Mark Gilleo - Sweat

“I’m not sure how to tell you this.”

“Just say it. You can tell me anything.”

Jake’s stomach turned with a combination of early relationship infatuation and fear. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your father is crazy.”

Kate laughed. Jake wasn’t the first boyfriend she had brought home who had voiced concerns over her father. “He is just a little overbearing.”

“Oh, Kate, he’s more than a little overbearing. And Tony… the guy nearly broke my hand.”

“They are just trying to be protective. They are harmless.”

“Harmless?”

“Jake, my mother and father have a saying. ‘Sometimes it takes an insane act by a sane person to prove a point.’ Don’t worry about my father. He gets a little crazy when it comes to his daughter. He is just showing that he loves me.”

“Kate, I understand your father loves you, but let me tell you about our little conversation. Your father said, and I quote, that he would ‘cut off my balls and my tongue if I cheated on you or lied to you.’”

“I’m sure he meant it figuratively,” Kate said, gently rubbing Jake’s thigh.

“How the hell could he mean that figuratively? He said he would cut my balls off and feed them to the dogs.”

“See, there you go,” Kate said with a satisfied look on her face. “I told you he was speaking figuratively.”

“’There you go’ what?” Jake asked.

“We don’t have any dogs.”

Chapter 10

Marilyn walked into the office Monday morning to a full voicemail box. Even when the CEO and president of Winthrop Enterprises wasn’t out of town, Peter Winthrop didn’t answer his own calls unless they came directly to his private cell phone—a number he didn’t give out to just anyone. You had to be royalty, or close enough to royalty that you could arrange a meeting with them. Marilyn was Peter’s assistant and switchboard. She did her job with perfection, trained to perfection over the last twenty plus years. She was very well compensated for standing guard as the final barrier to communication between the outside world and her boss.

The frantic urgency of the messages left on Peter Winthrop’s phone was unusual, and Marilyn wrote down the number with haste. She listened to the messages a second time and decided a return call was in her best interest. Her boss was outside Rio, scoping out a potential factory to sell to a Japanese investor, but she knew he would call. He liked his morning update, the more detail the better. And if she could solve a problem without wasting her boss’s time, that was fine too. That’s what she was paid to do.

With the name and number of an employee from Republic Outfitters scribbled on the paper in her hand, she hit the numbers on her phone. She checked the clock on the wall, and after two rings, was surprised to hear a human voice this early in the morning.

“Good morning. Republic Outfitters, Amy Grant speaking.”

“Good morning. This is Marilyn Ford, personal assistant to Peter Winthrop. I am returning several calls that were left for Mr. Winthrop over the weekend. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Good morning, Marilyn. Thank you for getting back to us. We have a bit of an issue with the rush order of shorts we received from our manufacturer in Asia.”

“Could you please hold for a moment?

“Yes.”

Marilyn opened her desk drawer and pulled out a file on active projects. Republic Outfitters was third from the front. She read the file quickly and returned to the phone. “Twenty thousand pairs of shorts. Rush-ordered. Chang Industries, correct?”

“That’s right,” the unlucky employee from Republic Outfitters answered from the company’s quiet headquarters in Maine.

“Rest assured that if there are problems with the quality of the product, we will handle it immediately at no cost to you.”

Amy Grant, corporate firefighter for the Republic Outfitters’ director of logistics, fumbled for words and went back to her original request. “I really need to speak with Mr. Winthrop directly,” she said forcefully.

“Mr. Winthrop will be out of the office for a few days. I assure you I keep all of his affairs in the strictest of confidence.”

“Still….”

“I understand your concern, but please understand mine. I have worked directly for Mr. Winthrop for over two decades and everything he knows, I know.”

“Well we have a bit of an unusual situation with the rush order of shorts.”

“As you have said.”

“You might have to see this to believe it. Do you have a fax number where you can be reached?”

Marilyn gave her the fax number, again promised to handle the situation, whatever it was, and hung up.

Amy Grant, black spiked hair to go with her pierced eyebrow, took several minutes cutting, pasting, taping, and copying. She had been working on the company emergency all weekend with her boss, trying to find the right people to talk to. When they found the first note, everyone assumed it was a hoax. When the number of notes passed two dozen, Republic Outfitter’s quality control group checked the contact person for the contract on the emergency order of shorts. Surprisingly, they found the same name in the contract as in the notes. Peter Winthrop.

Amy finished honing her kindergarten cut-and-paste skills and looked at her handiwork. She placed the stack of paper face down, and fat fingered the final number on the fax machine before hitting send.

Marilyn impatiently waited by her personal all-in-one fax, copier, and scanner. Peter was due to call any minute, and she would feel better knowing what the emergency from Maine was all about.

Jake walked in the office, gave Marilyn a wave and a “good morning,” and continued on to his office, briefcase bulging with files and newspapers. Twenty minutes later, Marilyn contacted Amy Grant at Republic Outfitters to tell her she was still waiting. The spike-haired employee insisted she had sent the fax, and checked the confirmation ticket that the fax machine generated automatically. She confirmed the number with Marilyn, who reconfirmed that the sender had sent the fax to the wrong number. The first page of the fax came in, inching its way from the slit in the top of the machine. The page was a photocopy of smaller pieces of paper, pushed together in an odd collage—a Picasso masterpiece made from scraps of paper, a plain sheet of office paper serving as the canvas.

Marilyn looked at the first page and then the next. She glanced at the machine and its small display window. There were five pages in total, but she didn’t wait to see them all before picking up the phone. Her demeanor was noticeably more serious.

“Where did this come from?” Marilyn asked.

“That’s just it. They came in the order of shorts we just received. We do a cursory examination on a sample number of shorts as they come in and the inspector found the first note. Then he found another.”

“How many did you find all together? I see the fax is five pages long.”

“Oh that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of notes so far, and still more keep coming. I don’t have a clue what the total number is, but it looks like it is in the thousands.”

“Isn’t that wonderful,” Marilyn muttered.

“What would you like us to do?”

“Check all the shorts and any other merchandise you get from Chang Industries. Keep all the notes. Mr. Winthrop will see to it that you are compensated for the extra work.”

“But what about the notes?”

“I will handle it and get back to you.”

Marilyn hung up the phone, looked around helplessly, and began to cry.

When Peter called, Marilyn grabbed her keys, unlocked her boss’s door and went into the privacy of his office. She came out a full hour later, eyes watering, sniffling like a kid with allergies in the middle of spring. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, and already it looked like the beginning of the second worst day of her life. ***