Gerald left my office door standing open. He hadn’t been gone more than ten seconds before I went over and closed it. First I looked out into the larger office. It was still early, but more than half of the pods were already occupied, people blowing on their coffee cups as they waited for their computers to boot up.
I looked right, down where Don’s Enormous Pod was situated. Given the angles and the heights of the intervening pod walls I couldn’t tell if Don was there or not. I looked left and saw Ruthie’s empty desk guarding Mary’s open door. It looked very much like the lights in her office were still off.
I shut my door and sat down again at my desk. I looked at my computer screen for a few moments, the characters of the email message I had been working on as meaningless to me as Sanskrit.
I picked up my phone and dialed my home number.
“Hello?” Jenny said guardedly.
“Hi,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “What are you doing?”
“I’m feeding Jacob his breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”
Ouch. “I thought you might be sticking pins in that voodoo doll of me you keep under our bed.”
“I’ll do that later,” she said.
“Look, I know you’re still mad at me, but I need that incredible brain of yours right now. Can we call a truce for the next 10 minutes or so?”
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get this plate of fruit out to Jacob, first.”
I waited patiently, hearing the knife hit the cutting board a few times and then her footsteps moving away. Here you go, honey, I heard faintly, and then footsteps coming back.
“What’s up?”
Her tone had shifted, and I was glad to hear it. Prior to her pregnancies, Jenny had been a public relations professional, and had been in and out of more companies that I had. In times like this I looked to her as a kind of business coach, and she knew it.
I told her everything that had happened so far that morning, skipping over my encounter with Bethany and going right to the discussion with Gerald. I told her that he was planning to quit, planning to take the client and start his own business, that he wanted me to go with him, and that Paul Webster had said there would be no deal without me.
“Whoa,” she said.
“I know, right? What do you think?”
There was a pause on the line. I imagined Jenny standing in our kitchen in her bathrobe and disheveled hair, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other holding the phone against her ear. In the background I heard Jacob call out for more blueberries.
“Just a minute, honey,” Jenny said to him, and then aimed her voice back into the phone. “I think you should call Paul Webster.”
That came out of left field. “What? Why would I do that?”
“Mommy! I want more blueberries!”
“How do you know Gerald is telling you the truth?”
“Why would he lie about that?”
“Because he’s a shifty asshole. You know that.”
“MOMMY!”
“Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute, Alan.”
While she was gone I turned things over in my mind. Jenny, of course, was right. Gerald was a shifty asshole, but even so, I didn’t see how a lie about Paul Webster wanting me to be part of the deal made any sense. If that wasn’t true, why would Gerald even bring me into the loop? Despite his protestations, he didn’t think highly of me. If Paul wasn’t compelling my inclusion, what other reason would Gerald have for approaching me? I mean, with this kind of information, I had him over a barrel. One word to Mary and Gerald and his secret deal would both be dead.
I told Jenny as much when she returned to the phone.
“Yes, I guess that might be true,” she admitted. “But I don’t trust Gerald and you probably shouldn’t either. He’s asking you to quit your job, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He says we have to both be clear of the company before Paul orchestrates the vote to cancel Mary’s contract at the Board meeting.”
“That’s a pretty big risk, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“You guess? Quit your job and our only source of income on nothing more than the word of Gerald Kreiger?”
Okay, I acknowledged, it was a pretty big risk. No guessing about it. I told Jenny about the lunch appointment Gerald had made with me, about how he promised to fill me in on more of the details and make the formal offer of employment that I deserved.
“Uh huh,” Jenny said, less than impressed. “I would still call Paul Webster. If not before lunch then definitely after. You absolutely shouldn’t make any commitment to Gerald without talking to Paul and verifying the story.”
I told her not to worry, that under no circumstances was I accepting or quitting any jobs today. I would gather what information I could and then we could talk about it over dinner tonight.
“Okay, Alan. Sounds good.”
“Thanks, Jenny. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Bye.”
And then she was gone, back to whatever obstacles Jacob planned to put in her path today. Our parting words of affection had felt perfunctory but genuine, and I took that to be a good sign.
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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