on family leave while Dad recovers, and Jasper was asking me to do a special favor in going out on the job while I’m here. But I’d agreed before I left to stay in the loop, to telecommute as much as possible, and if I’d agreed to go out on a job, I should have been as careful as I usually am when I approach a new recruit. All I had before going to see Averin was what Jasper told me—master’s degree in materials science, working as a full-time lab tech at the university, impressive publication record in the area Beaumont was after, high tensile strength metal alloys, the kind of stuff we could use in our building materials division in particular—and the small additional amount I’d scared up through some Google searching an hour before I went in. I should have known something was off there. Everything online about her had been calculated to avoid anything personal—no pictures, no social media accounts, and on her university staff profile page, there’d only been a “No Picture Available” box, and underneath a list of publications so long that I’d had to scroll down twice.
The fact that I’d not taken the time to read a single one was bad enough. But worse was the fact that I’d jumped to conclusions—I’d thought Averin had to be at least forty-something to have that publication record.
And I’d thought Averin was a man.
She was neither forty-something nor a man. I’d thought she was a grad student, honestly. A gorgeous one too. When I’d first seen her, my mouth had gone dry, the tips of my fingers had twitched. It was such a dick move, such a massive error of assumptions that I still got a hot, embarrassed feeling when I thought about it. I may have played it cool when I was standing in front of her—I was terrific at playing that game—but I’d known I had fucked it up, and for some reason, it had felt uniquely awful to fuck it up with her.
“How’s he doing?” asks Jasper, and he sounds genuinely concerned.
“He’s a stubborn cuss, and he’s got me working like a dog. Which I guess means he’s doing all right. Doesn’t quite have his color back yet, but he’s a little better every day.”
“You brought him home yet?”
“Yeah. On Thursday.” I let that sit, enjoying Jasper’s silence. Thursday, the day Jasper called to insist I see Averin as soon as possible, I was helping get my seriously injured father discharged from the hospital, settling him into a house I’d spent the last three days preparing for his arrival, moving furniture and setting up ramps and installing grip bars for his tub and toilet.
Fucking Jasper.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I really am.”
Anyone else would probably hear this as lukewarm, barely a gesture. But Jasper hardly ever apologizes, so if he’s said it, I know he means it. And I can forgive Jasper for not getting it, I guess—the guy’s got no family of his own, and pretty much all he does is work. He laughs off the jokes people make at the office about his being robotic, a machine, but I know that shit gets to him. I know he tries.
“Averin,” I say, shifting the focus back to where he’ll feel more comfortable. “She doesn’t want anything to do with Beaumont.”
“Try again,” he says, and I have to laugh at how fast he’s returned to form.
“I’m serious, Jas. Aside from the fact that I was shit in the meeting, I don’t think she’s interested at all in what we do.” I have a memory of the way she waved a hand over me, where I stood in the doorway. Your suit, she said. Your face.
“So she’s a tough case. But that doesn’t mean she’s impossible. You’ve handled lots of cases like this.”
I had, actually. In fact, usually, tough cases are my specialty. Two months ago, I closed a guy who’d had his name on four medical patents that Beaumont wanted to develop. He’d been tenured faculty at his university for fifteen years, making good money, his wife and his kids happy and settled in their town. He had a top-of-the-line lab on campus and grad students that worked hard for him. There was really no reason for him to move on.
Until I convinced him otherwise.
Most people think recruiting comes down to one or two major things—money, usually, is the first one, or location—if you can convince someone that they’re going to be moving to a better place, one with more opportunities, or a better climate, whatever. But it’s more complicated than that. A good recruiter gets to know as much as he can about his target’s life, looks at that life in all its tangled, sometimes piecemeal, and always personal complexity. A good recruiter knows that people might move for money or location, but they stay for all kinds of different reasons—politics, partners, the sports scene, dog parks, whether there’s a good local bookstore. Beaumont has branches in seventeen states, and I know them all inside and out. I know the offices and the people who work in them; I know the surrounding areas and the shopping districts and the best places to go to school. I know everything that might turn a recruit on, that might scare them off.
Usually.
“She seems different,” I say, stacking more slate.
“Listen. Since we talked, I met again with Greg,” Jasper says, his voice serious. Greg is head of R&D, basically our boss, though Jasper and I work with more independence than probably anyone at corporate headquarters. “He’s decided Averin is his top prospect. And if we get her, he says he’ll let us out of the non-compete.”
Holy shit. I drop a piece of slate.
If we get out of the non-compete, Jasper and I have our shot, what we’ve been working toward for the last seven years. We could go independent, start our own consulting firm—rather than being employed by a single company, doing their R&D recruiting, we go out on our own. We scout talent, we shop it. Sports agents for scientists, basically. We’d work all over the world. We’ve built up contacts everywhere.
It’s the non-compete that’s kept us at Beaumont, and if we get out of it, we can make this happen.
If I can get Averin.
“I’ll get her.” But even as I say it, I think of that firm set to her mouth, that sharp-eyed look she gave me. She looked at me like I’d come to steal the eggs from her nest, and while I’d dealt with targets that were protective of their work, I got the sense that there was something else to the way she’d looked at me as a threat.
“You have a plan?”
“No,” I say honestly, picking up one of the shards from the piece of slate I’d dropped. My life is chaos right now, being away from the office and here taking care of my dad. And yet I’d worked my ass off for seven years, for longer than that, really, and all of it had been for this kind of chance. If I need Averin, I’ll find a way to get back in her good graces and to ignore the inconvenient and entirely unprofessional effect she has on me. “But I’ll make one.”
* * * *
I’m back at my dad’s place by seven, but it feels like midnight to my body, which hasn’t seen that kind of hard labor in years. In Texas, on the road, I work until I’m dead tired, and while I get to the gym almost every day, it’s nothing like a day at the yard, which is standing, lifting, pulling, stacking, cranking.
My dad got hurt doing this kind of work, and I’m struck with a fresh wave of guilt. I have that guilt generally, have had it since I left home, but it’s not even close to what I’ve felt since I got the call last week from the hospital. Your father’s taken a fall, the nurse had said, and I’d had to ask her to repeat it, just to let it sink in.
Sharon, my dad’s neighbor and part-time employee at the salvage yard, is in the kitchen, stirring something that smells delicious on the stove. “Potato and leek,” she says, as I set my wallet and keys on the counter. “Want some?”
“Thanks, Sharon. How’s he doing?”
“I think he terrorized the home health aide today,” she says. “He made her take apart some clock he’s trying to repair. When I got here, she said he wouldn’t even let her do the sponge bath he’s supposed to get.”
Shit, I think. Guess I’m doing the sponge bath. “I’ll call the service tomorrow and apologize.” It’s only for this first week, the home health service, but still, I want to stay on their good side.
Sharon shrugs. “You know, by the end of it I don’t even think she minded. She asked where she could leave all the tools so she could work more on it tomorrow when she comes.”
I have to laugh, imagining this. My dad is eccentric, no doubt about it, but he’s charming as hell too, and he’s always getting people interested in the same oddities that preoccupy him. When I was growing up, my favorite days at the salvage yard were when the polished, wealthy clients would come in, looking for something mint-condition, some high-priced sideboard or chandelier. They’d talk to my dad for twenty minutes, and all of a sudden, they’d be devoted to some wreck in the back, something they’d have to put all kinds of money and elbow grease in to restore fully. “You’ll hate it for a while,” he’d tell them, “but then you’ll love it more for hating it.”
“You okay?” Sharon asks, handing me a bowl of soup. I accept it gratefully, comforted by the familiarity of having Sharon here. She moved in next door three years after my mom moved out, and at first I was sort of terrified of her. She was six-foot-one and wore old baseball jerseys and jeans almost every day, and within two months of moving in she’d built a garage in the backyard entirely by herself. She and my dad argued about tools and cars and politics, but she was his best friend, and she certainly took better care of me than my own mom did.
“I’m all right. Busy there today.”
“It always is on Saturdays,” she says. “I’ll open and close tomorrow so you can stay home with him. The aide’s on the schedule for the morning, if you need to get out at all.”
“Sharon,” I sigh, once I swallow a bite of her delicious soup, “you’re saving us.”
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s just soup. Anyways I usually work Sundays.”
“Okay,” I say, because I know Sharon. If I thank her too much for this food, she’ll probably put a laxative in the next thing she makes me, just to teach me a lesson. I shove in a few more bites, set down my bowl on the kitchen table so I can grab a beer.
“Your mom came by for a bit today,” Sharon says from behind me, and I’m glad to have my face stuck in the refrigerator at that moment, so I can school my features. I saw my mom earlier this week, at the hospital, and it was awkward as all hell, as it usually is with us. My parents probably had one of the most amicable splits in the history of divorces, despite the fact that my mom left this house and moved straight into the downtown condo of the partner at the law firm where she worked as paralegal. When dad and I went to her wedding, barely a year later, my dad hugged her and shook Richard’s hand, and it was basically as if he was seeing an old friend get married, no hard feelings at all. Sometimes, when I’d have my weekly dinners with Mom, Dad would come along so they could catch up. The best thing about that was I didn’t have to do much talking.
“That’s nice,” I say, popping the tab on one of my dad’s shitty beers and leaning against the counter.
“Ben. It is nice.”
“Sure. That’s what I said.” Sharon gets along fine with my mom too. Actually, everyone gets along fine with my mom. I’m the only asshole around who holds a grudge, and even though I do my best with Mom—I call her every couple of weeks, I always see her when I’m in town—I still feel as tense and resentful around her as I did when I was a kid. “You should get out of here, Sharon. Get some rest before tomorrow.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snaps, but she’s wiping her hands on the towel, heading toward the door. “Henry!” she shouts, that big, gritty voice of hers always a surprise that makes me smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget to take the stool softener the aide left!”
I wince, and my dad shouts back, “I’ll call you in the morning, let you know if it worked!”
She rolls her eyes at me. “Good luck,” she says.
I take another drink of my beer and almost grab one for Dad but remember he’s off the stuff until he’s not taking his painkillers at night anymore. Instead, I get him a glass of water and head into the living room, where he’s sitting in his recliner, a TV tray covered in clock pieces in front of him. His left arm, heavy from the cast he’ll be in for the next two weeks, is held tight on his abdomen with a sling, but he’s tinkering as best he can with his right hand, which is shaky and pale.
“Dad, come on,” I say. “Let’s put this away.”
“Be quiet or make yourself useful,” he says, but I take the tray from him anyways, pulling it toward me before I slump on the couch. He grunts his disapproval, shifting slightly in his chair.
“You want to elevate it for a while?” I ask. In addition to the busted elbow and collarbone, Dad shattered his tibia, and his left leg from the knee down is in a thick, black boot, cushioned by some fancy inflatable bags that are supposed to stabilize the bone, which is now home to a titanium rod and a bunch of screws.
He waves me off, and I can see the effort it’s taking him to stay awake. Even in the hospital he fought sleep, wanting to stay as close to his longtime routine as possible: asleep at nine, up at five. I had the best luck in the hospital talking to him until he’d dozed off, and I decide I’ll do that here too, just to avoid an argument. If I have to carry him to bed, I’ll do it, but it’ll probably break my heart in half. Seeing my dad—my strong, unflappable dad—in this condition has been a gut check I wasn’t prepared for.
I tell him about my day at the yard, give him a report on the slate I picked up today, which, aside from the piece I broke on my call to Jasper, was in great shape, and would probably do a whole roof on a smaller house, a good profit if we get a contractor who’s interested. Talking about the yard, I guess, isn’t the best way to make him sleepy, since he looks more alert than he has in a few days. I use the conversation as the grease I need to get him up and moving toward the bathroom, talking as much for his sake as for mine. It’s less awkward helping him undress and getting him settled on the toilet when I’m talking the whole time, even when I’m standing outside the door, waiting for him to finish up.
Once I’ve got him in bed, I make him take his meds, and he leans his head back on the pillows I’ve propped up—upright sleep for the first days after the surgery, the doctor said, and believe me, I took notes. He looks exhausted by all that bedtime effort. “You’re not going to have trouble at work, being here?”
“Dad, we’ve talked about this. It’s fine.” I sit in the chair I pulled up by his bed before I brought him home. I’m not leaving until he’s asleep. I even bought a baby monitor on Thursday night, but I’ve stowed it under the bed so he won’t know.
“Don’t use the f-word with me,” he says. “I know you’re real important over there at your job.”
I think about how important I stand to be if Jas and I can get out of this non-compete, if we can break out on our own. “You had some work yesterday?” he asks.
“Yeah, I went to see a possible recruit. She was—not real interested.”
“I thought you go around throwing all kinds of money at people,” he says, but he’s smiling, teasing me a little. “She doesn’t like money?”
“I don’t think she likes me.”
“Can’t say as I blame her,” he says. “With that ugly mug you got.”
“Jealous, old man?” I tease, and he huffs a laugh. I find myself telling him about my meeting with her, but I’m not even focusing on any of the right things. I skip right over the part where I insulted her by assuming she was someone else. Instead, I’m describing her—I’m talking about the goggles she wore over her black-rimmed glasses, the way I could still see the dark, rich color of her eyes right through them. I’m talking about how she was barely as tall as the steel frame she was cleaning, how she wore a too-big lab coat that had the sleeves rolled up into thick cuffs. I’m not saying anything that has to do with a plan.
“Mad scientist,” my dad murmurs, and it’s good—he’s getting sleepy.
“Yeah,” I say, but her lab—it was clean, almost freakishly so, when most labs I visit seem in a constant state of disarray. “She’s working with lots of old equipment, which she wouldn’t have to worry about if she came to work for us. She broke one of her old cabinets while I was there. The thing looks like it was manufactured during the Manhattan Project.”
Dad perks up, rolls his eyes toward me. “What’d she break?” Typical, that this is the detail my dad would seize on.
“Storage cabinet, a steel one. Broke the handle off. She seemed used to it—had a piece of rope as a handle for two of the other doors.”
“I got handles for one of those at the yard, probably. Those cabinets are a dime a dozen.”
I think about this, wondering what Averin would think if I showed up with replacement cabinet door handles as an apology. Rather than, say, me wearing a dunce cap and having read all her published work, which is what she deserves as an apology. Probably on principle I should also email my women’s studies professor from junior year and apologize for exhibiting gender bias.
“Hmm,” I say, but I notice Dad’s breathing is deeper, and his eyes are closed. I lean back in my chair, wince at the loud creaks it makes in the room.
My dad looks so small in his bed, which doesn’t make sense, because at six-three, he’s still exactly my height, and he’s in good shape from working the way he does. I wonder if it’s something about being back in this house, about how when I left eleven years ago, I was still so used to being a kid, used to seeing everything, including him, as bigger than me. It’s not that I never make it back here—I do, at least twice a year, and Dad comes out to see me maybe once every two years. But knowing I’m going to be sticking around for a while has changed my perspective, I guess.
“Stop staring at me,” he says, his eyes still closed.
“Thought you were sleeping.”
“I don’t want an audience. Go to bed; you’re annoying me.”
I chuckle—this is my dad’s familiar, cheerful gruffness. I stand, looking over things one last time, making sure there’s water by the bed, that there’s a pillow under his elbow, that his sling is in the right position.
I swallow a sudden surge of emotion. It’s hard not to see this fall as some kind of turning point, some kind of moment of reckoning that means Dad and I have to start talking seriously about what happens in his future. He’s only sixty, sure, and even though he’s got no plans to retire, his recovery from this is going to slow him down.
Thinking about that now, after the day I’ve had—after the week I’ve had, really—feels too exhausting, and anyways, I’m no help to Dad if I’m too tired to see things clearly. I flip off the light and head down to my room, resolved to apply the rest of my mental energy for the night to thinking through what I’ve got going on with Beaumont, with Jasper, with E.R. Averin. Doing a job here will be a good distraction, will help keep me balanced while I take care of Dad.
But I still switch on the monitor and set it on my nightstand, listening to Dad breathe until I fall into a dreamless sleep.