Chapter 13

NO MATTER what the day held, she had routines to begin. When she arrived at the office Monday morning, she went about her usual routine and then prepared the presentation area so she could project from her computer.

When Mr. Carver came downstairs, he seemed in a particularly good mood.

“Good morning, Ms. Scott. Ready for your big presentation today?”

“Good morning, Mr. Carver. As ready as I am likely to be. I’m not accustomed to making this kind of presentation, but I will give you my best.”

“No doubt! I put together such a fabulous meal on Saturday that I’m still floating. You remember the salmon filet I got in last week’s groceries? I poached it in parchment paper with vegetables and it was perfect. Just a bit of rice with it. Clean-up was not at all difficult,” Mr. Carver said. Erin was thrown by his unexpected familiarity. “That reminds me, speaking of clean-up.”

“Did I do a poor job, sir?” she asked.

“Oh, no! Not at all. I wanted to tell you that even when you go out to get our lunch for us, you are not on the hook for cleaning the kitchen. Mr. Jerico and I would have taken care of it had you not been so efficient. It is actually a part of my routine. When I’ve eaten, I feel compelled to clean something. I even do it after Sunday dinner with my mother. I fear my grandfather grew impatient with me while you were cleaning the kitchen. You would have done much better than I did at entertaining him until we were ready to start working again.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do as you wished.”

“You have been with me two weeks and I can scarcely find a thing to criticize about you. Allow me one little item. Human Resources will think I am ill if I don’t have anything to complain about. Still, you make complaining very difficult,” Mr. Carver said. “Please come in and sit with me in the kitchen while I eat breakfast, and tell me how you like your first two weeks of work.”

“I should check upstairs and make sure everything is tidy, sir.” To Erin this was almost as important as cleaning the kitchen seemed to be to Carver. She’d quickly adapted to the routine and missed it if something was out of place.

“I’ll give you time while I wash my dishes. Here, have a cup of coffee.”

“Thank you, Mr. Carver.”

He sat with his breakfast and waited for her to begin.

“Ah. The work,” she said. “I find I’ve been challenged. I expected to be invisible in a corner as I kept notes rather than being brought in on the planning process. I practiced the presentation the way we wrote it all weekend. I can see places where we need to make small adjustments.”

“I’ve never worried too much about that, as Mr. Duval will spontaneously rewrite it when he is in front of the board. His presentations, while effective, have never been pleasing to me. He’s a snake oil salesman and I need to make sure the snake oil is real. It will be a small miracle if the project we have designed is the same as the project he sells. But he will sell it. He reads people extremely well. We must do our best to see that he understands the project.”

“Will you want lunch with Mr. Duval?”

“Heavens, no! He considers lunch a social invitation and I am rarely social with him,” Preston laughed. “Order Thursday lunch for the two of us. I’ll let you know if Mr. Jerico will join us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, how about the routine parts of your job? Bored to death?”

“Oh, no. Relieved to have some less mentally challenging tasks occasionally. Much as you find washing up after your meals to be a means of establishing your space, I find the menial tasks of the office to be just as peaceful.”

“Don’t become so attached to them that you consider them the primary part of your job,” he said. “That’s happened to me on a couple of occasions in which important tasks were overlooked in favor of putting away my socks. I admit to being difficult, but the company is my number one priority.”

“I detected that in preparing this presentation. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to do it yourself? I know you are passionate about the material.”

“First, don’t underestimate your own understanding of the material. Duval will get hold of it and will hear only a portion of what we present. That’s okay, because he’ll sell it anyway. Second, don’t ever suggest to anyone—especially to me—that I do a presentation. I find that I can talk to you in the office and rarely become flustered. Same with my grandfather. But I’m quite sure the board of directors would object to a frozen statue at the head of the table. Or to being regurgitated upon.”

“I won’t mention it again.”

“Good. I’ll wash my dishes and let you get on with your work. Have a good day today, Ms. Scott.”

He sounded almost as if he wasn’t going to be there. It was a little frightening.

One of the things Erin had become aware of in these past two weeks was that Mr. Carver thought along several lines at once. She saw it in the way he used a Rubik’s Cube. He could solve a cube while working out the most complex design problem in his development. It was the same with his washing dishes. His mind was likely designing the power grid for the community. He actually needed secondary and tertiary trains of thought in order to bring ideas together.

He’d once mentioned water treatment in the early part of the previous week as he and his grandfather were talking. Erin had made a note of it to bring up later. But later in the week he’d been discussing the problems of garbage removal with a particularly unique solution, at the end of which he simply looked up and declared, “And that is how we handle water treatment!” The entire treatment facility and system design rose from his voice and fingers as a complete design.

She completed her maintenance tasks, relaxing her concern over the presentation. Mr. Jerico arrived at noon and the men asked her to join them for lunch in the kitchen. She ate sparingly. She had made presentations before and was comfortable making the presentation to Mr. Carver and Mr. Jerico. But she’d had little to do with Mr. Duval beyond forwarding the spec for the cell towers and drafts of the presentation. She thought it was likely that he didn’t read the drafts. She’d arrived independently at the conclusion that Mr. Duval was all packaging and no product.

He arrived promptly at one o’clock.

“Preston, Lawrence. How are you, my friends? Ah, Erin, it’s good to see you again. I trust you are getting on well.”

“Thank you, Mr. Duval. Mr. Carver keeps me very busy. It’s good.”

Erin reminded herself of Mrs. Carver’s warning that those who leaped to using first names with Mr. Carver, or herself, were pretending to a degree of familiarity that had not been offered.

“Well, so this is the model? My God! How are we going to get that thing into the board room? Well, maybe we can just take some pictures of it and put it in the slide deck. Do I have a fresh deck?” Duval rattled on. Preston just stared silently at the man.

“Have a seat over here, Duval,” said Mr. Jerico. “We’re going to give you the works. All you’ll need to do is add your personality to it. This is exactly what the company needs.”

“Whatever you say. You’re the boss,” Duval said.

“Carver is the boss. I’m just consulting on this,” Lawrence said.

“Oh. Yes. Of course. No offense, Preston.”

Carver nodded and pointed to a chair where Duval sat. Erin gave each of the men a copy of the presentation and made sure they had their favorite marking tools. She pulled the curtains across the windows to the rooftop patio, and pulled down the screen. She pressed a button on her remote control and the screen lit up with her title slide.

“Gentlemen, welcome to the future of JeriCorp Architecture and Development. Over the past two hundred years, our company and its predecessors have made their mark on Jerico City and on businesses as far afield as both coasts. We’ve struggled in the past months due to economic realities for some of our clients. I’m here to tell you it is time to take control of our own destiny and leave our mark on the future. I present to you Cloudhaven, a resort and employment community united by digital servers and high-speed communications.”

Erin had taken her mask off to make the presentation, but all three men continued to wear theirs, making reading their expressions difficult. She did see them nodding, though, as they followed in their notes.

“Why do you need me?” Royce asked after the presentation.

“What do you mean? It’s your job,” Lawrence said.

“It looks like I’ve been replaced by a demo dolly. She did fine with the presentation.”

“Y-you know you aren’t here to do a good presentation,” Preston said. “You’re sup-p-posed to sell it. We always write the presentation. You sell.”

“Yeah. It’s not usually this polished. I can add the zing to this, but I might want to rearrange a few slides. Do we really need all that about water purification? They’ll buy glamour and the romance. It’s a resort. No one wants to deal with water purification,” Royce said, marking in his copy of the script. Erin kept notes in her copy.

“Not just a resort, remember,” Lawrence said. “It is an entire planned community. You need to use this presentation as a launching platform to sell the community concept to the public. We’ll need shops, restaurants, and wireless communications, in addition to the resort. All those things require the right infrastructure and your ability to get the marketing people behind it.”

“Okay. I get that. We really want to make this a work from home resort? You know the only people interested in working from home are the lazy ones. They can’t even be bothered to dress in the morning and go to work,” Royce said.

Preston cleared his throat.

“Present company excepted, of course,” Royce continued. “You’re a special situation, Preston. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the office wouldn’t be productive if we let them work from home.”

“P-Pr-Prod ... Results during the shutdown s-s-say th-that’s false,” Preston said. “We had productivity as high during sh-sh-sh ... quarantine as we had before. Better in several areas. That’s why we need the entire town preset for fast internet service. Rapid communications. Those are some of the people you need to sell.”

“I didn’t like it. I like to see an office full of busy people. Having meetings. Getting things done. Working,” Duval insisted.

“There would still be people who would work in the office. You wouldn’t be abandoned,” Lawrence laughed.

“Yeah, like Carver’s assistant. Bet you aren’t willing to have Erin work remotely.”