Beauty: A Novel (13 page)

Carol felt sick in her stomach because she knew how much effort and time it would take to make her company go. She didn’t mind that. She wanted her company. But she wanted Easy, too.

From Now On

A
s soon as she connected with Parks at the new plant, Carol put on a hair bag and a smock and shoe covers, and brought all the office staff down onto the floor. Annette was still confused about electricity usage in the old plant, and Carol said, “Okay. Let’s get on it,” and put it out of her mind.

She knew she’d want to stand on something, but she hadn’t planned that out. She looked around at the women who were the regular plant laborers. She looked as many in the eye as she could, and she nodded and smiled without pretending to be friends. She wanted to appear as if she were in charge and as if it didn’t matter what they thought of her. She had been on plant floors before this one, but this time was different.

She stood up straight and let the women look into her, and she hoped they could see she understood what plant work meant. She hoped they could see she was honest and was capable of running a company. She hoped they could see she was nervous but that she was steady despite being nervous.

She stood among them until all of the office staff, including Parks and Annette, was down and had mingled. In her father’s plants, and in almost all the places she’d shut down, the people in the offices were apart, upstairs mostly, so the upstairs was mostly the enemy. Her father called it “the upstairs” and hated and worshiped it.

In the working women’s faces here today, Carol saw envy, judgment, and curiosity, eagerness for a deal, and readiness to do work. She saw kindness and anxiousness and readiness to laugh. She saw assertion and reticence. She saw plain women and strong women and women who had been pretty and pretty girls who were tough. She saw a lot of reluctance to hope.

She looked down at a concrete floor that was so new the gray floor paint still had its gloss. She saw her feet massive in the shoe covers. She had great green hooves.

There had been a face that had looked able to laugh, and Carol tried to remember which one.

She looked up and searched the faces again and found that face, and she engaged those eyes.

Then she lifted one foot.

She looked at her raised foot, the giant hoof, and looked again at the eyes that might laugh. She imagined Baxter on the floor, which would have been a first for him and not a happy one.

She looked at her hoof again, and stood down on it, and then hopped, da-dum, da-dum, from hoof to hoof. She hopped like a kid pretending to ride a horse. She made just the gesture of her hands holding the reins.

It took no more than an instant. But everyone saw.

It was an instant that seemed an hour and made firing people seem a walk in the park.

And she heard Baxter’s voice in her head say, “What the hell are you doing?”

The woman made a low chuckle.

Carol heard that and made one more da-dum, da-dum, with her hands pulling on the reins now and her eyes on her horse and leaning back to stop.

The chuckle became a laugh.

Then Carol looked up at the woman who was laughing and laughed herself. They looked at each other and it was funny and they laughed out loud, and now she could look around at all of the other faces again, and they laughed. They laughed at Carol and they laughed with her. They laughed wondering what was going on, but they laughed.

She stood in her blue suit and her smock and her hair bag and her shoe covers, full of news, and Baxter said, “All right. Screw me.”

She let go of her horse and relaxed from the laughter and let everyone else relax.

She walked toward the first of the lines, and the women let her through, and she said to no one in particular, “Can I stand here on a part of the line?”

She was at a black belt on rollers and its stainless sheathing. She put her hands on the edge and looked around. “Will I break the belt?”

Somebody pushed through to spread a clean cloth over the edge and the belt. One of the Asian women.

Another woman said, “I’ll get a stepladder.”

Carol said, “I’m okay,” and she reached under her smock and hitched her pants and swung a knee up. She could still climb onto something she wanted to climb onto.

She didn’t worry about what she looked like. She was who she was, and this was what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it, and she didn’t give a shit about Baxter.

There were other hands on her, steadying her, some actually pushing to help her up.

She said, “Thank you,” without looking back. She put her weight on her own hands and got one foot beneath her and then the other. She gathered her balance, as much on the edging as she could be, and she stood.

She turned around to face them all, and the Asian woman who had brought the cloth looked up at her and said, “Phwoo,” with a gasp of breath as if she had had to climb up herself.

There was enough quiet that the “Phwoo” sounded out.

Carol said, “Phwoo,” and there was another general laugh.

Then she said, “Take a look around,” and she looked around herself at the fat boys’ new and too-shiny plant.

The walls were as glossy as the floor. Almost everything else but the belts, and there was a lot of everything else, was stainless. There was some signage, and some OSHA cautions in small red squares. There were a few yellow components beneath what must have been the ovens. There were lines of orange hosing. There were other stairs and there were gates and double doors for equipment. There were tracks to and from the freezers. There was a small, isolated line in its own alcove that she knew was for experimental products, though she was sure that the fat boys had never done, or imagined doing, any experiments. Overhead, weaving under and through brand-new iron roof trusses, painted a nice Rust-Oleum orange, were the tin and stainless ducts and vents and fans.

It was the opposite of the old plant. It was all whitewalls and chrome next to her bent Mustang. She liked her Mustang and she liked her old plant.

The people before her were quiet.

She said, “It’s a pretty place.” It was quiet, and she said, “You won’t work again in a place as pretty as this.” Now the quiet was listening in a different way. She said, “From here on out, it gets ugly.” Nobody was about to laugh now, and she didn’t smile. She said it and let it sit. All of the faces listened, and she listened with them. She looked once more around the fat boys’ meal ticket, and she heard a few feet shuffle in restlessness. She said, “From now on.” The shuffling stopped, and she said, “From now on, we’re going to be working in the old plant.”

Carol took a deep breath. She hadn’t just said something good—and she knew she had—she had said what she had wanted to say at burial after burial for all those years.

She thought she
was fine by the time she got upstairs. She tried to lead Annette and three executive assistants back to the copy room on the executive floor, where they had been working since early that morning. But Annette stopped her, said “Thank you,” and held out her hand to shake, and then the other three said “Thank you” and shook her hand, and Carol teared up. She put an arm around Annette’s shoulders.

She let go of Annette and said, “Okay,” loudly, and everybody laughed. Then they went on and sorted piles and handed paper back and forth and ran copies of the takeaway material for suppliers and customers and anybody else who might be helpful. Aside from the five of them, the floor was empty.

It was mind-numbing work, but everything was falling into place as if it had all been waiting for her. She had only arrived the day before yesterday. She needed to ask Baxter how worried she ought to be. This was more of a roll than she’d ever been on in her life, and it was exhilarating, and she couldn’t believe she deserved it.

She wondered if her father would be proud. He would read the old plant. He would register the exploded asphalt around it and the battered loading dock. He would see deferred maintenance—abandoned maintenance it looked like. He would remember their old neighborhood and see the deferred maintenance in those plants spreading like a virus before he died. It would have reached his bench if he’d lived. He might say, “You’re a CEO, Carol,” and try to let her know he was impressed, but he would understand she was the CEO of a brick trying to float.

From down the hall came Remy’s voice shouting, “Hey, Carol,” and she kicked into that gear. She was glad she’d get to see Remy as a friend, and she also wondered what kind of a deal she could get from him for all the office hardware on this floor. She knew she couldn’t afford brand new, but suddenly she wanted brand-new copiers, and brand-new desks; she even wanted new carpet.

Whoever Remy had brought with him said, “Where’s the Beast?”

“Where
is
the Beast?” Remy said.

Neither of them said it unkindly, and Carol almost called out, “I’m here.”

She stopped herself from that, and Annette and the three assistants kept at their work in the copy room, watching Carol for a signal.

“You boys looking for Ms. MacLean?” It was Easy, talking slowly and firmly, with the kind of authority she imagined he had on his boat. “Around here, we call her Beauty. Try calling that. Call Beauty, see if it don’t get you an answer. Like this—try, ‘You here, Beauty?’ ” And just like that, Easy Parsons had chased away the Beast.

By the time the men got to the copy room, Easy had introduced himself to Remy and the other guy, who turned out to be the redheaded number. Baxter had hung up from talking to Carol and shipped them both straight up to Elizabeth Island.

Plain as could be, Remy gestured at Easy and at Carol and grinned and lifted his eyebrows in the question, and Carol felt Easy watching for the answer, and she nodded and smiled back at Remy.

Then she sat down to orient Remy and present the basics of the offer for the old plant. She told the redhead what they needed in a stock plan. He was good, as was Remy; that was the point. Remy even made her a sweetheart deal, on the spot, for some of the new office hardware and the new plant’s remaining stock of frozen pollock and cod. Carol wondered if Baxter had told Remy not to be a hard-ass with her. She brought in one of the assistants as a resource for the guys, for names and details. Easy stuck around to listen, and Remy was glad to have him there, asked questions he didn’t need to know the answers to as if he was genuinely curious about fishing in winter, a shark in the nets. Easy was an asset in the room. He also helped with the pricing on the pollock and cod.

Then she and Easy left Remy and the redhead to their business and stepped out into the hall. Easy said to Carol, “I would have called, but I have to go out on the boat soon and I wanted to see you.”

Even though Annette and the three other women and Remy and the redhead were still very nearby, Carol wished Easy would kiss her. She said, “I’m glad you came,” and the two of them stood there, both wanting to kiss, too shy to duck into one of the fat boys’ offices.

Easy said, “I do have an actual message. You’re supposed to call Anna Rose.”

“Is she okay, that she couldn’t call?”

“She’s fine, but I said I was going to call you and I’d have you call her.” Easy grinned at that, as if he was shy of, and proud of, his roundabout reason for coming to see her.

She said quietly, “That’s almost as good as a kiss.”

Easy watched her as she dialed Anna Rose.

“Carol. Are you near a seat? Never mind. This you can take standing up. Everybody who got contacted was ready to pledge money, real money, straight off the bat. Who needed kitchens? Then all those people who’d pledged, they called everybody else. I’m talking about the whole town here, Carol. I had everybody spread the word back to come to the St. Peter’s Club at seven thirty, which is a good time for this kind of thing. I thought let’s just have everybody drop off checks there.”

Carol was amazed. Everything was breaking. She almost wanted to tell Baxter. She said, “I can hardly believe it. You were right, Anna Rose.”

“I was right, but you have started it all, and now I have to hang up because more calls will be coming in.”

Easy was watching her and smiling. He gave her a quick kiss and said, “The bad news is that I have to get down and set the boat up so we can go out in the morning. But I’ll see you tonight.” Then he was gone.