“And right away you blame Theo?”
“Sally, he did the work.”
She crumpled the tissue in her hands. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s his fault. Like, what if someone gave him the wrong parts and he couldn’t tell the difference?”
“Look, Sally, I’m really sorry about this. I’m sorry about how this affects you, because you’re special to me. You know that Sheila, when she was still around, and I have always thought the world of you. Kelly loves you. I’d bend over backwards to give Theo the benefit of the doubt, because I know he means a lot to you, but-”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know exactly how much he means to me. But he’s all I’ve got at the moment.”
“Well, look, that’s something you have to work out. And what I have to do, Sally, is I have to protect myself, and this company, and the people like you who work for me, and if someone does work for me that’s unacceptable, that leaves us exposed to possible lawsuits, that could end up getting someone killed, for crying out loud, then I have to do what I have to do.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “But I’m sorry I’ve hurt you.”
She nodded, dabbed at her eyes again. “I know.”
“And I know that this has been a tough time for you. Losing your father. No other family here to help you out.”
“He was just… one minute he was okay and the next he was gone.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s hard. Look at my dad. One second he’s hauling plywood off a truck, the next he’s dead.”
She nodded. “You were there,” she said.
“Yeah, I was there when he died.”
“No, I mean, my dad’s funeral. I couldn’t believe it when you came to the funeral.”
“Sally, I wasn’t going to not be there for you.”
“Yeah, but you had a funeral to get ready for, too. I always felt bad.”
“You always felt bad about what?”
“That I didn’t come to Sheila’s.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“No, I feel real bad. I mean, if you could come to my dad’s, why couldn’t I go to your wife’s funeral the day after?”
“It was hard for you,” I said. “You’re just a kid, really. No offense. You get older, you can handle these things.” I tried to make a joke. “You learn to multi-grieve.”
“I thought I was the office multitasker.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “ ‘Give it to Sally, she can handle a hundred things at once.’ I guess not always.” After a couple of more dabs at her eyes, she asked, “Is Theo finished? Is he ever going to get work around here again?”
“I don’t know.”
“He said you’re going to ruin him.”
I let out a long sigh. “He’s ruined himself.”
That, evidently, rubbed her the wrong way. Abruptly, she pushed back her chair and stood up. “You’re a hard guy to love, Glen. Sometimes, you can be such a hard-ass. Now we’re going to have to move away, and I’m going to have to get a job someplace else.” She stormed out of the room with one last shot. “I hope you’re happy.”
I wasn’t, particularly.
Sally went home after that. It was, after all, quitting time. The last thing she’d told me, in short, clipped sentences, was that Doug had left his truck, full of stuff, around the back of the shed, then taken off with Betsy in her Infiniti to go see the bank before it closed about the mess they were in. Sally said Doug had asked, if I had a chance, would I mind unloading his truck.
I put my head in my hands for a few moments. Then I opened my bottom desk drawer and took out a half-full bottle of Dewar’s and a shot glass, and poured myself a drink. I put the stopper back in the bottle and tucked it into the drawer.
I downed the drink, then went to the shed. I didn’t know that I could do much for Doug in his current predicament, but letting him and Betsy store their stuff here was at least something. There was a lot of room in the shed, and if their things were stacked efficiently they wouldn’t take up that much space. Unloading Doug’s truck would mean one less thing he had to deal with when-and if-he showed up for work tomorrow morning.
I felt sick about Doug. It was a strained relationship we had at times, particularly lately. We’d worked side by side for several years while my father was alive, more or less equals on the job. We not only worked together. We played. Everything from golf to video games. Our wives commiserated while their two grown men would kill an afternoon immersed in a Super Mario Bros. time-waster. And to prove we weren’t just children, we would get drunk at the same time. Doug had always been a carefree guy, someone who didn’t see much point in worrying about tomorrow when it was a whole night’s sleep away, and the unfortunate thing was he’d married someone who worried even less. Not, as today’s events proved, an ideal match.
His lackadaisical approach to life hadn’t been a problem when we worked together, but after my father died and I took over the company, and Doug became an employee instead of a coworker, things changed. First of all, we no longer hung out as a foursome. When I became the boss, Betsy didn’t like the way the scales had tipped between her and Sheila. Betsy imagined Sheila somehow lording it over her, like I’d somehow morphed into Donald Trump and Sheila was Ivana, or whomever Trump was married to these days.
The qualities that had once endeared Doug to me now occasionally drove me to distraction. His work was always good, but there was the odd day he phoned in sick when I knew he was hungover. He wasn’t as attentive as he could be to customers’ concerns. “People watch too many of those home reno shows,” he often said. “They expect things to be perfect, but it’s not like that in the real world. Those shows, they’ve got big budgets.”
Clients didn’t like to hear those kinds of excuses.
If we hadn’t at one time been buddies, Doug probably wouldn’t have felt he could hit me up for advances on his salary. If we hadn’t at one time been buddies, I would have said no the first time he asked, and not set a precedent.
I wanted to help him out, but I couldn’t rescue Doug. He and Betsy were going to have to hit rock bottom before they were able to pull themselves up again. I understood what he said about the banks, about those mortgages that were all too good to be true. He wasn’t the only one that got sucked in.
A lot of people were learning their lessons. I just hoped Doug and Betsy were able to learn theirs before they killed each other.
I opened the tailgate of Doug’s truck and the window of the cargo cap above it. Because the Pinders had not had time to organize their things, everything had been tossed in loose. I opened the door to the shed and cleared a spot in one corner for the stuff, and brought out a couple of chairs, a DVD player, some linens. They probably should have taken that to Betsy’s mom’s place, but they could sort that out later.
I had the truck nearly emptied when I noticed a couple of cardboard boxes, about the size a dozen bottles of wine would come in, tucked up close to the cab. I crouched down and walk-squatted the length of the truck bed. You spend enough time in construction, you can walk in the back of a pickup like that without getting a groin injury or pulling a hamstring.
Once I reached the boxes, I got down on my knees. I wasn’t sure whether this was stuff from Doug’s house or something he’d already had in the truck that belonged to the business. So I folded back the cardboard flaps and had a peek inside. There was a lot of crumpled newspaper, which had been used as packing material. I took out bits of paper to see what it was protecting. The box was filled with electrical parts. Coils of wire, outlets, junction boxes, light switches, parts for circuit breaker panels.
It might have been interesting to read some of the stories on the newspaper scraps, but they were all written in Chinese.
THIRTY-EIGHT
It wasn’t immediately obvious these parts were all junk. As knockoff electrical bits went, they looked pretty authentic. But sitting in the back of Doug’s truck, studying them, I was able to spot things that didn’t pass muster. The circuit breaker parts, for one, had no certification marks on them. Anything legit would have had them. The color of the plastic used for the light switches was off, not consistent throughout. You handle parts like these long enough, you just know.