“My boss told me that Jay left Building Products.”
“Huh?” The news was sudden and surprising. Michelle looked at Rob with a stunned expression. “You’ve got to be kidding! He quit?”
“I don’t know if he quit officially or what,” Rob said, typing at his computer terminal. “But an HR person spoke to Joe this morning, and Joe told me and a few of the other guys that Jay is no longer with the company.”
“That’s too bad,” Michelle said, trying to keep a neutral tone.
As she continued with the rest of her day she found herself pondering the real reason for Jay’s departure. It would suck if he had actually been dismissed for shooting his mouth off the other night at the Lone Star. Could a company really fire you for that? For expressing your personal opinion about work in general in a public place, on your own time? Michelle was fairly confident that various issues like the First Amendment would protect Jay in a case like this if that was what really happened. At one point during the day she stumbled across his business card and made a note of it; in addition to his office and fax number, his cell phone number was listed. She wondered if his cell phone was a private one or if it was company owned. Maybe when she had time she would call him and find out. She could do so from her hotel room; what could it hurt?
She mentioned this to Donald that evening. She’d left the office at five-thirty and stopped for take-out at a Barbecue place on the way back to her room and was just finishing her supper of a roast beef sandwich and soup when her cell phone rang. “So you haven’t seen this guy since Monday night?” Donald asked.
“No,” Michelle said. She’d gathered the trash up in a plastic tie-off bag to take downstairs to the lounge where she’d deposit it in a trash bin there. She didn’t want the smell of leftovers in her room tonight. “Like I said, he kind of got in a tiff with some of his co-workers about employment in general. Technically, he was in the right. We were talking about social issues and some of his co-workers took exception to it. I’d hardly think you could be fired for discussing social issues outside of the work place on your own time.”
“You would think, but the world has gotten nuttier lately regarding employment and business practices,” Donald said. She heard him sigh. “There’s some employers now who not only refuse to hire smokers, they’re firing people who don’t quit. They claim it costs more money to insure them. I read about one company that banned their employees from smoking anywhere! Even their own homes. They’ve actually fired people for it.”
“Really?” Michelle asked.
“I kid you not,” Donald answered. “As a doctor, if I encounter a patient who smokes I try to convince them to quit for health reasons. I cannot force them to quit. The decision is up to them, and it’s theirs to make. Plus, last time I checked, tobacco is still sold legally. Same with alcohol. I heard a similar case in which a company that had a policy against its employees drinking alcoholic beverages off company hours fired an employee because he was seen drinking a beer one night in a bar. Alcohol and tobacco both pose health risks, but they’re not illegal by any means. You can take that same kind of reasoning and apply it to people who are overweight—not just obese, because there’s actually discrimination laws that can protect obese people—but honest to goodness overweight people. Somebody who is twenty, maybe fifty pounds overweight but isn’t considered obese. Companies can use this same argument and fire those people for not losing weight or eating right. And if you break it down further, what’s to stop them from forbidding you to participate in certain sports during your off time? It all boils down to health coverage. They want to save money on it. Once you head down that path, it can get worse.”
“I hardly think Jay got fired for what he said,” Michelle said. “But still—”
“Corporations do a lot of weird things, honey,” Donald said. “I’m dealing with one now that doesn’t want to pay for a surgery that will not only save a man’s life, but will ultimately save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in long term care which they’ll end up paying anyway if they don’t approve the twenty thousand dollars upfront it will cost to cover the surgery. They just want to save as much money as they can for this quarter to meet their executive’s financial goals. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Michelle didn’t want Donald to go off on another tangent again so she changed the subject. “I might give him a call Friday,” she said. “I was supposed to meet with him today on this project anyway.”
“Will you not meeting with him change the scope of your project?”
“I met with a couple of the guys he worked with and they filled me in. I have enough to get started.”
They talked for a little while longer and when Michelle hung up she found herself in a deep, melancholic funk. Talking about Jay brought the memories of their conversation Monday night to the surface; how he’d asked her if she had children and her response to that question, followed by that painful memory. That painful memory now burned in the surface of her mind, and she sat on her bed and pulled her purse to her lap. She rummaged through it, found her wallet and opened it up, flipping through the pictures.
When she extracted the photos she let the tears come. Unbidden.
Her daughter had been beautiful even though she’d been born two months premature. Eyes forever closed, skin dark pink, little hands splayed open, a white blanket covering her to her chest, Alanis Michelle Dowling looked just like her mother and nothing at all like the sonofabitch who’d fathered her. Thank God for that, but even if she did possess traces of Kirk’s features she would have loved her fiercely just the same. For now there were the photos, over five prints taken the day she was delivered prematurely and lost forever. Her only link to the best thing that had ever happened in her life.
She was twenty-four years old when she became pregnant with Alanis. She’d been working at All Nation Insurance in Manhattan and hated every minute of it. Her parents had gotten her a job there—had insisted on it, actually. Michelle had wanted to go to college after graduation and major in art but her folks shot that idea down. Her mother told her it would be a waste of time going to school. Her folks could get her a job at All Nation, get her into a good position, and she could work her way up the ladder.
There would be no need to waste four years of her life on a worthless degree when she could cut right through the line and have a secure job by the time she would have graduated. Against her better judgment she’d gotten a job at All Nation right away, mainly to make her parents happy, but she’d been unhappy. She’d spent the first four years working a variety of entry-level jobs by day and partying and getting into the underground rock scene at night. By the time she was twenty-two she’d worked herself into a fairly well-paying administrative position. It was there that she met Kirk Hummel, five years her senior and a budding middle-manager.
By then her extra-curricular activities in music and art had taken a back seat. Her life revolved around work because it was expected of her. Michelle was an only child and both her parents had been staunch workaholics, completely dedicated to the corporate cause of their employer. Michelle had spent most of her childhood at daycares or in the care of her grandmother. Her mother pushed her into majoring in Business in high school and disapproved of any other career choice Michelle had—journalism, graphic arts, even architecture. “A good solid business education is what you need to better prepare yourself for our growing economy,” Mom had said. This mantra was repeated so often that Michelle finally gave in to shut her parents up. She chose business as a major in high school and her grades promptly fell. By the time she was twenty-two she was asleep at the wheel; a passenger in an automaton that looked like her and answered to her name. She woke up, showered and dressed, took the subway into Manhattan every morning, worked ten to twelve hours a day and came home. She had no time for her friends, her art, or any kind of social life. Until Kirk Hummel stepped in.