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Tuesday morning, I got up at the same time I always did, drank the same coffee I always brewed, and put on a suit I had worn probably at least a hundred times before.
Still, something was off about that morning. I just felt odd, and nothing I did seemed to help. Keeping a routine, I had read, was a good way to stay grounded, though that day I felt anything but.
As I went to leave for work, grabbing my workout bag from the closet in the front hallway of my house, I knocked my head into my old backpacking pack and it slid off the hook. When it hit the hardwood floor, some left-behind items from the last trip Adam and I went on spilled out. An emergency blanket, which folded up smaller than a wallet, tumbled out and began to come undone. Along with that, I heard what could only be my heavy pocket knife fall out, as well as the crumbling sound of plastic. I bent down and picked up a pack of trail mix that I apparently forgot to take out when we got home.
A lot of the stuff inside was molded, and I looked at the expiration date and saw that it went bad more than three years ago.
No way.
I shook my head. There was no way it had been that long since I’d gotten into this pack. I couldn't believe it. I remembered that trip like it was yesterday. Adam and I drove up to Northern California and hiked a part of the Pacific Crest Trail through the Shasta National Forest. It was one of the best trips we’d ever been on, and the views from some of the peaks we hit were breathtaking. It felt so good to be out in the wilderness again, and I remembered feeling especially good because…
Because Dad couldn’t get ahold of me to talk about the transition.
Then it hit me. That trip had to have beenbeforemy dad stepped down as CEO. It was such an amazing trip because my dad had been hounding me for months in preparation for my taking over the reins of the company, and I was so relieved not to have to listen to his voice for an entire week.
Five years ago.
Give or take a few months. That’s how long it had been since I’d made time to go camping with my brother. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I’d gone for a hike at that time. I tried to get my brothers to go on one with me when we were in Hawaii, but it ended up raining the one day we had free, so we had to cancel.
Sitting there on the floor in my hallway, holding a molded bag of trail mix, I realized what had been making me feel so off that morning. I wasbored. I was bored of doing the same thing every single day. Bored of spending almost all my time in the office and never getting to go out and do the things I used to love so much. I felt like some sort of CEO robot, just like my dad had been after the company started to grow when I was in high school. Before Becker Tech got big, my dad used to spend every weekend with me and my brothers. Then, pretty quickly, that all stopped. Work became his number one priority, and I watched as it turned him into a completely different man than the one who was around when I was a kid.
I always vowed I wouldn’t let something similar happen to me.
And yet… it had.
I grabbed the pocket knife and emergency blanket and stuffed them both back into the pack, then went to throw the trail mix away. Slamming the front door shut, I realized I had forgotten to grab my gym bag, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to go to the gym that day, even though I went every Tuesday. At least this was one way I could make a change, one way I could rebel against the mundanity that had infected every other facet of my life.
* * *
The cherry on top of my bad mood came in the form of my father, waiting for me in my office when I arrived at the building a little before 9 in the morning. I could see, from the look on his face, that he had been waiting there for a while.
“I thought you came in at 8,” he said when I came through the door. I ignored the comment and went to put my bag down on my desk and get to work. “When I was CEO, I came in at 8 every morning, if not earlier.”
“I know.”
“I just assumed you were going to do the same when I passed the company onto you. I guess not.”
“Dad,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I came to find out how much you decided to offer that kid who is suing us. What's his name, Mike?”
“Mark.”
“Mark.” He said it as if the word tasted bad on his tongue, scrunching up his face in an angry scowl. “Right. What did you decide to offer Mark to open up negotiations for the settlement? You know, you have to be strategic about these things, it’s a numbers game and if you offer too much right out the gate, then he could end up getting way more than he was initially willing to settle for.”
“I know how it works dad,” I said. “But we decided not to settle at all. We’re gonna take him to court.”
He laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“I’m serious.”
He looked at me and frowned. “You can’t be. Because if you were serious, then I would be forced to ask you what the hell you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind? We don’t go to court with people like this. It’s beneath us. We pay them off and forget all about it, it’s a lot easier that way.”
“It’s also a lot more cowardly.”To use Lily’s word.
I saw anger flash across his face, and I was quite proud to have put it there.
“You’re saying the way I used to do business iscowardly?”
