Grumpy Best Friend

“Sounds good,” I said, turning away from him. “I have a list of machines we’ll need and a process workflow we can go through.”

“Good,” he said. “Bring that along.”

“Who’s the contractor?” I asked.

“A guy I know,” he said. “Friend of a friend. I’ve done work with him in the past. He’s solid and worth the cost.”

“Fine,” I said, nodding to myself. I didn’t like that he’d reached out to someone and make such a big decision without me, but I also knew that this was his specialty, and the whole reason we’d brought him on. I couldn’t start undermining all of his decisions, not after we just decided we’d try to work through this together.

“See you tomorrow then,” he said, and watched me for another second like he wanted to say something more, then turned and walked off.

I went too far, asking Lady Fluke to remove him from this project. It was stupid and impulsive, and I knew it was the wrong thing to do. But this felt better—at least I was being up front with him, and now we’d find some way to move forward. I learned a long time ago that I could easily stay in one place, wasting my time on nothing, painting my nails endlessly, watching Dawson’s Creek reruns until my eyes gave out, or I could force myself to keep trying to improve.

I thought of my mother, sitting in the kitchen with her plastic cup of Sprite and cheap vodka, smoking a cigarette, on her tenth pill of the day, barely aware of anything around her, always on the verge of being sick, always one misstep away from getting fired from another job—and I never wanted to end up like her, stuck in her own small world, stuck in her dependencies, stuck in her misery.

I started walking, and with each step, I felt a little bit better. I had a goal. I had a target. I’d keep going.

6

Bret

Nicky Shame scratched his square jaw and frowned at the open space. I could only guess what was going on inside that brain—mental calculations of square footage, materials, manpower, and money. We’d worked together on a couple other factory projects in the last few years, and while Nicky looked like a typical South Philly guy with baggy, cheap jeans and a ratty long-sleeve shirt, gut barely held in check by his poor, overworked belt, the ghost of a beard on his face, bags under his eyes, I knew the guy was sharp as hell and good at what he did. He was dependable, and that above all else mattered in my business.

“One hell of a spot you’ve got here,” Nicky said, tapping a pen against his clipboard, and scribbled a note in what looked like a foreign language, but was probably poorly written English. “I used to drive past this place when I was a kid, you know, the whole goddamn road smelled like cookies.”

“I know,” I said, breathing deep. The cookie scent was still there, lodged deep into the steel and the concrete. “It’ll smell like that again if we can get her up and running.” I glanced to my left and watched Jude skirt around the edges of the room, looking up at the windows and at the long streaks of light that cut into the workspace.

“I’ll admit, I’m not excited,” Nicky said. “She’s an old building, you know? Not up to code, so there’ll be a lot of extra fucking around to get it legal, then we’ll have to put the tooling and machines in place.”

“But it’s possible?” I tilted my head as Jude picked up a rock and sent it skipping over the concrete.

Nicky winced when the rock smashed into a pillar and skittered away. “Yeah, doable, so long as your partner don’t fuck something up in the meantime.”

“Hey, Jude,” I called, waving.

She smiled a little like she’d been caught doing something wrong and walked over to join us. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I guess I got a little distracted.”

“Nicky was just telling me that we can make it work,” I said, looking at him.

He sighed and scratched his neck with the pen cap. “Yeah, all right, I can do it,” he said. “Won’t be fucking cheap though. And it won’t be fast, either.”

“How slow are we talking?” Jude asked, frowning slightly. That was my question, too— the sooner we got off the ground, the better. Lady Fluke was liable to change her mind at any moment, and I wanted to sink as much cash into this project as possible before that happened. Otherwise, it’d be too easy to pull the plug.

Fluke seemed like a proper English lady. She came from a long line of rich people, and she had that certain sort of breeding that made her seem unapproachable. But from my brief time with her, I’d realized she was a flake, like her last name suggested—that she was prone to mood swings and irrational thinking, though she hid it well behind good posture and a look that sent chills down my spine, like she was judging me, and she found me lacking. That look could make a lesser man crumble.