42
ANNA
My fatherand I disagree about the Baltic routes on a Tuesday morning in October, and it’s the best conversation we’ve had in years.
He’s sitting across the conference table from me with a shipping manifest and a cup of tea that’s gone cold because he keeps forgetting to drink it when he’s making a point, which is often. I’m sitting across from him with the financial projections my mother put together last week and a highlighter I’ve been using to mark every place where his operational instinct and her numbers don’t align.
There are a lot of highlights.
“The fuel costs make the northern route unviable in winter,” I tell him.
“The northern route has clients we’ve had for fifteen years.”
“Who are currently paying rates from eight years ago?”
He looks at the manifest and at my projections, then drinks his tea without noticing it’s cold. “We renegotiate the rates,” he says.
“Or we consolidate with the southern corridor and save thirty percent on operational costs.”
“And lose the relationships.”
“Or strengthen them by being honest about what the routes actually cost.” I push the projections across the table. “Look at page four. Mama modeled both scenarios.”
He pulls the document toward him and reads. I watch his face move through the numbers the way it always does, the small furrow between his brows that means he’s genuinely considering rather than just waiting to respond.
He’s been doing that more lately. Genuinely considering. The warehouse and the surgery and three weeks of recovery in a room where his grandchildren brought him flowers every afternoon did something to Viktor Kestrel that thirty years of marriage and two decades of business couldn’t quite manage. He’s slower now. More careful. Less interested in being right and more interested in getting it right.
I’ve started to like working with him.
“Page four,” he says finally. “The southern consolidation saves more in year two than I thought.”
“Mama flagged it.”
“She’s very good.”
“She’s always been very good. You just didn’t give her a spreadsheet before.”
He looks at me over the top of the document. Something in his face that I don’t quite have a name for. “I made a lot of mistakes.”
“You did.”
“I’m trying to make fewer.”
“I know, Papa.”
He goes back to the document. I go back to my projections. Outside the conference room window, the city moves in its ordinary way, ferries crossing the harbor, cranes at the dockside, the whole visible machinery of a shipping operation that is finally, after years of bleeding, beginning to look alive.
My mother appears in the doorway at noon with sandwiches she made herself because she doesn’t trust the building’s catering, which she has described on multiple occasions as aggressively beige. She sets the plate between us and looks at the documents spread across the table, and the cold tea and the highlighter marks running down three pages of projections.
“Are you fighting?” she asks.
“Discussing,” my father says.
“He wanted to keep the northern routes,” I tell her.
“You should keep two of them,” she says without hesitating. “The Riga contact alone is worth the fuel cost. But consolidate the rest.” She picks up my father’s cold tea, takes it to the small kitchen off the corridor, and comes back with a fresh cup. Sets it in front of him. “Page four is right. I ran the numbers twice.”
My father accepts the tea. “I know. She just showed me.”
