Once Buck let me loose, sharing I needed to find Chap, he disappeared.
Me, in my jeans, librarian blouse (this particular one iris purple with pintucks up the front) and strappy, high-heeled, dark purple snakeskin sandals, searched for Chap.
But at that time, Chap was nowhere to be found.
This was, I would find out later, because Chap was on a not-unusual bender.
Therefore, Chap wouldn’t be found until I saw him stagger out of the Dive four days later while I was in the side lot where the warehouse was, beyond which the Dive sat. All of this, incidentally, was adjacent to their store in a one-through-four hit: their massive store, a small admin building where I worked that had my office and a well-kitted-out, air-conditioned break room, their big warehouse, and the Dive.
When I saw Chap, I’d been dealing with a delivery of home improvement stuff.
Or, more to the point, struggling to deal with a delivery since I had no idea what I was doing.
Since I’d started in the office, I approached every man I didn’t know, hoping they were Chap.
Therefore, I met most of the MC as well as the employees who worked at Ace, either in the shop as sales associates and resident advice-givers to customers, or those who went out on jobs—electricians, plumbers, painters, drywallers and the like.
Not all of them were members. Though all of them were rough and tumble. Even the women.
So, I approached Chap as he stumbled out of the Dive and found my man.
I could proudly say I hadn’t done badly in those four days.
In fact, in the end, I found it a blast.
I was hesitant at first, sorting through what appeared to be a mountain of paper debris and noting there didn’t seem to be a system. Instead, it seemed like whoever had taken care of the office made an art out of not having a system.
Then, on day three, I figured the system was going to be mine anyway, so I dug in and organized stuff how I wanted it.
And one could say I’d learned along this journey that a research librarian liked to dig into anything that involved paper, and those papers didn’t have to be contained in books or pages from Galileo’s diary.
It might make me crazy but setting that office to rights was the most fun outside of being in bed with Buck I’d had for over a year.
Chap, who had a straggly gray beard that nearly touched his chest, a shock of steel-gray, long, wiry hair that he didn’t bother pulling into a ponytail and a long, thin, almost gaunt body (which made me fight asking him to dinner), was, as mentioned, the most veteran member of the MC.
He also knew the office work.
He was gruff, and the first time I met him, seriously hungover. Thus, he made it clear he wasn’t a big fan of giving me time to explain the office work.
But he also realized if he didn’t, he might be pressed into doing the office work (he realized this when I explained it to him), so he gave me time.
By week two, I had it down.
I still didn’t know what half the inventory the shop stocked was. Ditto with what the men told me to order for the jobs.
But I just had to check the delivery notes against the orders, match up words and numbers, decipher what was stock for the store, and what was coming in for a contracting jobs, direct it to where it was supposed to go and sign off.
Easy.
Ordering, easier.
The boys just told me what they needed, I wrote it down, found out who to order it from by asking Chap (who now was on speed dial), and I ordered it.
Invoices, even easier.
Bill paying, even easier.
Payroll, not so easy.
But I got the gist of it after I talked to Buck, who okayed me paying for an online tutorial. I took that, it made sense and was far from rocket science, so I got relatively up to speed, ran my first with only one guy reporting an error, and I suspected the next go would be a breeze.
Gabbing on the phone with current and prospective clients, the easiest.
I found, oddly, they kind of liked the fact I had no clue.
They thought it was very “Ace” for some clueless chatty chick to gab with them and promise a callback from someone who did have a clue (this callback, incidentally, usually came from Buck, or Ink, or sometimes Chap).
In fact, some of them had become phone friends.
Not much had changed in those three weeks, except the fact that I had a job and it could be the best job I ever had (yes, even better than the Hunter Institute, where I’d actually seen pages of Galileo’s diary when it floated through to be on display for a traveling exhibition).