“Are you okay, Nicholas?” The soft question came from across the table.
Nicholas neatly placed his fork down and forced a smile for his baby sister. Eve took after their mother, small and round, and in her old-fashioned white blouse and prim skirt and dwarfed by the massive oak table, she looked far younger than her twenty-three years. “I’m fine, sweetheart. I have a lot on my mind. Didn’t sleep much last night.”
Eve nodded, her glossy dark hair catching the light. She hadn’t eaten much of her own meal either, but that wasn’t unusual. These mandatory biweekly lunches weren’t meant to be conducive to a good appetite.
Lunch with his family hadn’t always been a dreaded event. Every Sunday, his mother would dismiss the help for the day and she’d putter around the kitchen. After Eve was born, she’d usually do itwith his baby sister strapped to her back. His father would stick to his study, but at least he’d be around the house. More often than not, the Kanes would join them after church, and the place would ring with laughter and food and talk.
Then she was gone, and every day of the week changed, including Sundays. Now, the couple of hours he spent with his father and grandfather every other week were more interrogation and battle than anything else.
“Stress is a silent killer, Nicholas. Get more sleep,” John Chandler advised, his normally boisterous voice somewhat muted by speakers. His face grew larger on the large computer monitor placed on the table as he leaned in to see them better. Nicholas’s grandfather’s hair was a messy shock of white, and he wore his usual plaid shirt. This was the second time this month that his grandfather had chosen to call into the meeting instead of coming to the office, citing fatigue.
Nicholas had no doubt his grandfather would have been happy to step down as CEO and retire entirely to play in his garden, were it not for the barely concealed decade-long power struggle he was engaged in against his son. “I will, Grandpa. Don’t worry about me.” To prove how okay he was, he choked down a cherry tomato, wishing it was an actual cherry. He could do with something sweet, and the untouched cookies on the platter in the center of the table looked way too tempting.
“Now that we’ve analyzed your sleeping habits, are you capable of answering the question?” Brendan checked his watch. Life had etched deep lines on Brendan’s face, but his father had otherwise aged gracefully, his hair a distinguished gray, his body still fit. Nicholas imagined he’d look much like this in thirty years.
Like father, like son.He’d heard some variation of that his entire life. It never failed to make him feel slightly ill.
Nicholas set his fork down, trying to concentrate. Dealing with his father and grandfather was hard enough when Nicholas was in peak condition. “The question. Yes.” What could they have been talking about? “I’ll consider the matter and get back to you.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll consider whether you have a status update on the protest?”
Oh Jesus. The protest.
“I didn’t realize the company was being protested. Did something happen?” Eve’s brow furrowed.
Brendan scowled at Eve. “It’s all over the news.”
“It’s not all over the news,” Nicholas corrected his father. “It’s been reported on one local news station. There were a few picketers at a Pennsylvania location yesterday. Activists claiming a couple of products we sell there are the byproduct of a prison-work program.”
“A prison-work program?”
“Honey made from bees raised by a place that employs prison labor, that sort of thing. And no, Dad, I don’t have a status update yet. We’re checking the source on those products right now.”?
Eve looked between him and their dad. “But this is only at one store?”
“So far. I say we don’t wait to see what the report says, we cull whatever products they’ve indicated and make sure we’re not using such suppliers. If someone isn’t being paid a fair living wage for a day’s work, then their labor isn’t voluntary,” John said sternly. “And we shouldn’t be subsidizing that. It’s antithetical to our company’s values. People. Quality. Fairness.”
Three words Nicholas had had pounded into his skull from the time he was a baby. John and Sam Oka, Livvy’s late grandfather, would have been considered progressive employers and businessmen by contemporary standards, let alone over half a century ago when they’d founded the company.
Brendan’s lip curled. “I know the motto as well as you, Father. But we have eighty stores now, not eighteen. We can’t personally check the provenance of every item we sell.”
The words were both a reminder of their size and a reminder of Brendan’s role in increasing it. If Nicholas were truly a dick, he’d remind his father that he was behind their recent boom of expansion in the past couple of years. But that would create more friction, and his main role here was to mitigate that.
Which was why he couldn’t close his eyes, ignore their squabbling, and obsess over Livvy. He also couldn’t scream about how this was a relatively minor issue that he could handle with his eyes closed.
The company had grown quickly, and sometimes Nicholas couldn’t tell if the two equal shareholders of Chandler’s really were micromanagers or if they were actively looking for ways to find every tiny detail to fight over. The latter, he assumed.
The company had once thrived under the control of dual CEOs, but Sam Oka and John Chandler had essentially been of one mind. After Sam had died, his shares had passed to his daughter, Tani. Livvy’s mother had no interest in running things, but her husband, Robert, had been smart, eager, and charming, a vice-president in the company already, and had stepped into the vacated co-CEO position in proxy for his wife.
When Robert had died, though, and Brendan “acquired” the Oka-Kane shares, the strife had begun. The boardroom became the war room, the company a pawn in Brendan and John’s battle for control.
Nicholas was aware every decision he made had to straddle two lines—pleasing his grandfather and his father. Following tradition while chasing expansion.
People. Quality. Fairness.
Money.
If he failed to maneuver and his dad and grandfather deadlocked, it wasn’t just what was left of his family that suffered. It was every single person that owed their livelihood to them, a number that grew every time they broke ground on another store. All those managers and farmers and checkout clerks and chefs and bag boys and and and...
