12 Company Practice

In the conference room, the party was essentially configured the way it had been for prayers, with Bysen at the head of the table and Mildred on his right. The sons and Linus Rankin sat along the sides. Mildred’s assistant, the nervous woman in the corner of the front room, came in with a stack of phone messages, which Mildred distributed to the men.

I handed Mildred the report I’d created for my meeting at the warehouse; when I told her I’d only brought two copies, she sent her assistant scurrying to photocopy it. The assistant came back in short order, somehow juggling a stack of copies and a tray holding coffee, soda cans, and water.

While we’d been waiting, the men had all whipped out cell phones. Linus was asking someone to find out about me, and William was working his way through his share of the messages, calling board members to reassure them that By-Smart was not budging on unions. Roger was dealing with a vendor who didn’t think he could meet By-Smart’s price demands. Gary held an animated conversation about a problem with a store where the overnight crew had been locked in: someone had had an epileptic seizure, as nearly as I could gather from my frank eavesdropping, and bitten off her tongue because no one could get the door open to admit the EMTs.

“Locked in?” I blurted out, when he hung up, forgetting I was trying to be supersaccharine to all these Bysen men.

“None of your business, young woman,” Buffalo Bill snapped. “But when a store is in a dangerous neighborhood, I won’t risk our employees’ lives by leaving them exposed to every drug addict walking the streets. Gary, get onto the local manager: he has to have a backup available to let people out in case of emergencies. Linus, we got a legal exposure here?”

I bit my own tongue to keep from saying anything else, while Rankin made a note. He was apparently the corporate counsel.

Roger flung his own cell phone down in disgust and turned to William. “Now, thanks to your idiot son, we have three vendors who think they can back out of their contracts because our labor costs are going to be going up, if you please, and they know we’ll understand that unless they shut down and move to Burma or Nicaragua, they can’t meet our price standards.”

“Nonsense,” the old man interjected. “Nothing to do with Billy, just the usual whiny weaseling. It’s a game with some people, to see whether we have the guts God gave a goose. You boys are all too thin-skinned. I don’t know what will happen to this company when I can’t be here in the kitchen every day, taking the heat.”

Mildred murmured something in Bysen’s ear; he gave his “hnnh, hnnh” snort and looked at me. “Okay, young woman, come to the point, come to the point.”

I folded my hands on the table and looked him in the eye, or as much of the eye as I could see below his overhanging brows. “As I said, Mr. Bysen, I grew up in South Chicago and attended Bertha Palmer High. From there, I went to the University of Chicago, having played in high school on a championship team; that earned me the athletic scholarship that made my university education possible. When you were at Bertha Palmer, and some years later when I was a student, the school provided programs in-”

“We all know the sad story of the neighborhood’s decline,” William snapped. “And we all know you’ve come here expecting us to give a handout to people who won’t work for a living.”

I felt blood rushing to my cheeks and forgot my need to stay on my best behavior. “I don’t know if you really believe that, or if you keep saying it so you don’t have to think about the reality of what it’s like to support a family on seven dollars an hour. It might do for everyone at this table to try to do that for a month before being so quick to jump to judgment on South Chicago.

“A lot of the girls on my team live in families where mothers are working sixty hours a week without overtime pay on just that wage. They may be in your warehouse, or your store on Ninety-fifth, Mr. Bysen, or at the McDonald’s, but, I assure you, they are working hard, harder than me, harder than you. They aren’t on street corners looking for a handout.”

William tried to interrupt me, but I glared at him at least as fiercely as his father ever did. “Let me finish, and then I’ll listen to your objections. These women want their kids to have a decent shot at a better life. A good education is the best chance these young women will have for that kind of shot, and athletics are a key factor in keeping them in school, maybe even giving some of them a chance at college. For you to fund a program that would give my sixteen teenagers access to proper equipment, proper coaching, and a facility where they didn’t risk a broken leg every time they tried a fast break, would be a great act of charity. Its cost would be down in the noise even for your South Chicago store; for the company as a whole, you’d never notice it, but the PR opportunity would be enormous.

“I just heard Mr. Roger Bysen-persuade-some manufacturer or other to supply you with something at six cents a piece less than they wanted to. Mr. Gary Bysen is annoyed that an employee bit her tongue off because she was locked in overnight. When these things are reported, they make you seem like the Scrooge of North America, but if you rolled out an important program in Mr. Bysen’s own neighborhood, his own high school, you could look like heroes.”

“You’ve got ten kinds of nerve, I’ll hand you that,” William said in his weedy baritone.

Bysen’s thick eyebrows met across his nose, so deeply was he frowning. “And you think fifty-five thousand dollars is ‘down in the noise,’ hnnh, young woman? Your own business must be very successful indeed if that sum seems trivial to you.”

I scribbled some calculations on the paper in front of me. “Your guy Linus will get my numbers for you, I’m sure, so I won’t detail them for you, but if there were a way to cut a dollar into forty thousand pieces, one of those forty thousand pieces would be the equivalent in my operation to fifty-five thousand dollars in yours. I think that’s trivial. And that doesn’t even include the tax benefits. Nor the intangibles, the PR benefits.”

Gary and William both tried to speak at once; Linus Rankin’s cell phone rang at the same time, and Bysen himself was starting to roar when Marcena pushed open the conference room door and danced in.

She gave me a quick wink, meant to be too subtle for the men to notice, and turned to Bysen. “I’m with Ms. Warshawski-Marcena Love-your Pete Boyland was talking to me about procurement and I got held up. Is that you next to the Thunderbolt on the wall out there? My father flew Hurricanes out of Wattisham.”

Buffalo Bill broke off midsnort. “Wattisham? I spent eighteen months there. Hurricane was a good ship, good ship, doesn’t get the respect it deserves. What was your father’s name?”

“Julian Love. Seventy Tiger Squadron.”

“Hnnh, hnnh, you and I will have to have a talk, young lady. You work with this basketball gal?”

“No, sir. I’m just visiting from London. I’ve been touring South Chicago, actually with one of your lorry drivers, I mean, truck drivers. Sorry, I can’t get the American lingo quite right.”

Marcena’s accent had become more pronounced the longer she spoke. Bysen was bathing in it, but his sons weren’t as enthusiastic.

“Who is letting you in the cab of one of our trucks?” William demanded. “That is against the law, as well as against corporate policy.”

Marcena held up a hand in a fencer’s stop. “I’m sorry. Are you in charge of the trucks? I didn’t know I was breaking any laws.”

“I still want his name,” William said.

She made a rueful face. “I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? I don’t want to get some bloke in trouble, so let’s just say I won’t do it again. Mr. Bysen, is there any chance I could meet with you before I go back to England? I grew up on my father’s aerial battles; I’d love to hear your version of those years; my father would be thrilled to know I met up with one of his old war buddies.”