Five more missed calls from my dad, making eight total in the span of a half hour. Now I feel guilty, hoping everything is okay.
I call him back, eyes still on Gavin sitting in the tent, joking with our tablemates.
“Finally, you check your phone,” Dad answers without a hello, sounding a lot annoyed with me.
If he’s annoyed, everyone should be safe. So this is about work, and my worry decreases. “I’m talking to you now. What’s going on? Is everyone okay?” Just to make sure.
“No. I have important business to talk to you about and I don’t need my employees ignoring my calls.”
I sigh. He frames this as a business discussion, but I hear the dad in his lecture. “Dad, I’m still working, despite what you think, and I need to get back to that. So, if you could let me know what’s going on...”
“It’s about work. I’ve pulled Loot from the competition for this sale, so come home.”
The world freezes around me. The frantic sounds of hooves on the ground, the cheers of the crowd, and the sound of conversations from spectators all fade around me, leaving me with a buzzing sound in my ear.
I think it’s rage. Not the hot rage sparked over an instant, but a cold rage that has been festering inside me for a while now, spreading inch by inch every time I get ignored or overlooked, and now I think I’m more rage than person.
But I didn’t even notice it was growing. Until now. Now I’m all too aware of it.
“What?” I ask in disbelief, hoping I heard all of that wrong. Giving him one last chance to reverse the tide of anger. Or at least stop it from spilling out.
“I negotiated with Carlyle to drop this sale, in exchange for another one we’ve both been going after. Big ancient Indian art collection. You know how hard it is to get a legal collection that big, of Indian art that old. You need to get back to the office to start cataloging and...”
I drown out the rest of what Dad’s saying. The rage, the one that had been steadily simmering since Dad told me, explodes at the continued proof that my own father doesn’t respect me. And to hear he negotiated with Gavin? After all we’ve been through?
I’m sitting here thinking I might love this man, and he’s negotiating behind my back?
I need fewer men in my life.
“You negotiated with Gavin behind my back?” I ask through clenched teeth, needing and fearing the confirmation all at once.
“What, the son? No. With his father, William Carlyle.”
At least there’s something in this shit day.
Dad starts to talk about the work I need to do when I get back, and I cut him off. “No,” I say, so quietly that I don’t know if he will even hear me. He couldn’t have done this. He wouldn’t interfere like that. We had a deal. However little he respects me, I thought he respected a deal.
Dad stops talking immediately. “What do you mean no?” He sounds wary, like he’s unsure how to respond to a word I’ve never used to him in a work context.
“You’re kidding.” I frame it as a command, hoping that I can will this all into a cruel joke. A cruel joke I can recover from. Eventually. This would be a lot harder.
“No. It’s done. I know we had the deal, but we can move it to another collection. This is too important.”
More silence as I process what just happened.
“How could you? This was mine.” I turn away from the field and tents, feeling very different than I did when I left that area a few minutes ago.
“It’s my decision. I’m the CEO and president. I’m within my rights to do what I want with my company. And this is the best for the company.”
“I was working on this show. I was so close to getting it. And unless you tell me that theMona Lisais in that collection you got, I sincerely doubt whatever you got was worth a fraction of what I could have brought in. And the sales that would have followed...” I growl in frustration.
“It’s my decision,” Dad reiterates. “It’s not a guarantee we would have gotten the sale. But the pieces I got will remind everyone why Loot is the best at what we do: Indian art. And maybe it’ll get Ajay excited about work too.”
“You cannot be this dense.”
“I’m your boss. And your father. You can’t talk to me that way,” Dad says sharply. But he doesn’t sound so sure.
“I’m your best employee. And if you don’t want to acknowledge that, it’s your loss. But if you don’t fucking acknowledge that you need to branch out into a wider market in order to stay relevant, that’s a bad business decision. And if you think Ajay is going to be excited about any of it, you’re blind.”
