Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen

get for you, we’ll get for you. You’ve seen it coming. Today’s the day, and I am sorry. Dave Parks is here, and his door is open. So is mine.”
    She stood silent. She looked around at the faces facing her. She met every eye that wanted her.
    She realized she was waiting for Baxter to make his bodyguard call.
    Then she realized he was not going to call her this last time, and that felt like its own surprise, on top of everything else. Carol, just like these women, was out of a job.
    Instead of walking to the stairs and up off the floor, Carol said, “There is this.” She did not say it as loudly or officially as she had been speaking. She said it like a conversation wandering.
    Some of the women who had begun to turn away turned back. As well as smocks, all of them wore surgical green bags over their hair, and Carol should have put one on before she came out.
    She said, “I’ve just been down to the old plant.”
    She had never said anything like this before. She didn’t know where she was going with it, but she was going.
    And it came to her, this instant, Baxter’s knee-jerk, how she and these women might be able to stand up. She wasn’t anywhere near positive it would work, but she was not ready to let these women, or herself, go.
    She said, “I understand that all the old lines are still in there, and that they still work.”
    She said, quietly enough that several of the women had to lean in to hear, “I’m going to see if that building and that equipment might support some reduced sort of operation. If it will, I’m going to get it running, and I’m going to need you people. It may not be a likely thing, and you may not want any part of it, but I’m going to figure it out fast and let you know fast. Think about it. Meanwhile, instead of pulling the plug right now, I’m going to ask you to keep doing your jobs here so that, no matter what happens, we can use up the inventory here and make a few extra bucks to divvy out.”

The Second Half
    D ave wondered why the hell Carol MacLean had just teased those women on the floor with the possibility of more work.
    When he and Carol and Annette got back to his office, he shut the door, and Carol again gestured for him to sit at his desk. She even said “Please.” It was a nice gesture, and since he had seen her commandeer Mathews’s desk, Dave noted the gesture. Carol sat in one of the two snazzier-than-necessary chairs on the other side of the desk. Annette waited for Dave to signal that it was all right for her to sit in the other snazzy chair.
    He nodded at her. Annette was not shy, but she was in her fifties now and had never spent much time off the island or, as they said, “over the bridge.” She had black hair going gray in a bun; she wore baggy cardigans; she had a hopeful face. She was not imposing and wouldn’t have wanted to be, and right now she was amazed almost to paralysis by Carol MacLean, the businesswoman from New York. When Carol asked Annette to remind her of her last name, it was all Annette could do to produce the “Novato.”
    To her further credit, Carol smiled at Annette in a friendly, unbig-shot way.
    Then she turned to Dave. In his dreams, Dave had a great poker face, which he didn’t, as his poker buddies would testify. Carol leaned her elbows on her knees, which were next to the HR magazines with their high-gloss covers advertising the thrill of workers’ comp issues and making the most of the older worker.
    “Dave, you think I was lying to the women on the floor about the hope of more work so I could keep them on task as long as possible and with as little loss as possible out the back door.”
    So much for the poker face. But Dave could still read people. He watched Carol.
    She said, “There’s background you don’t know that prompted me to say what I did. If I find out we can make the old plant go, I’ll tell you the background. But I wasn’t kidding.”
    Fair enough. Carol looked like a capable businesswoman on