HEY, LARRY, YOU GONNA GET that analysis done by COB tonight?” his boss called from half-way down the hall as he slipped his designer overcoat over his Italian suit.
Most of the outer offices were dark, their occupants having already exited for the Friday night commute home. Lawrence Carter’s thinning hair poked over the top of his cubicle walls. He glanced down the hall briefly then down at his cellphone next to his elbow.
8:00 pm. The screen also displayed a text from his wife, telling him that she was going out with her sister, was taking the car, and that he would have to find his own ride home from the station.
Looking back at his computer screen, he growled inwardly. His boss wasn’t going to do anything with this data over the weekend, for heaven’s sake. Why does he need it tonight?
“Yeah,” Larry replied, “just two more formulas to set up on the summary spreadsheet . . . ” As the fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, the only thing betraying his rage was the sheet of yellow-pad paper on his desktop slowly crumpling under his fist.
This was the third week in a row with a crazy deadline right before close of business on Friday, or “COB” as his boss preferred to call it—pretentious jerk! And this time, Larry knew his boss would be gone for the weekend and most of next week, heading out for a Caribbean cruise he’d heard someone say in the coffee room. Woo-hoo! he thought. The last trip Larry had taken was a weekend in the Twin Cities for some accounting convention. He’d actually talked his wife, Julia, into going along, as then he only had to pay for one ticket. But even for that, she had to practically beg the head nurse on her unit to get the time off.
* * *
Larry was forty-three years old; Julia, forty-five. They’d been married almost sixteen years.
He had a clean-shaven, round chin and thin, straight, blond-but-graying hair. He wore round-rimmed, tortoise-shell glasses, which some might charitably call “retro” but were actually the same glasses he wore since his late teens. He had kept them safe all those years with a black elastic headband. He said it was to keep him from needing to push his glasses up his nose “like a nerd,” but it actually had the same effect.
His body was definitely not built for a lot of outdoor activity. His skin had what might be called a fluorescent-light tan. So, generally, he was thinning on top and thickening in the middle—typical of guys his age. It didn’t bother him a lot. What did bother him was when he became aware that Julia noticed.
Julia herself didn’t exactly shop in the petite department, but she had been able to keep her figure better than he. She went to the gym near their home two or three times a week. She had girlfriends she met there, which probably made it easier with her willpower.
He, on the other hand, felt plenty of work-comes-first peer pressure from those at the office. He’d been with the company—the Albany Machine Tool Corporation—for most of their marriage. His father-in-law had made it clear that he was glad Larry was attached to such a solid firm. Larry supposed he didn’t want his daughter going hungry. He knew he would probably feel the same if he—they—had had children.
* * *
The Albany Machine Tool Corporation—AMTC for short—has existed since the early 1900s, nestled in what was often referred to as Tech Valley. The region along the Hudson from New York to Albany included businesses manufacturing everything from wind turbines, cannons, and ball bearings to microchips and precision optics. The company supplied many of those industries.
When Larry began with the company, where his father had worked the floor for so many years, he was told of AMTC’s role in rebuilding the machines that had helped restore America’s Pacific Fleet after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Since then, the company mainly served transit and heavy-haul railroads.
With no major competition, his job as a pricing analyst was no huge challenge. In fact, when Larry thought about it, nothing was a big challenge to him anymore. His life had become about as gray as the shop floor outside his security-glass-windowed office.
But it was a steady paycheck, and now supporting both his ailing parents and Julia’s, that money had better keep coming in. The knot in his stomach was a regular occurrence every time he heard of closings, restructurings, and layoffs in other industries of similar rust-belt lineage. He always wondered when his company might be next. But his current concern was getting the columns and rows in front of him to add up.
The formulas on his spreadsheet finally worked, and he had some viable data—he hoped—for management to use in setting up next year’s pricing budgets. He knew there wouldn’t be any significant change. Sales hadn’t changed in the past year. In fact not much had changed around old AMTC for years, he mused as he cursored over to close the program, then shut down his computer.
* * *
There were times that Larry wished he could get a place out in Country Hills, Sarandon Springs, or even up in the Finger Lakes where the big bosses lived. But Chilton Park was an inexpensive ticket on mass transit and a number of other mid-level employees lived there. And, being an accountant, Larry was always looking to pinch pennies.
His frugal tendency remained a sore point with Julia and came up in conversation regularly, usually when another disappointment arose in their lives: an unexpected car repair, a long-delayed home improvement, the inability to afford a vacation comparable to those of Julia’s more well-to-do friends.
“Your whole family is a bunch of stingy old misers!” she’d yelled at him in one of those moments—a statement he could not readily disagree with, and so he said nothing.
She went on, “I don’t know why I married into it.”—another declaration he had no answer to, and so again he’d given no reply.
The two of them had met in high school and then dated off and on through the years as they both established their careers, his in accounting and hers in nursing. In their late twenties, they had decided to move in together. Then, after a year of pressure from both sets of parents, they’d gotten married in a simple courthouse ceremony—economical and efficient. That time, they did both agree.
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