The Lobby
The rain started a little before six, a thin tapping against the bedroom window that Nadia Kerr heard for a while before she understood it was weather and not the radiator. She lay still and listened. The building across the alley had one lit window, a kitchen, where a man in a towel was eating cereal standing up. She had watched him do this most mornings for the eight months she had lived here, and she had never once seen him sit down.
She got up, pulled on yesterday's sweatshirt, and went into the kitchen in her socks. The floor was cold. The apartment still had the look of a place someone had moved into on purpose and then not had time to finish: two good chairs, a table she had sanded herself, a stack of framed pictures leaning face-in against the wall because she had never bought the right hooks. She filled the kettle and stood at the counter while it worked itself up to a boil, and she ran the day in her head the way she used to run a shift roster, block by block.
Ride in. Park. Meet HR at the garage door at eight-forty. Walk the floors before anyone knew who she was. Ten o'clock, the all-hands, Gerald Hask at the front of the big room on the seventeenth floor saying her name to two hundred people who had spent a year hearing bad news. Then the real work, which would not start for weeks, because nobody tells the new boss the truth in the first month.
The kettle clicked off. She made coffee in the dented stovetop pot she had owned since she was twenty-two and drank the first cup black, leaning against the sink.
Six weeks ago she had not heard of Ardent Freight Systems, or she had heard of it the way you hear of any mid-sized company in your own industry, a name on the side of a trailer, a logo on a conference lanyard. Then Gerald Hask had called her at the port, on a Tuesday afternoon while she was standing on a gantry walkway in a hi-vis vest watching a crane operator fail, for the third time, to set a container down square. She had nearly not answered. The number was unfamiliar and the wind was loud, and she had been about to go down and have a conversation with the crane operator's supervisor about why the man had been on a double shift.
"Ms. Kerr," Gerald had said, and then, after a pause long enough that she thought the call had dropped, "I've been told you're the person who fixed Saltmarsh."
"Saltmarsh fixed itself," she said. "I just stopped people from getting in its way."
He had laughed, a tired, surprised laugh, and she had liked him for it.
There had been four interviews after that. Three of them had been fine. One, with a board member named Hollis who wore a pocket square and called her "young lady" twice, had ended with him asking, in a tone he probably thought was friendly, whether she owned a suit. She had said yes. It was true. She owned one, navy, bought for her mother's funeral and worn since to two weddings and a court date over a forklift accident that had not been her fault. She had not worn it to the interview, and she would not be wearing it today.
What had decided it was not the money, though the money was more than her father had made in any five years of his life put together. It was the second meeting with Gerald, in a coffee shop near the old freight yards, when he had stopped selling and started confessing. The software rollout in spring that had put the dispatch team back on spreadsheets and phone calls for nine weeks. The two accounts they had lost over the summer because of it. The people who had quit. The ones who had stayed and stopped believing anything management told them. He had drawn the org chart on a napkin, crossed out three boxes, and said, "I built this company with my hands and I don't know how to fix it anymore. I need somebody who does."
She had looked at the napkin for a long time. Then she had asked him who ran the dispatch floor at night, and he hadn't known, and that was when she decided to say yes.
Her phone was on the table, face down. She turned it over. One voicemail, from 9:52 the night before, when she had been asleep with the ringer off. Dad.
She put it on speaker and set it down next to the coffee pot.
"Nadia. It's me." A long exhale, the sound of the depot behind him, an air wrench going somewhere far off. "I know you're asleep, you're always asleep before ten like an old woman. I just wanted to say. Tomorrow. Big day. Okay. That's it." A pause. "Check your rear tyre pressure, it was low on Sunday. Don't argue with me about it. Okay. Love you. Bye."
She played it again, and then she called him.
He picked up on the second ring. He would be at the bus depot already, he had been at the bus depot by six every working day of her life, and she could hear the big doors rolling and someone shouting a number.
"You got my message," Teddy said.
"I got your message. The tyre's fine."
"It was low."
"It was low because you checked it when it was cold. I checked it after I rode. It's fine."
"Hm." He did not believe her. He never believed her about tyres. "You nervous?"
"No."
"Liar."
She smiled into the coffee. "A little."
"Good. You should be a little nervous. Means you care what happens." Something metal clanged near him, and he covered the phone and said something to someone, and came back. "Sorry. Number fourteen's got a coolant leak again, Ronnie thinks it's the hose, it's not the hose. Listen. What are you wearing?"
"Dad."
"I'm asking."
"The jacket."
He was quiet for a second, and she could tell he was pleased, though he would never say it. "Good," he said. "Don't let them put you in some costume. You walk in as you. If they wanted someone else, they should have hired someone else."
"That's roughly what I told the man with the pocket square."
"The one who called you young lady."
"That one."
"I'd have hit him," her father said, which was not true. In thirty-six years she had never seen him hit anyone. She had seen him, once, stand very still in front of a man twice his width who was shouting at a bus driver half his age, and she had seen the big man run out of words and walk away. That was the thing her father knew how to do. She had spent a long time learning it from him and a longer time learning that it did not always work.
"I've got to go," she said. "I want to get there early."
"Course you do. Walk around. See who says hello to the cleaner." He coughed. "Call me after. Or don't, if you're busy. But call me."
"I'll call you."
"Rear tyre," he said, and hung up before she could answer.