Chapter 14: Delacroix

The call came into Hawthorne on a Monday morning from a man named Frank Delacroix, who ran a hardware store forty minutes east that had been buying from Mercer Industrial since before Robert’s father had handed the company down to him. Evan recognized the name the second Rebecca said it out loud, holding the receiver away from her ear with an expression that told him this was going to be a longer conversation than most, her eyebrows already halfway up her forehead.

“He’s asking specifically for you,” Rebecca said, palm over the receiver. “Says he heard you were over here now. Says—” she listened a second, “—says he ‘wants to talk to the Mercer boy,’ his words, not mine.”

Evan’s stomach dropped a little, a small cold drop like missing a step in the dark on the way to the bathroom. He remembered the man vaguely — a big voice, a store that smelled permanently like cut lumber and fertilizer and the particular metallic tang of a key-cutting machine running all day, a granddaughter’s birthday card he’d once carried in himself, tagging along on a Mercer sales call at fourteen years old because his dad hadn’t had anyone to leave him with that afternoon and had figured the trip would do him some good. Frank had shaken his hand like he was already somebody, even at fourteen, standing there in cutoff jean shorts with a comic book rolled up in his back pocket, because that was how business worked in a town like this — you were somebody’s kid before you were ever anybody yourself, and everybody remembered exactly whose kid you were.

“I can’t take that account,” Evan said, before he’d even fully worked out why, the words arriving ahead of the reasoning behind them, though the reasoning caught up fast enough once he started saying it out loud.

Rebecca frowned, covering the receiver with her palm again, Frank’s voice audible in small tinny bursts on the other end, patient but not infinitely so. “Why not? It’s a good account, Evan. Steady volume, pays on time, never once been a headache in the years I’ve watched Mercer’s trucks pull up out there. This could be a nice piece of business for you, and he’s asking for you by name. That doesn’t happen a lot around here.”

“Because I know that family. Not secrets, exactly — I don’t have Mercer’s actual pricing sheet memorized for every account or anything like that, I never got far enough in to know all that — but I know the relationship. I know how Frank and my dad talk to each other. I know my dad drove out there himself the week Frank’s wife passed, just to sit with him for an hour, didn’t even bring an order form. I know things about how Mercer does business with people like Frank that I only know because I grew up inside that building, riding along on sales calls before I was old enough to drive. If I’m the one who lands this, it’s not going to look like I won it clean. It’s going to look like I used my last name to poach a customer, and I told Margaret I wouldn’t do that. I meant it when I said it, and I still mean it.”

Rebecca studied him for a second, her hand still over the receiver, something in her expression shifting, recalibrating, the way it had the day of the fasteners quote. She wasn’t arguing with him exactly — more like she was double-checking that he’d actually thought it all the way through and wasn’t just being noble for the sake of being noble, the way people sometimes were in the first flush of a new job, before the bills reminded them noble didn’t pay rent.