Chapter 1

It was while I was having seconds of the smoked turkey at our family Thanksgiving dinner that my brother dropped the bomb on me.

“Josh,” he plainly stated, “you’re going to have to take the girls full time again, for a while. Until Christmas, for certain ... and really more likely well into next year. We’re all total screwed at work through the end of this quarter and probably the next one as well and I’ve got to hit the road hard to have a prayer at meeting my new quota. The ass who’s our new regional VP of Sales has promised corporate that our sales this quarter will show a 7% or better ‘same store’ increase over last year’s figures. He’s certifiably insane, because every sales projection metric shows us gaining at most 3% over this time last year ... but that’s his projection. Frankly it’s going to be a coin-flip either way as to whether I’ll even be able to keep my job, even if I do pull down that miracle ... there’s more rumors about corporate consolidation and ‘right-sizing’, and that’s going to mean even more layoffs, again for the third straight year. Anyway, I’ve already talked to the twins and they’re fine with it.”

Well, there we were ... and there went my appetite for the turkey, so I switched to apple pie, and with it another beer. My brain needed the sugar – and the added benefit of more alcohol surging through my veins didn’t hurt either, while my brother filled me in with the rest of the minor details.

I love my nieces, a lively pair of gloriously erratic and volatile red-headed and green-eyed twins – the very qualities allegedly most espoused by Satan himself for his most-favored soul-stealing minions of evil. They get their hair mostly from their mother, who was frankly crazier than a whole clowder of cats locked up in a catnip toy mouse factory. Red hair runs a bit in branches of my family too, but it tends to skip a generation or two. My brother Mitch has dark hair blacker than a money-lender’s heart and mine started off as a child promisingly auburn, but it darkened over the years to something that could resemble pecan or walnut brown. The twins, if anything, have even brighter, redder hair than their mother, who had a real scorcher of a flame-top! They’re just fourteen, barely teenagers still, but they’re going to be heart-breaking beauties when they grow up!

It needs to be said, probably here and now, that Mitch and I aren’t really best buddies, despite being brothers. Mostly it’s due to the age difference between us, which is six full years and then some. Just when I started to grow up from being a ‘snotty-nosed kid’, he’d progressed onwards into his life where girls, motorcycles, cars, and hanging out with his buddies were all much more interesting than sticking around home and shooting the shit with me. Heck, I was still in middle school when he graduated from high school and moved out on his own, got married and then produced the twins. That feeling of sibling disconnect never much changed, even years later, until his wife Erin died suddenly about six years ago, leaving him alone to raise their two young twin daughters. Frankly, he then botched the job so badly I felt morally obligated to step in, and ever since, I’ve really never stepped back out.

“Anything that I can do to help,” I’d told Mitch at her funeral. He then took me literally and proceeded to fall nearly entirely apart at the seams for most of the next two years, enough so that the girls then came to live with me. Even now, they ate and slept nearly as much at my house as their dad’s. Some people would be angry, or at least resentful and being semi-permanently dumped with someone else’s offspring ... but I do love my nieces – and none of this is their fault.

Honestly, I don’t even understand how Mitch and Erin managed to stay semi-successfully married for those ten years. They fought incessantly, about everything and anything ... but also apparently really enjoyed the ‘making up’ afterwards. “It was worth the scars on my back from her fingernails”, he told me once, after more than a few beers. Erin was feisty, and more than a bit passionate about anything and everything and was sexually impulsive, having at least a dozen flagrant affairs that Mitch knew about ... and probably another two dozen or more brief flings that my poor cuck of a brother didn’t. He didn’t much care – he accepted the fact when he married her that she was utterly untamable and that life with her was better and far more interesting and colorful than without her. Each to their own ... but I could never live that way.

For the next hour or so, Mitch and I swapped horror stories about our work places and then commiserated about the tragedy of our situations over another six-pack of beers while the twins sidled off to the tv room to watch football. They were viciously demolishing the leftover bits of pie straight from the pan with a pair of aggressively wielded dessert forks. A duel to the finish where no quarter would be given. It would all end in tears, and possibly blood too, but that’s life in a house with teenaged red-heads.

The problems at both our work places, we agreed, were directly attributable to defects between the ears of management; plain and simple. Both companies had taken advantage of the recent recession to expand, gobbling up weaker competitors in a frenzy of over-spending, without taking a suitable pause to fully digest their conquests before leaping off to make other fresh kills. Now, for each of our companies, the indigestion from their gluttony was hitting hard ... and the costs of this new debt servicing were turning a pair of once mildly profitable companies into a mire of financial accounting red ink. Likewise, our managements were equally blithely convinced that it would all work out alright in the end ... if every possible short-term cost cutting measure was taken – like laying off or firing at least half of the employees who did the actual revenue producing work!

Fortunately, Mitch had enjoyed a decent level of seniority at his company, a national ‘top 5’ auto parts chain, which had insulated him from previous layoffs. This time around it was going to dicey.

“Four years ago,” he reminded me, “when I was first promoted to Area Sales Manager, there were about eight of us in this district, each manager handling just six to eight stores apiece. We also didn’t need to hand-hold the stores as much and didn’t have to make site visits at least weekly, like we do now, so we could spend more time in the district office working the phones to generate new products or getting a better price on our existing stock. Now, two rounds of layoffs later, there are just four of us left in my district and we’re each responsible for at least twice the number of stores we had before ... and our regional corporate boss wants us make weekly visits to every store ... and push each and every one of them to push out more inventory! Now they’re thinking about cutting at least one more sales manager slot ... or maybe even two of us – and reducing commissions as well! As of this week, I’m about tied with a gal named Marilyn for second place, but since corporate needs more women to promote later into higher management, her job is safe pretty much regardless. That means that I’ve got to firmly move my store sales into first place, minimum, to make sure my job is safe. I’ve got to use these six weeks to try and take over the top spot for our area, and that will mean hardly being home with the girls at all.”

“Who’s the unlucky likely loser currently in 4^th?” I inquired, “since they’re almost certain now to be the one to get the chop!”

“Unfortunately, like Marilyn, Tyler’s another one our VP’s pet EOOC projects and also being groomed for higher management,” Mitch sighed. “I like the guy and we hang out together sometimes, but his job is secure regardless of whatever happens, being both a minority and a partially disabled veteran who won a Bronze Star in Afghanistan. Guy’s pretty smart too, and in about five years when they give him that corner office somewhere in corporate, he’ll have probably really earned it. So that just leaves me and the guy that’s #1 in sales ... it’s going to be one of us that’s going to be toast! I told you earlier about the new mandate for at least a 7% increase in same-store sales over last year, so that means every week from now on I’ll have to drive out to visit all fifteen of my store locations! The Beeville store location alone is a two hour drive out of town to the south and the Barton one is almost as far up to the north. That means driving back and forth a full six days a week and maybe, hopefully, spending all day Sunday in the local office to try and catch up on the paperwork!”

“And then starting the madness all over again on Monday.” I commiserated, “It sounds almost as bad as being a plumber. At least I don’t have that much paperwork as most of our work orders are digital now, but yeah, since our latest round of layoffs, they’ve upped my usual daily service call work queue by about 50% ... which I could normally handle, but now I’m getting more of the trickier calls, since several of the older, more experienced techs have left. More time spent on a site means I’m later getting to the next appointment and working later in the evening to finish off everything. And it won’t be getting any better anytime soon – if ever! Those poor girls are darned near going to be orphans next month!”

That was certainly the truth!

About two weeks later on an early Friday evening, I parked my truck in the service bay for the night a full two hours later than was usual or preferred. I don’t like working at least 12 hours shifts every weekday, and then face the prospect of at least another half-day of pre-scheduled service calls on Saturday. If the queen-bitch even hinted about my working another emergency call or two on Sunday, I was going to quit right on the spot!

After dropping my schedule log at the service desk, I was swiftly enveloped by the arms of my nieces, who were rather more enthusiastic in their greeting than usual. Friday night was our pizza night out ... and the girls were both hungry! Most weeknights, the girls went straight home on their own after school, or their regular afterschool activities, like basketball or soccer practice or their twice-weekly martial arts classes. Friday nights were always our special ‘out’ night, usually first pizza and then either a movie, bowling, putt-golf, or something else fun. We were already off to a very late start, but I could tell at a glance that the girls had already handled everything that had been sitting in my inbox this morning, so I thought I could escape from the office tonight fast. They’d learned the arcane filing system used around here years ago, while being bored waiting for me, and they could forge my signature on parts ordering request forms and other twaddle just as well as I could. In fact, their version of my signature was slightly better and more readable than mine. I had a more than sneaking suspicion that at the tender age of fourteen, they were already handling at least half of the petty paperwork that this now overgrown company created; all of mine and probably for several of the older (and nicer to the girls) service technicians.

“She wants to see you, in her office,” Reba warned me, and then made a cut-throat gesture with her index finger. If that wasn’t enough of a warning, Scarlett then grabbed the necktie of her school uniform, tugged it around to the back of her neck and made loud choking noises, as if she were hanging herself. The twins didn’t care much for Jessica, the owner of the company, despite the fact that she was a natural red-head too, like them. At home, they just called her ‘the queen bitch’, but that was fine there, as I did the exact same thing. Here, in her office, we were all a bit more polite. Usually.

Well ... it was a Friday, and that meant that I’d already been paid for the week, as my paycheck went via direct deposit to my bank by noon every week – and I’d already checked my account online earlier this afternoon to verify that there had been no problem. So, since I had another paycheck in the bank, it wasn’t the worst possible time to get either fired or laid-off. I could make a few phone calls on Monday morning and be signing a new employment contract by Monday afternoon at some other home services company. I had my Master Plumber’s cert and could be counted upon to show up for work sober every single day and get the job done. I’d certainly had other offers, and recently too ... but I’ve always been sentimental about this company. My father had worked for the old man, the founder of this company for nearly forty years.

Reminder note to self: Never, ever ‘retire’. Cole (Jessica’s father) retired about four years ago to a nice golf course community in Florida and promptly keeled over dead with a heart attack on his very first day out on the greens, right on the 18^th green while waiting to tee off. Now, I suppose, he’s at the great 19^th watering hole in the sky. My father passed from a heart attack later that same year too, but while reseating a wobbly toilet. It was probably exactly the way he would have wanted to go out from this world; still working and doing what he loved most. Given a choice of those two exits from this reality, I’d choose the later.

I knocked once at her office door and entered immediately without waiting for an acknowledgement. I wasn’t going to waste any more of the evening by being here a minute longer than I could help. The wonder twins were wanting their dinner, and preferably served up a half-hour ago, if not earlier. The bitch was wasting my personal time now, not the company’s.

Right from the first glance, I could see that Jessica was not her usual frantic self, exhibiting none of her usual restless hyperactivity. Her desk was clean, devoid of all paperwork except for a single folder, which in itself was quite remarkable. Like me, she believed in the vertical filing system method of handling paperwork and her desk was usually stacked a foot high with mounds of the stuff. Every bit of paperwork that this office (and approximately 90 employees) generated crossed her desk first at the start and then finally again later when completed, before going off to be filed. The system was inefficient and massively time-consuming, but it had worked for her father ... back when Holmes Plumbing had perhaps a dozen employees. Now that she had over-expanded the business, Holmes Home Services was probably drowning under its own weight in paperwork, as well as debt ... and Jessica’s initials were signed in duplicate on each and every page. Better her than me!

Currently, the boss lady’s big office chair was swiveled around with her facing the wall corner featuring nothing of particular note other than a pair of old vintage advertising prints, and an old framed photograph of her father in his younger, more hale days. Lost in her thoughts, I didn’t bother to ask to be seated, but helped myself to the guest chair across the desk from her. It was hard and uncomfortable, but that was entirely by design, as her late father believed that meetings should be kept short and to the point, and business completed in the least possible amount of time. Jessica had kept up at least that part of the tradition, believing that her staff would malinger at the least bit of provocation, besides, she wasn’t really the chatty sort of boss. I thought about planting my feet up on top of her desk, but decided against it. If I was here to be fired or laid-off, I wanted to get it done and over with as quickly as possible. I was damned hungry too, and I could already taste that pizza in my mouth.

I counted to twenty slowly, and when nothing happened, I cleared my throat loudly and then counted to twenty again, a tad more slowly. I thought then about ripping a hellacious fart, but since my belly had been scant since breakfast, my colon had nothing to work with, so I gave up the effort reluctantly and settled for a second, rather louder, semi-repressed cough. That finally did the trick and the bitch queen swiveled around her chair to face up to me.

“Sorry...” she offered in way of an explanation, “I was all lost in thought. Wondering in fact what my father would think about all of this – the current mess that the company is in.”

Oh! What an opening! It was such a miraculous golden opportunity to say out loud what everyone around this place had been thinking for the better part of the last two years, that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The resulting mixed sounds from my mouth didn’t emerge as intended and ended up sounding like the noises that the sea lions make at feeding time at the local aquarium.

“Go ahead ... laugh at me,” Jessica muttered, looking down at the lonely folder on her desk on that vast expanse of bare hardwood. “Jim Meyers did, when I tried talking to him about an hour or so ago. I thought he was going to pee himself right where he was standing, because he was laughing so hard. Oh, and he quit again too ... said he didn’t give a fuck anymore about whatever kind of new shit I’d gotten us into, because his ass was done trying to deal with it ... and that was that. He didn’t slam my door shut, so I think that means he really means it this time.