"Only until we get strong enough to tell them they can take their money elsewhere," Thomas promised.
Otis remembered saying, "Let's make sure that day comes."
The first two years were a blur of impossible delivery deadlines and secondhand machinery. They ate sandwiches on crates and spent weekends repairing equipment that would have been replaced at a better-funded factory. When they received their first hospital-system contract, Thomas danced between the lathes so badly that Otis threatened to add dancing to the workplace safety manual. Their first two employees watched in astonishment, then joined him.
Otis designed a more reliable pump assembly for facilities that needed uninterrupted water circulation. She wrote testing protocols, trained technicians, and insisted that no shipment leave without a documented inspection. Thomas argued about the additional expense until a competitor's product failed at a customer site and the customer's engineer called them instead. After that, Thomas never complained about the inspection process again.
The company began to grow. They moved into a larger building, hired machinists from the neighborhood, and built a small apprenticeship program with a nearby technical college. Thomas spoke to customers as if they were old friends. Otis spoke to machines as if they were capable of explaining themselves. Between them, they developed a company that made good equipment and, for a while, tried to treat its people as carefully as its products.
Thomas's son Ryan was still a boy then. He came to the workshop after school wearing expensive sneakers his father thought were a waste of money. Otis taught him fractions by having him measure scrap pieces of aluminum, and when he became frustrated, she reminded him that being wrong was not the same as being stupid. Sometimes he listened. Sometimes he grew angry and demanded an easier assignment. Even as a boy, Ryan disliked feeling less competent than someone else.
One afternoon Thomas found Ryan refusing to sweep the floor because cleaning was the sort of work other people did. Thomas took the broom from his son's hand and put it back again. "Every person in this building cleans something," he said. "Otis cleans up my mistakes half the time, and I clean up hers the other half. You are not too important to sweep."
Ryan swept the floor, but he looked furious doing it. Otis remembered the expression years later when he looked at her pushing a cleaning cart. She sometimes wondered when the boy had learned to associate dignity with being above another person, because his father had spent so much effort teaching the opposite.
Thomas died suddenly several years after the company's first great expansion. He had complained of a pressure in his chest after a customer meeting, dismissed it as indigestion, and promised to see a doctor the next day. There was no next day. By the time Otis reached the hospital, he was gone, and the business they had built together had become the least important thing in her life.