Total pages in book: 54
Estimated words: 49393 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49393 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
“I wasn’t talking about this place. I did personal training here for a while and loved it so much that I still do a couple mornings a week for fun. My brothers and I have a private security company, and we have an opening.”
“I’ve never worked security before,” I had said gamely. “But I can learn. I’m observant and good with noticing details. I do know how to fire a gun, but I don’t have a firearms license here. I can get one. What would the job involve?”
“It’s not a security job. It’s an office job. We have a bookkeeper who takes care of payroll and billing and that kind of thing. What we need is an executive assistant to handle scheduling and manage the office stuff. How are you with computers?”
“I used Microsoft Office at the insurance place, and at the Quickie Mart I just used Google Calendar and Sheets. But like I said before…”
“Fast learner, got it,” he quipped. “Your qualifications cover all the bases.” By the time the hour was up I’d set up an interview for the next day.
Now, a couple years on, they were sending me Chinese food to make me feel better after insisting I work from home and recover. That free training session at the gym had been the best break of my life. Not once in two years had I looked back with anything but gratitude on meeting the Burns brothers and joining the Vigilance Ltd. Team.
I dove into the gingery goodness of my meal and smeared some black bean sauce on my shrimp merrily. Once I had downed half a carton of delicious food, I drank some water to cool the heat from the chili sauce and dialed Drew.
“Hey, did you like the food?” he asked. I could tell I was on speaker.
“Yes, you’re spoiling me.”
“Eli’s here, he’s the one that reminded me about the bean stuff you like.”
“Thanks, Eli. Did you get the tofu?” I joked.
“One time. I pointed to the wrong menu item because I was on the phone, and I’ll never hear the end of it,” he said as we laughed at the memory of his face when he cut into a block of jiggly, pale bean curd and took a bite absently. He had stopped short of wiping his tongue off with the napkin but just barely.
“Any one of the lot of you could have ordered for me or asked the waiter to come back in a minute.” He grumbled.
“There’s no tofu here, at least not in the container I opened first. I’m not sure who all this food is for but it’ll last for days probably. Anyway, I’m coming back into the office tomorrow. I have had all of this I can stand.”
“How long since you had a temp?” Eli questioned sternly.
“Since noon yesterday. It’s already more than twenty-four hours. I’m officially on the mend and ready to come back to work.”
“I think you should rest another day,” Drew said.
“You are such a mother hen,” I told him.
“She’s not wrong,” Eli put in.
“Three out of four Burns brothers would agree,” I laughed.
“That’s right. Gang up on me. See if I send you Chinese food next time you get the plague,” Drew said good naturedly before we hung up.
Truth was, I missed them all. The banter and the inside jokes and the easy friendship. I felt like I belonged there, and I contributed to the company. The scheduling was flawless, the office ran smoothly, and the famously cranky printer even sent and received the occasional fax for me.
Talking to them made me feel better, happier. I was excited to get back to work, and couldn’t wait to be in the office, in the thick of all that activity and snapping back at the jokes and feeling that energy we shared.
“Synergy,” Eli had supplied once when I tried to describe how it felt working there with them. “It’s when the combination of factors or people or companies fits so perfectly that it creates something greater than the sum of its parts. Synergy is so overused in corporate speak, but in reality, it’s a feeling, a sense of rightness, and it’s as rare as it is beautiful.”
Maybe that explains why I laid out my clothes for work the next day like a kid excited to see their friends on the first day of school.
2
DREW
Even though I’d seen Agafia Liubov’s TED talk about how the deprivations of her youth in Chisnau and the oppression she witnessed inspired her to activism, it was still impressive. It was only slightly distracting that I had to hear it in my brother Ty’s voice because he was serving as her interpreter.
If Eli had become the translator instead of Ty, he’d have memorized the whole talk so he could deliver it in English with the exact expression and intonation Liubov used in her native Romanian. Being Ty, though, he was listening and interpreting off-the-cuff. Capturing the moment is how he described it. She was speaking from the heart, after all, not reciting a lesson, so if he’d memorized the TED talk by rote it would lose the spontaneity of her word choice and anecdotes. She’d had an awful childhood, from the sound of it. It made me grateful to be an American and to have grown up with the parents we had, despite the fact they’d died young.