Thursday came the way important days always come too fast and too slow at the same time. Marcus was up at 5. He pressed his one good button-down shirt, the navy one he'd worn to his last three interviews and stood in his bathroom mirror doing the thing he always did before something mattered too much. Which was to not look too long at his own face. He told his daughters he had a meeting.
He told them it was important. Nadia said she'd get Zoe ready for school. He said he owed her one. She said she knew. Drove to Decatur with the radio off.
Gerald Patton's office was in a converted brick building on a commercial block. The lobby was functional, military in its plainness. Nothing there that didn't serve a purpose. Marcus sat in the waiting area for 8 minutes and did not look at his phone. He sat with his hands on his knees and breathed.
Gerald Patton was not what Marcus had expected. He was 74, black built like someone who had once been much larger and had compressed over the decades into something dense and absolutely certain. He had a handshake that said everything about who he was before he said a word. He looked Marcus over the way. Robert looked at things directly without performance taking actual inventory.
Robert tells me you can run a site, Gerald said. Yes, sir. Marcus said he also tells me you've hit a rough patch. Yes, sir. Don't apologize for that.
Gerald said, I've hit three of them myself. You know what they teach you? He didn't wait for an answer. They teach you whether you quit or you don't. He sat back.
Tell me about the last project you ran. Marcus told him. He told it clean. No hedging, no embellishment. Just what the project was, what the challenge was, how he managed the crew, what went wrong, how he fixed it.
Gerald interrupted three times with specific technical questions, the kind designed to find out if someone actually knows what they're talking about or just knows how to talk about it. Marcus answered all three without hesitating. Gerald studied him for a long moment after the third answer. You know why I hired the last supervisor I had? He said, "No, sir. " Because he had the best credentials I'd ever seen on a resume.
He paused. He couldn't manage a crew of four men on a bathroom renovation without three phone calls to me a day. Another pause. Robert told me you got a man through 30 years of silence in about 2 months. That tells me more about your management skills than any piece of paper.
Marcus went still. That's not what I'd call a management skill, he said carefully. What would you call it? Marcus thought about it honestly. Showing up, he said.