“I think it’s sort of the same as what they say about contractors, you know? Their own houses always need the most work. We’ve got a lot of old stuff around the house, but I don’t think he wanted to do much restoration of his own.”
“I can see that.”
“Plus he’s not a great housekeeper, so it was easier for us to have a small place. And one that had a built-in microwave. Not much of a cook, either.” We stop at a crosswalk and I almost reach a hand out to guide her across, but stop myself.This isn’t a fucking date, I scold myself.
“It must be hard, what you’re doing,” she says, as we reach the other side.“Taking care of him.”
“It’s not too bad.” And the truth is, it’s not. There are definitely bad parts—we’re past the sponge bath stage, thank God, but Dad still needs help in and out of the shower, especially with the damned garbage bags we have to put over his casts, and it’s still a big punch to the solar plexus when I see him get tired so easily, when his good hand shakes from the fatigue of overcompensating. But I like being around Dad, around the yard. I always have, even when I was a young asshole and it seemed like I didn’t.“It’s the least I can do,” I say. But that’s a little too much information, so I take the last bite of my hot dog to keep from saying more.
“You mean because he raised you?”
“Sure,” I say, once I swallow.Redirect.“Where’d you grow up?”
“Ohio,” she says, her voice flat.
“The whole state?”
“Mostly the northeast corner. It was cold and snowy, and that’s about it.”
I sneak a glance at her, and she’s balling up the wrapper from her food, looking down.“You know, if you want warm weather, Texas—”
She looks over at me, scowling, but her eyes are laughing.“You’re shameless.”
“Listen, Kit,” I say, taking her trash and tossing it and mine into a nearby can.“I know the weather’s not something that’d get you to Texas. When I first came to you, I’d been told you were good, that you were a top recruit. But tonight, seeing you work—you’re incredibly talented, exactly the kind of mind my company needs. The opportunity you’d have there, the equipment, would be unlike anything you’ve seen before.”
“Is this your pitch?” she asks, arching a dark eyebrow.
“It’s not. My pitch involves a lot of things—a virtual tour of what your lab would be. A conference call with the people who’d be your team. A review of the salary package that includes a very generous bonus structure, with stock options. A chance for you to be able to ask all your questions, and for me to answer them. This is just me telling you”—I clear my throat before going on—“as your friend, that you should consider Beaumont.”
We walk for a bit in silence, getting close to her house now, and I know I won’t have time to actually go through this stuff with her, but somehow, this feels right, what I’ve done here—Kit’s eased up around me, even when I’m talking to her about this, and that’s major, given the way I’ve been striking out up to now.
“Are we friends?” she asks, stopping in front of her gate. She adjusts the bag she has resting across her body and looks up at me. The streetlight casts her dark eyes in gold, making it look like there’s fire behind them. I’ve entirely lost my train of thought.
Again.
“I think we are,” I finally say.“I mean, I fixed your toilet. I wore a purple sweatshirt in front of you. Also my breath probably stinks right now. So I don’t know. I think it’s the real thing, Kit.”
She rewards me with another smile, then looks toward her door.“I guess I should go in,” she says, but she sounds reluctant about it.“If we are friends, maybe you’ll help me out if I come to the salvage yard again?”
“Absolutely.” This will be another excellent opportunity for my father to embarrass me, but still, the more time I have with Kit, the better.
“Okay.You help me with—you know. My knobs and hinges.” She breaks off here to give me a quelling look, and I chuckle.“And I’ll listen to your pitch. The whole thing—the virtual tour, the stock options, whatever.” She offers up this wavy, all encompassing gesture, which suggests she’s not going to take any of it all that seriously.“But it doesn’t mean I’m interested, okay?”
“Sure,” I say, and she serves me another one of those stern looks, adon’t try and handle mestare. There it is again, that feeling: I want to kiss her so bad that I can feel it in the palms of my hands, at the backs of my knees.
I watch her go up the stairs, make sure she gets into her house safely. She waves at me through a panel of sidelights flanking her front door. It feels—I don’t know. It feelssweet, like I’ve just had my first date with her, like I’m hoping she’ll go in there and call a friend to talk about the great guy she’s met. But I know, Iknowthat’s not what this is about.
I pull my phone from my pocket, swipe my thumb across the screen.I’m in, I text Jasper, and make my way back to my car.
Chapter 7
Kit
It’s Thursday morning and I’m at my desk, clicking through a set of images Ben Tucker sent to my personal email—over thirty-five photos and three videos of the microscopy lab at Beaumont’s Houston division. When I’d first seen the email on my phone, I’d told myself that I’d look more closely when I got home. I didn’t want to bring up an email about a job offer on my work computer. But then I’d happened to see one of the thumbnail images, and—well. An FEI colorandspherical aberration corrected scanning electron microscope? I can’t be sure, having never been much into the stuff myself, but I’m pretty sure this is how people who are tempted by pornography feel.
Ben hasn’t added any commentary to the message—probably he figures the pictures do all the talking, and I guess they do, because the lab at Beaumont looks incredible. It’s not just the equipment, either—this is the look of a lab that has a professional, scientifically trained cleaning staff, and it’s the look of a lab that has zero cash flow problems. Over the past few days, since Ben visited me here at work, this has been his strategy, mostly. It’s not him that does the pitching. Instead, he sends me this sort of thing—pictures, but also papers that have come out from Beaumont’s team, an annual budget report for the metallurgy division that looks sizable enough to run a small country, and, probably most convincingly, a link to a TED Talk from one of Beaumont’s lead software engineers, a petite woman named Kim-Ly Nguyen who completely owns the room, describing her work on developing programs for remote surgical procedures. I don’t know much about software other than what I have to know for the running of the scopes, but it doesn’t matter. It’s compelling to see someone in corporate science be so engaged, so connected to theworkof what she does.
It’s not that Ben has left himself out of the picture. On Tuesday, I’d gone after work to the salvage yard, planning to spend maybe an hour getting started on the list of hardware we’d drawn up. But one hour had turned into three, mostly because Henry had offered to take me on a tour of the whole place. We’d made our way through the expansive space, Henry wheeling along at my side, talking happily about the different“zones,” and as it turned out, my favorite was the same as his, the area toward the back that was lit by vintage chandeliers and light fixtures that Henry himself had restored. Eventually, Ben had joined us there, explaining that he too had been trained to do some of the lighting work, and I’d been transfixed by learning about all the different chandelier parts. The space was warm from all the electric light, the prisms casting ripples of rainbowed pattern along the walls. Ben had enthusiastically described—in more detail than I would have been able to provide—my house to Henry, who’d leaned forward in his chair, nodding, as though this was a really important issue to him.“You don’t want to be a slave to the restoration,” Henry had said, looking at me.“You want historical pieces, okay, but don’t think everything has to be from the same era. You pick stuff that catches you, that speaks to you. It all has a story. It doesn’t have to be a story from the same time period.”
