The Job Read Online Free PDF Page A

shouldn’t have done any of that.
    By
the time I get back to the work area, Ian’s showed up, but Lou’s nowhere to be
found.
    “Anyone
seen or heard from Lou?” I ask.
    Everyone
just shakes their heads.
    I
pull the phone out of my pocket and dial the number.
    “Yeah,
boss, I’m headed over now.”
    “Do
you know what time it is?” I ask.
    “I
know I’m running a little late,” he says, “but you wouldn’t believe this party
last night, boss. It was off the—”
    “You’re
fired.”
    With
that, I hang up the phone.
    I
don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. I feel a lot better, and I didn’t
have to get in hot water with the client.
    What’s
left of my crew looks up at me, this being the first time I’ve ever actually
fired someone.
    “There’s
room in the unemployment line if that’s what you’re looking for,” I tell them.
    I’ve
never seen my men clear an area so quickly.

 
    Chapter
Three
    Two
Gallons of Regret
    Jessica

 
    We’re
three weeks into the remodel, and nowhere near completed.
    It
took them three days just to get everything surveyed
so they knew what to remove before they knocked down the walls and now that
whole area is a complete eyesore.
    I
realize that these things take time, but I’ve never seen such a lazy crew in my
life.
    Worse
still, Eric has been fighting me on every little change I want to make to the
project. He keeps telling me that we’re setting back the clock, but this is my
store, and I want what I want.
    I
do feel kind of bad about having them dig out that two-foot sunken area only to
have them refill half the resulting hole in the store, but how was I supposed
to know that it wasn’t going to work?
    Right
now, I’m walking toward the front, trying to keep as much distance between the
crew and myself as possible. If they see me, they don’t bother acknowledging it
and that’s just fine by me.
    When
I get to the front, I ask Linda the same question I’ve been asking her for the
past two weeks, “Slow day, huh?”
    “Yeah,”
she says. “You’d think with all the beefcake we’ve got in here, we’d be pulling
in all the unhappily married women in town, but everyone’s afraid of getting
splinters in their eyes.
    “What
do you think I should do?” I ask. “I thought the job was supposed to be done by
now, and it doesn’t look like they’ve gotten hardly anything done.”
    “This
crap takes time,” Linda says. “My dad worked in construction for a few years
when I was a kid. He’d take us by a build a couple of times a week and it never
looked anywhere near done until it was really nearly done.”
    “So
you think I should give it more time?” I ask.
    “I
don’t know,” she says. “It’s your store. What I can tell you is that if business doesn’t start picking up, we’re
going to run into some serious trouble.”
    “Yeah,”
I tell her. “You’re right about that part.”
    “So,
do you think I should ask Eric out on a date?”
    “You
can’t be serious,” I laugh. “He’s got to be one of the most unrefined person
I’ve ever met. You should hear the way he talks to his crew when he thinks
we’re out of earshot.”
    “Oh,
I’ve heard him,” Linda says. “I don’t know if it’s the whole gruff male thing
or the fact that I’ve got some pretty serious daddy issues, but hearing him go
off on those guys makes me think I should start bringing a towel to work.”
    “A
towel?” I ask, but instantly I regret the question.
    “Yeah,
so I can have something between my legs so customers don’t slip on the—”
    “Got
it,” I interrupt. “Like I said, though, at least until they’re done working
here, there’s a hands-off policy regarding the crew.”
    “Hands
off?” Linda asks. “So that means I could still use my—”
    “There’s
no way to end that sentence that’s going to get anything but a ‘no’ out of me,”
I interrupt again.
    “And,
by the way, when you first hired them, you said that I could do