Chapter 5 - The Cost of Keeping Peace
Maya scheduled the employment review for the first week of January.
I wanted to sit in every interview.
She told me no.
“You are the reason we need distance,” she said.
“That is a rude way to talk to your CEO.”
“You hired me because I talk to the CEO this way.”
She was right.
Again.
I was beginning to resent how many people were becoming right around me.
For three days, I worked from a smaller conference room while Maya, legal, and operations reviewed each of the forty-seven terminated employees.
They looked at attendance, actual job duties, performance reviews, disciplinary history, certifications, project results, and whether the role itself had been created for a business reason.
The numbers were worse than I expected.
Fifteen positions had no credible business justification.
Eleven more employees had serious performance or conduct problems that managers had repeatedly softened because they were related to Claire.
Nine were ordinary workers with mixed reviews.
Twelve had records good enough that firing them had been indefensible as a business decision.
Jenna was one of the twelve.
So was Ben, the electrician.
So was Melissa in accounts payable.
Maya brought the summary into my office.
“We recommend rehire offers to twelve immediately. Another nine can reapply under standard criteria if their positions remain. Twenty-six stay separated.”
“Martin?”
She gave me a look.
“You know the answer.”
“Paul?”
“No.”
“Derek?”
“No.”
I nodded.
“Send the offers.”
Maya stayed seated.
“What?”
“You need to do something else.”
“I already apologized to Jenna.”
“This is not about Jenna.”
She slid a stack of anonymous employee comments toward me.
I read the first one.
Why did we freeze apprentice raises while relatives of the owner’s wife had made-up jobs?
The second:
People stopped reporting Paul because nothing happened.
The third:
We were told there was no budget for new fall protection equipment at the Louisville warehouse, but Martin had a company SUV.
I stopped reading.
“Maya.”
“You asked me to tell you when culture problems became expensive.”
“I know.”
“No, you know now.”
She pointed at the papers.
“This is what keeping peace cost.”
The sentence followed me all afternoon.
I had always thought of the jobs as favors I could afford.
A salary here.
A truck allowance there.
A consulting fee that kept Claire from getting another call from her father about money.
But money is never only money inside a company.
It is what did not go somewhere else.
A raise delayed.
Equipment postponed.
A manager who learned rules were flexible for the right last name.
At home that evening, Sophie was making boxed macaroni and cheese.
I took a wooden spoon from her.
“I can do that.”
She grabbed it back.
“I know.”
I opened the refrigerator.
“What do you want with it?”
“Nothing.”
“Chicken?”
“No.”
“Broccoli?”
She looked horrified.
“It’s macaroni and cheese.”
“People put broccoli in it.”
“People commit tax fraud too.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
She smiled a little.
It was the first normal sound in the house since Christmas.
Then she said, “Mom called.”
I turned.
Her biological mother, Megan, had moved to North Carolina four years earlier after remarrying. She and Sophie spoke regularly, but visits had become less frequent than either of them liked.
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth.”
“All of it?”
“Dad.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Sophie stirred the pasta.
“She wants me to come for spring break.”
My shoulders tightened automatically.
“That is months away.”
“I know.”
“We can talk about it later.”
Her spoon stopped moving.
“That means no.”
“It means later.”
“It always means no when you say it like that.”
“That is not true.”
“Last summer.”
“You had driver’s ed.”
“Thanksgiving.”
“You wanted to go to Chicago with your friends two days later.”
She stared at me.
“You always have a reason.”
I heard Claire in that sentence too.
Work.
Sophie.
Schedules.
Reasons.
I had built my life out of reasonable explanations and rarely noticed when they all pointed in the direction I already wanted.
“I’ll think about spring break,” I said.
Sophie drained the pasta.
“Think about whether you’re scared or whether I’m actually unsafe.”
Then she carried the pot to the stove and left me standing beside an open refrigerator.
The next morning, Linda called.
Claire’s mother did not ask for anyone’s job back.
That surprised me.
“Daniel,” she said quietly, “can I come by?”
“For what?”
“I need to return something.”
She arrived with the keys to a company SUV Martin had been driving.
She set them on my desk.
“He told me it was part of his retirement arrangement.”
“It wasn’t.”
Linda looked embarrassed.
“He told me a lot of things were.”
I did not fill the silence.
She folded and unfolded a tissue in her lap.
“I should have gone after Sophie too.”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid of Martin.”
That was not what I expected.
“Afraid how?”
“He doesn’t hit people, if that is what you mean.”
“I didn’t ask that.”
She looked at the floor.
“When somebody embarrasses him, he punishes the whole room until everyone agrees who caused it.”
I thought about Claire sitting at the table.
About how quickly she had gone still when conflict started.
Linda looked at me.
“That does not excuse her.”
“No.”
“It explains some things.”
“Maybe.”
She stood.
At the door, she hesitated.
“Martin says you tricked us by pretending to be poor.”
“I never said I was poor.”
“No. You just let us assume.”
I had no defense worth making.
Linda left.
A minute later, Maya called from downstairs.
“You need to come to the operations floor.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
Her tone told me something had.
“Then why?”
“Because your foremen want to know why people related to your wife had company cars while their crews were sharing safety harnesses.”
I looked at Martin’s keys on my desk.
Christmas Eve had not created the problem.
It had only made it impossible to keep calling the problem generosity.
Before I left that evening, I opened the capital budget from the previous year. The numbers were plain enough to make me feel foolish. Martin’s salary, vehicle, travel, and expense account had cost almost exactly what operations had requested for the deferred safety-equipment package.
Nobody had stolen the money.
May you like
I had approved where it went.
That was harder to blame on anyone else.
