“They’re in the middle of something.”
“I understand.”
“You might want to come back another day.”
Daniel studied him.
The man seemed sincere.
That somehow made it worse.
“Thank you.”
The executive continued walking.
Daniel remained seated.
At forty-one minutes, the conference room door opened briefly as someone stepped out to answer a phone call.
Voices escaped into the hallway.
Richard Hale’s voice was the easiest to recognize.
“We need to stop treating this company like it’s still 1987.”
A few people laughed.
Then another voice, male and younger, said, “Daniel hasn’t been involved in day-to-day operations for years.”
Someone else replied, “Exactly. We can’t keep waiting for him to make decisions.”
Daniel slowly folded his hands.
He could have stood then.
He could have walked in.
He could have reminded them that his signature appeared on the company’s original incorporation documents.
He could have told them that when the first six employees received their first paychecks, the money had come from an account containing almost everything he and Margaret had saved.
He could have reminded Richard that Daniel still owned thirty-one percent of Mercer Industrial Supply.
Instead, he remained seated.
Because suddenly he no longer wanted to interrupt.
He wanted to understand.
Another voice came through the partially closed door.
“And frankly, Daniel’s sentimental attachment to the old employees is becoming a problem.”
The sentence settled into him differently from the others.
Sentimental attachment.
Daniel looked down at his watch.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
For an instant he was not seventy-one years old sitting outside a polished corporate conference room.
He was thirty-four again.
Standing in a cold manufacturing plant outside Cleveland beside a machine that had stopped working during second shift.
Back then, Daniel had been a maintenance supervisor.
He earned enough to support Margaret and their two children, but not enough to feel secure.
Their house was a modest brick place with one bathroom, a narrow driveway, and a kitchen table that served almost every purpose a family could assign to furniture.