A/N: Because you all are so wonderful, here's another chapter.
Leaving the bonds office behind was a little harder than I had expected. Not the job, and certainly not my piece of shit cousin, but knowing that I wouldn't be seeing Connie and Lula every day made my chest hurt. We had been through some stuff together.
My mother had nearly cried with joy when I told her about my new job. She had sat at dinner talking about how nice it would be not to get calls about me chasing an FTA through someone's backyard, having my cars destroyed, my apartment set on fire, or my hair singed. I was excited about those things too.
Sara met me downstairs at the main reception on my first day. She had my shirts and ID badge. She also gave me keys to the building, to my desk, and Mike's office. She showed me around the building and introduced me to everyone. I learned that the receptionist's name was Ellen Zebrowski and she was Sara's aunt. She was retired from being a teacher but had been too bored and came to work at the office. She mainly directed calls that didn't know which extension to take and informed people when visitors had arrived. The first-floor offices contained the various accounting people, who each had a specific role in payroll, billing, and accounts payable, Human Resources, which I had already seen, and the Information Systems office. The person who managed the computer stuff was a contractor rather than an employee, so he worked when he felt like it or there was a specific need. I was told he was usually in the office on Mondays and Thursdays, but that if I needed something he was always available by phone.
"This floor is the busiest," Sara told me as we got to the second floor. It was similar in style to the third floor, except there wasn't a desk in the reception area. "It's the main operations area. The estimators, safety director, expeditors, and supervisors are on this floor. The foremen also have an office here in case they need to come in and work away from the job site. There are also two conference rooms here where they hold planning meetings."
"None of them have an assistant?" I asked as I was introduced to each person on the floor, all of whom regarded me with indifference. They were probably used to Mike's assistants not being around long and didn't think it was worth learning my name.
"No, that's just the privilege of Mike," Sara said. "You're more of an office manager than an assistant to a specific person. I keep telling Mike to change the job title, but he doesn't get it. He'd still be calling you his secretary if it weren't for Dave telling him it's not the standard anymore."
Dave was the HR guy. I had a feeling he had to put up with as much bullshit as I would be.
"Other than Mike, the head project manager and the assistant project manager are also on the third floor," Sara said as we arrived. Mike's door was closed. "He's out on a job site," she said, indicating the closed door. "You'll have a lot of work simply because he isn't the type of guy who does well behind a desk."
I was shown the computer system, which linked the various offices through Microsoft Teams. Mike wasn't great with technology, according to Sara, so he had been very resistant to making too many changes. My job would include doing all the stuff on the computer that Mike couldn't figure out because he refused to be patient enough to try it. The estimators and contractors still had to do a lot of work on paper because Mike refused to invest in tablets, so I would also be entering a lot of their information into the system because they flat-out refused to spend time typing it up after being forced to write it all out. It seemed like if Mike didn't understand something, he assumed no one else did and therefore pretended it wasn't worth considering.
"He will also want to send you on a lot of errands," Sara told me. "Sometimes you'll need to put your foot down. He will want it done right away, but if you're busy and it isn't something important you can't just drop everything at his whims, or you'll never get anything done."
"In terms of organizing, you do what works for you," Sara said as I sat down to explore my computer. "Each one of his assistants has done things differently and some of them were disasters. You seem like you have your shit together, so I feel good about you being here. I think the office will run more smoothly with you here managing it."
I hadn't known her for more than a day, but she already had that much faith in me. I wondered what Jill was saying about me.
I was given my login for Teams and got my email address set up. Because of his disinterest in technology, I was responsible for managing his email along with my own. Not just because he couldn't type, but because someone had to prevent him from pissing people off and putting something in writing that could get him sued.
Mike came back around lunchtime and told me to get him something. I asked what he wanted, and he said he didn't care and shut his door. Sara pulled out menus from various local restaurants and inside each was highlighted what he liked and how he liked it.
"You're a lifesaver," I told her. She told me where the petty cash was to buy the food, how to write down the expense, and gave me the keys to a company car.
"Don't ever drive your own car if you don't have to," she advised. "Especially to job sites. You'll be picking up nails in your tires, and it'll be constantly dirty."
I ran down the road to get Mike a chicken sandwich, fries, and a chocolate milkshake. I delivered his food, with no thanks from him, and sat down to fill out the petty cash form. Once that was done, Sara and I went to get our own lunch at a local Mexican restaurant. She told me when we got back to the office that she would start showing me what the day-to-day stuff looked like. We made small talk about our respective lives and headed back to the office.
A pile of paperwork had been slowly filling up an inbox on the corner of the desk. Sara sorted through the pile and explained the different forms and what to do with them. I observed as she entered the information into the appropriate places. She then would file the papers in different drawers, depending on the form and whether it was for a residential or commercial project. One thing that immediately stood out was how complicated things were when they didn't need to be. It seemed like there was a lot of unnecessary repetitiveness in documentation. I understood that clients were given hard copies of their files once the work was complete for future reference, but there was no reason the office needed to keep paper files. Hell, even the bonds office had gone paperless.
I left at five on the dot. Sara said there was absolutely no point in putting in overtime. Mike didn't want to pay for it, and I wouldn't get the work done any faster anyway. I thanked her for my time, gathered my things, and left. I had made plans to celebrate my first day at the new job with Jill over dinner and drinks that night, so I went home to change and headed back out. We were going to a restaurant and bar called Last Resort. It was surprisingly nice for such a casual place. The food was amazing, and the bartenders worked hard to create their own unique cocktails. It wasn't until I pulled up that I remembered it was one of Ranger's favorite places. I had been there with him more than once over the years.
"How the hell did you and Mike come from the same family?" I asked her as we shared an appetizer of loaded potato skins. She had a cocktail that was electric blue and served in a tall, skinny glass. I had gone with a beer because I didn't handle liquor well.
"Our parents got divorced when I was six," she said after sip of her drink. "Our oldest sibling had come out as transgender, which had enraged our father. This was the early eighties, so most of the world shared his point of view. He told my brother to get out of his house because he wouldn't have any daughter of his dressing and acting like a man. My mother put her foot down and said he if forced Johnny out, then she was leaving as well. He didn't believe her. She packed us kids up and we moved out the next day. But Mike was twelve at the time and went back to our father's house almost immediately. He felt the same way about Johnny as our father did, and my mother told him she wouldn't tolerate his attitude in her house. Johnny was ten years older than me, so he wasn't there for very long before he headed off to college. He's a physician's assistant in Pittsburg now. He's married, has two kids, and three grandchildren. We're close with our mother, but he hasn't had anything to do with Mike or our father since he left for college. Mike is basically a carbon copy of our father."
"Wow," I said. "That explains the difference between you two."
"He has his good parts," she said once the server had placed our food in front of us and left. "But there's a lot of stuff about him that I can't stand. We don't agree on politics, religion, or sports. We can only agree that our mother's pierogis are the best and that his wife is entirely too good for him."
"Yeah, I wondered how they ended up together. She's nothing like him."
Jill shook her head sadly. "I wish she would leave him. He's mean to her. Just like our father was to our mother, and her father was to her mother. She fell into the cycle. Thank God I managed to escape it. Tony's a good man."
"He also has a wife who could kick his ass to the moon if he tried any shit," I pointed out. We clinked our drinks and dug into our meals.
"How are you doing? Met anyone?" she asked after we had a few bites.
"Are you kidding?" I asked. "Not a chance. Veronica's there to keep me away from men. I'm counting on her to scratch their eyes out if they show up."
"You could try a dating app?"
"I catfished a couple of my FTAs on Tinder in the past to get them to come out so I could haul them back to jail. I'm sure I'd end up with some weirdo who wasn't at all what he claimed to be."
"Do you want me to set you up with someone?"
I shook my head. "No thanks. I'm fine. After almost four years of dealing with my feelings for two different men, I'm thankful for the complication-free time."
Jill gave me a skeptical look. "So you haven't been thinking about Ranger lately?"
"No," I lied very badly. "Okay, some, but it's difficult not to think about him when the office I work at uses a Rangeman security system."
Jill continued to eat her food and look at me without an expression only mothers seemed capable of.
"Stop looking at me like that," I said. "I'll get over him. I will."
"Okay."
I pushed my food around on my plate and sighed. "I never had to 'break-up' with him before. It's different, that's all."
"Do you still love him?"
"Yes," I muttered. "But that's normal, right?"
"Do you still love Joe?" she asked.
I thought about it for a minute. "In a way, but not the same way. Joe was a part of my life growing up. Ranger has only been in it the last four years."
Jill chewed her bite of food and took a drink of water before speaking. "So you aren't in love with your boyfriend of almost four years any longer, but you are still in love with a man that you never dated? It sounds to me like there is some unresolved stuff there."
"I never said there wasn't unresolved stuff. I just haven't figured out how to resolve it yet."
"Have you ever considered you might need to talk to Ranger in order to resolve it?" Jill asked.
"I'm not doing that."
"Why? You're an adult. Just because you talk to him doesn't automatically make him your boyfriend, or even your friend. Maybe you just need to talk things out with him."
"I know that's why I can't get past him," I admitted. "Because I didn't really let him say anything when I told him to get out of my life. And I keep wondering if he would have said anything that would have made a difference."
I felt my throat tightening. Oh hell no. I wasn't going to cry about this. "I just have to live with the knowledge that I won't know. I'll be okay."
"Would it kill you to talk it out so you can have some peace?"
"It might."
Jill gave me a nod that felt a little too understanding but didn't ask me about Ranger anymore.
I got into an easy routine with work at the construction office. I came in and started the coffee at eight before Mike showed up. He always did a grand tour of the big job sites before coming in for the day. I would check emails and copy/paste them onto a word document. I would spread them out so he could have room to write in a response he wanted me to give them. He would arrive around nine-thirty and complain about someone not-white, not-straight, or not-Catholic pissing him off. I eventually learned that he didn't require any sort of acknowledgement, so I started putting my Airpods in with my music on before he arrived. He would take a while to sit in his office and review documents and write out his responses to his emails. He would drop the papers off at my desk before heading out to meetings with the project managers. I would work on whatever there was until lunch time. I also learned he didn't care what he got for lunch that day as long as it was something he liked. I usually did a rotation of the takeout menus and started using DoorDash to avoid going out for his lunch, then going out again for my own. I could have ordered something when I got his, but then he would expect me to work on my lunch. I needed my space from the office. After lunch I would have things to type up after the morning meetings, then the estimators would come in from their morning work and toss the papers in my inbox. I would get those worked out, then there was usually something Mike wanted me to do outside the office. Sometimes it was accompanying him to job sites to see what was going on and to make notes of things they needed. Other times it was to run errands for him. It was an easy job, it didn't exactly bore me to tears, and I could tell him to fuck off when he was being particularly vile.
The only person happier than me about my new job was my mother. She told me every time she saw me.
"I'm so relieved you are in such a nice, quiet office job," she told me for the umpteenth time in early March. "I always worried about you when you were doing that bounty hunter job. I never wanted to leave town because I was always afraid that something would happen while we were gone and we wouldn't be here when you needed us. I feel like I can actually take a vacation now." She looked across the dinner table at my father. "Frank, why don't we go visit Mark and Diane in Scottsdale? They've asking us to come out for years."
"Fine, whatever," my father mumbled as he ate his meatloaf. I was pretty sure he would go along with my mother just about anywhere as long as he didn't have to put in effort of any kind.
It bothered me that my mother hadn't felt comfortable enough to leave town when I was working in bond enforcement. But I couldn't blame her when every time she turned around I was having a car destroyed or being kidnapped. I just hoped she would go through with her idea of taking a vacation.
"How are the people in the office?" Grandma Mazur asked. "Have you made any new friends?"
"Not really," I said. "I don't think anyone in the office is friends. They get along fine to work together, but that's it. I never get the impression anyone spends time together outside of work."
"Well, that's too bad," she replied. "You had great friends at your old job. I guess that's some of the trade-offs."
It was, but it was one worth making.
"Okay, you need to get with the times, technology-wise," I told Mike in mid-March. "You are never going to keep up in the business with the situation you have going on right now."
"I don't need to do that stuff," he said, waving a dismissive hand. "This system works just fine."
"No, it doesn't," I said. "The estimators and contractors need to be able to complete the forms on laptops or tablets. They could type everything out, then email it to me. I can file it, then print a copy for the client file."
"Are you trying to do less work?" Mike asked accusingly.
"Yeah, I am because I can't keep up. No one can. There's too much coming in, especially considering I'm also expected to type up the stuff from Camden and Vineland. And you're still in talks to buy that office in Newark, right? Once that goes through, it will be physically impossible for me to do this alone. So you need to decide if you want me playing errand girl and not get stuff here done, leave me chained to my desk and not getting the other stuff done, hire a second person to help me, or invest in technology that will make everyone's lives much easier."
I could see Mike wanting to rant, but we had gotten to know each other well enough that he knew I wouldn't listen and would walk out of his office.
"If I buy these tablets, you have to teach everyone to use them," he said shortly.
"That's fine," I said. "I doubt it'll be very hard because most people already know how to use this stuff. You're the only person I know who can't operate a smart phone. My own grandmother texts, tweets, and makes Tiktoks."
Mike growled at me. "Don't expect me to be doing complicated shit on those things. You're still going to be answering my emails."
"That's fine," I said. "I'll have plenty of time to do that. Besides, it might help with all the duplication we have going on as well. We end up having to repeat the same information on several forms. I could work on creating some new documents for us to use that would help cut down on that."
"I'm not paying you extra for that," he snapped.
"I don't expect you to," I replied. "Should I go ahead and email Pete and Luke about figuring out what would be best to purchase and getting the order started?"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he said, waving me away. I practically skipped out of the office and to my desk.
Who knew that converting our technophobic boss to iPads would turn me into the office hero? The estimators actually cheered when they got the email saying we would be converting to a paperless format starting in May. I could hear them from down the hall. One of the estimators, who was one of the only other women in the office, bought me a spa package. The other estimator brought me coffee and donuts every day for two weeks. The contractors who would come in to give us the paperwork for various services were over the moon that they wouldn't need to waste a trip to the office every time they did work for us. Mike could see the elation and didn't particularly like it. He tried to take credit for it, but everyone called bullshit and knew it was me leading the revolution.
"You go into this app," I said to Mike as I began teaching him to use his new iPad. "And that will let you see everything that is waiting for your approval."
"How did you get everything from the computer into this app," he asked.
"That's a question for Pete," I said, referring to the computer guy. "He developed it for us using the existing system we had in place. He just made it work on these."
I didn't mention that Pete had confided in me that he had created everything a long time ago in hopes that someone would convince Mike to go paperless. He just made a few tweaks and a process that would have normally taken months took only a couple of weeks.
I had asked Pete to set it up so that Mike couldn't send out a derogatory email without me seeing and intercepting it, so he set Mike's email up to be a read-only situation. Mike would usually just tell me what he wanted to say because the man couldn't type to save his life. He was convinced that the letters on the keyboard changed positions every time. But he was learning and it was going better than I had expected.
Sara showed up to the office one day in early May with a bouquet of flowers. "I don't know what you said or did," she told me. "But getting him to switch to a paperless format has been amazing. He brings his iPad home at night and has our kids teaching him how to use it."
"I should definitely have earned that raise to $30 an hour by June," I said, smiling.
"Honey, you'd get that raise for simply sticking around. You're the longest anyone has worked in this position without turning in their notice."
"I wouldn't have worked so hard if I had known that was the case," I joked. "But it does make this job easier. I'm working on a new template. Why don't you look at it and tell me what you think before I show it to Mike?"
She came around the computer and reviewed it. "This is great," she said, patting me on the back. "I tried telling him that there was a better way to do this, but he doesn't like to listen to anyone. I'm not sure how you get through to him."
"I've made him believe that I'm going to do whatever the hell I want regardless of whether he agrees to it, so he has just started going along with everything I say," I replied. "It's a power I'm trying to use responsibly."
Sara chuckled. "That's great. You keep doing that. I'm hoping he'll lighten up once the Newark deal is completed. It shouldn't be long now."
I shook my head. "He doesn't tell me a lot about it, but since I answer his emails, I get some of it."
"The owner in Newark hasn't caved to Mike's pressure like the other owners did," she told me quietly, looking over her shoulder to make sure Mike wasn't nearby. "This man wasn't like Mike or the other people where he had inherited the business from a family member. The Newark owner built this company himself, and he's very proud of it. He wants to make sure it's still going to have a good reputation."
"I can understand that," I said. "You create something and you don't want someone else coming in and ruining it. That can apply to something as simple as a dinner, not to mention a whole company."
"And the man who owns that company is Latino, so you know Mike has probably said something stupid to him," Sara said with a shake of her head. "I swear, I wish could put a shock collar around his neck and zap him every time he acts like an idiot."
I thought back to what Jill said about their older brother. "Yeah, if only it were that easy."
The buyout of the office in Newark was official at the end of May, which meant that Kowalski & Sons Construction would have an official office in Newark as of July 1st. The company that had been purchased, J.M. Construction, was a small, but well-respected firm. I learned from Mike that he had approached the owner and told him that he could either sell to Mike and stay in charge of the office up there, or Mike could set up shop nearby and run him out of business. Mike said the owner, who was named Javier, was in his mid-sixties and knew it was a better deal to sell out rather than be put out of business and leave his employees without jobs.
"I'm hoping he'll decide to retire here soon so they I can send Jake up there to run the office," Mike told me. "He's done a good job. I can get someone else to help here and let him be the big dog in Newark."
"It wouldn't be good for morale up there if you try to run him out," I reminded Mike. "Are you keeping on the people who worked for him?"
"Most of them," Mike said. "But he had to let some people go because we already have people, like HR and Safety."
"I'm sure that was difficult for him," I replied. Mike shrugged. "It happens. Anyway, you and Pete are going to be up there helping them get set up with everything.
"Me?" I asked. "Why?"
"Because you run the office here and you do a damn good job," he begrudgingly admitted. "Sara keeps telling me I need to give you a promotion and a new job title, so I'm doing it. You're gonna be the official Office Manager for the company. That means I'm going to want you to travel to the other offices and see how things are going. And with Newark it means getting them setup with our way of doing things."
"How long would I need to be there?" I asked.
"A couple of months, maybe."
"A couple of months? I can't be away that long!" I said.
"You told me that all these fancy iPads would make it easier to do work on the road," he said, pointing to his own tablet. "You don't need to be here to do everything. I'll get Sara to do some of the errands while you're up there."
I groaned. "I thought I'd given up commuting to Newark when I left E.E. Martin," I said.
"I can put you up in a hotel," Mike suggested. I shook my head. "I have a cat, Mike. I can't leave her alone that long. She'd be feral by the time I got back, even if someone came to check on her. I'll just take the train or drive."
I walked back to my office feeling annoyed. I knew it was my job to do this, but I still wasn't excited about it. It took me a minute to realize Mike had said something about a promotion. I leapt out of my chair and hurried back into his office.
"You said I'm getting a promotion," I reminded him. "Does that come with more money?"
"Yeah," he muttered. "I talked to Dave. You'll start making $35 an hour as of July 1st, when the promotion kicks in. You need to see him to sign a paper or whatever."
I felt a little happier about spending the summer in Newark as I left the office for a second time.
