Love Handles (3 page)

“What kind of loser doesn’t know how to drive?”

“She grew up in the city. She takes MUNI everywhere.”

Ellen, whose idea of public transportation was Southwest Airlines, scowled at him. “She’s a loser.”

“Sign it. This will get HR off your back. And me.”

She gave him a disgusted look. “She’s the worst assistant I ever had.”

“You say that about all of them.”

“And always true. A downward spiral.”

He leaned forward and picked up her pen. “Well, now she works for Darrin. Not your problem.”

“Everything here is my problem.” But she took the pen, made a face at the column of three’s he’d typed up under Wendi’s name, and signed her ornate signature with its E filling half the page before shoving it back to him. “Tell her not to get too comfortable. The new people might have higher standards.”

He forced himself to give her threat a lazy, unconcerned smile.
The new people
. So she did intend to sell. “I hear your niece wasn’t able to sign those papers the other day.”

Her eyes narrowing, Ellen hauled up her orange, metal-studded, moose-sized purse and dumped it on the desk. “Richard didn’t wait for her. The girl just inherited his ass and he didn’t bother to stick around, the dumbshit.”

“She coming back soon?”

Apparently not considering Liam might have a different opinion on the matter, she exhaled loudly and pulled out a lipstick. “God, I hope not. We just FedEx’ed the papers down to her. But she has to find a notary and, quite frankly, it seems clear she is just as lazy as her mother. My big sister got pregnant at seventeen just to avoid homework, then made a career out of marrying for money.” She exaggerated the “marrying” with air quotes.

Liam knew better than to swallow Ellen’s character judgments, but he felt a surge of panic at the thought of one selfish stranger’s signature standing between Fite and disaster. “Wendi set the line meeting at one.” He kept his tone neutral.

She jerked the cap off a tube and twisted the bottom until a stump of her signature crimson lipstick appeared. “Meetings should never be so close to lunch. You thought you were nice rehiring that loser, but it just hurts the rest of us.”

“You’re going out?”

“Hitting the stores, but maybe I’ll make it back in time.”

If she did, she’d just confuse everyone and push out the deadlines—revising and deleting and chasing new ideas—then contradicting herself next week. Most of the team could withstand her withering contempt for their choice of footwear, but her unstable, inconsistent management was torture. “All right, maybe we’ll see you.”

Ellen disappeared behind the swing-arm mirror clamped to her desk and lifted the lipstick to her grimacing mouth. Familiar with her method of dismissal, Liam left her and went to find Wendi.

He found her with the men’s sample patternmakers holding up a bolt of thin, black stretchy fabric that, to his alarm, she was instructing be cut into shorts. “Liam! Check out this sick sample yardage. It’s got 3D stretch or something, totally new.”

He nodded hello at the patternmakers, who drew back in fear and got busy at the opposite ends of the table, and took Wendi’s arm in one hand and the fabric in the other, guiding her out of earshot. Ignoring her disappointment, Liam shoved the roll back onto a storage rack.

“Too shiny,” he said. “Our Fite guy can't look like he's running down the street in Victoria’s Secret.” If Darrin, her new boss, saw what she was doing, Liam would never be able to convince him to keep her.

He strode past the cutting tables, nodding but not speaking to the staff. “Move the Spring meeting to eleven,” he called over his shoulder, knowing she had followed. “I want everyone there with whatever they've got so far. We’ll be quick so it doesn’t spill into lunch.”

At five-foot-barely, Wendi was having to jog to keep up with his six-three stride. “But you said one.”

“Now I'm saying eleven. Just whatever they've got. I realize it's a surprise.”

Wendi's brown eyes widened under her Tina Fey glasses, her mouth dropping open. He watched her struggle to hold back her whining that the designers and their assistants were certainly not ready, had planned on cramming through the lunch hour, and would tear her apart when she delivered the summons. “That's in fifteen minutes,” she choked out. “And Ellen just went out for lunch, and she’s usually gone for hours.”

Liam raised an eyebrow and looked at her.

“Oh. Right.” Finally understanding him, she broke into a full run in her kitten heels and tore off past the patternmaker's tables on the far side of the floor. She threw open the door and clattered down the stairwell.

Design assistants couldn't afford to wait for the elevator. An irony, given the ridiculous shoes they liked to wear. Even at a fitnesswear company, the young fashion graduates teetered around in sexy stilettos or whatever they thought was sophisticated and hot, no matter how impractical for a person who was going to be doing thinly disguised manual labor for ten hours a day.

If Ed hadn't liked looking at the young pretty legs so much, he would have let Liam outlaw the heels. Everyone should wear athletic shoes or something they could move around in. They were a fitness company, for God's sake, not a New York cut-and-sew house. They stood for something.

But he wasn't quite in charge, was he? Not then, and not now. No, he was just responsible for the final result. Everyone came to him and he told them what to do, but ultimately it had been Ed behind every policy, every rule, every hire in the building.

And now it would never change. Ed had died and left the company to his spoiled descendants who would finally sell out Fite, take the cash, and leave Liam at the whims of whatever transnational holding company swallowed them up.

Just because Ed had wanted to leave it to a blood relation. As if Liam hadn’t loved him more than his family ever had.

“Liam!”

He turned to see Wayne Woo, the men's new production patternmaker, waving at him from behind a rolling rack. Liam kept walking. “Can't stop. Late for a meeting.” Which almost cheered him up, knowing how desperate the designers would be for him to be very, very late. It was cruel of him to move up a big meeting like that, but he was pissed off. At Ed, at the company, at himself.

But Wayne didn't give up so easily, chasing him down near the row of humming sewing machines outside the stairwell. “I've been working on this all night.” Wayne shoved something on a hanger at him. “I resolved the chafing problem in the Fite the Man shorts. And the seams are flat along the hem, though we can't press these goods too hard or they'll shine—”

“Wayne.” Liam gave him his coldest glare. “Not now.”

The young man in the bicep-baring tank top didn't seem to hear him. He continued to hold the shorts out to him. “And if we change the reflective embroidered logo to a screen print, we can afford an iPod pocket—”

“Wayne!” Sally, a senior patternmaker in a Tinkerbell sweatshirt, ran over to rescue Liam. Or Wayne, really, since Liam was glaring at the well-built young guy, silently questioning Ed's hiring judgment again. Ed had loved the good-looking talkers, male or female and regardless of their talent. Though at least this guy looked like he knew the difference between a squat and a deadlift.

“Sorry, Liam. He won't bother you again.” Sally pulled the guy away and whispered furiously into his ear.

Liam nodded and kept going, satisfied but wondering when he'd become the type of boss who couldn't bear to have the little people talk to him directly.

Wayne continued complaining to Sally. “But Darrin won't listen to anything I have to say either. He told me thinking is above my pay grade. Well, duh de dum, how fucking boring is that?”

She shushed him. “Not now!”

Liam turned around and saw Wayne shaking his head with the deflating enthusiasm of a new employee who’d just begun to realize Fite wasn’t as cool as its ads. “Wayne, hold on. Come back.”

The young guy lit up and hurried over. “Yeah?”

“Show me.” Liam held out his hand, and Wayne thrust the shorts at him. With a practiced touch, Liam unclipped the hanger and ran his fingers along the inside seams, judged the fit of the waistband and studied the small inside pocket. “Darrin wouldn't look at it?”

“Just told me to save a couple bucks on the make so it could retail under thirty,” he said. “But going cheap on the stitching makes it chafe, and taking out both pockets doesn't give you any place to stick your keys or music when you go out for a run.”

“And what'd he say to that?”

“He said our customer isn't going out for a run. That he just wears the shorts to lie on the couch stuffing his face, and doesn't need a pocket for his remote control.”

Biting back fury, Liam looked away and ran his hand through his hair to stay calm. “He said that?” That snotty weasel.

“When I argued with him, he threatened to go to you.” Wayne smiled, exaggerating the silver stud through his lower lip. “But I figured I'd save him the trouble.”

“You weren't afraid of him?”

“I know his type. All bitch and no bite.”

Liam snorted and put his hand on the guy's shoulder. He had to be a foot shorter than Liam but didn't cower like some of the employees did, and he liked that. “He's bitch and bite, I'm afraid. But thanks for telling me. Next time you see him, tell him I made you show me what you were working on and insisted you do it your way.”

Wayne beamed. “Excellent.”

“All right.” Liam made a run for it before the guy thought they were friends now or something. He couldn't afford to be anybody's friend at Fite.

He went downstairs to the second floor conference room and stopped outside the door to give them every possible minute. He could hear the frantic, sniping conversation, chairs rolling around the table, the clatter of design boards and samples being hung on the metal-gridded walls. In spite of his foul mood, he drank in the familiar thrill from the creative process and reminded himself to try to go easy on them. Losing Mr. Roche had been a shock for everybody. And at some point, each one of them had gone into this business with enthusiasm, optimism, even love. And though reality had crushed most of the youthful fantasies within the first six weeks on the job, every once in a while he saw a hint of glee in somebody’s face that she hadn’t listened to her parents.

He walked in. “Hello, everyone.”

All movement stopped for a split second while they glanced his way to measure his mood. None look reassured.

The product development conference room was like a going-out-of-business sale at a department store. Racks of clothes clogged the doorway. Boxes of sample buttons and other trim sprawled over a long, white table that filled the middle of the room. Old design boards hung by pant hangers on the floor-to-ceiling metal grids covering each wall. More metal rolling racks on wheels blocked the windows.

Darrin Kipper, the men's designer, sat at the opposite end of the table wearing an orange—salmon, Darrin would say—Armani suit, trying hide his indignation with presenting his line two hours earlier than he'd expected.
Mr. Roche never would have moved up a meeting
, his eyes said.

Liam looked around the room at the insecure, resentful faces. “There’s no reason to be revising everything at the last minute,” he said quietly. “For years we’ve worked right up until the deadline as though finishing early implied you didn't know what you were doing. Well, not any more. If you aren't able to show me our line a little earlier than you expected, there's something wrong with your ideas. You should have been done yesterday. The day before yesterday. Last week. Nothing has changed, only the bad habits in this building that have everyone running around with their heads cut off for the maximum amount of time possible. As though that were a virtue.”

With that, he sat down, the creak of the office chair the only sound in the room. “All right,” he said finally, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Show me what you've got.”

The ten men and women around the table broke out of their paralysis. The designers mouthed furiously to their assistants to finish putting up the boards, and the assistants—all female—jumped up with their scissors and glue sticks and swatches and tear sheets and tried to look fashionably invincible while everyone stared at their thin, athletic backsides in action.

Darrin, angling for Liam's job like he always did, pretended not to care; he licked a skinny finger and flipped through the pages in
Men’s Fitness
.

Jennifer, the designer for women’s, stood up and straightened one of the boards. She spent most of her days defending herself from Ellen’s critical oversight, and the strain had begun to make her look closer to forty than the thirty she probably was.

“Green!” She said suddenly, slapping her hand on the board dangling behind her. Everyone jumped. “American native plants, mostly from California. The color story is gold and lupine blue, with lots of small embroideries throughout evoking wildflowers and the natural earth—”

Jennifer continued to rattle on about environmental populism while Liam scanned her presentation board for the new sketches he'd asked for. Satisfied, he tuned out the rest of her speech.

He felt old. It wasn't his body. He was fitter, stronger, faster than he'd ever been—well, maybe not ever, but he was in damn good shape for thirty-three, and didn’t stay up late partying anymore. He was disciplined, but his runs and his lifts were accomplishments of sheer will; he had to drag himself out of bed in the morning and push himself outside in the evenings, as though it just wasn't fun anymore.

“Liam?” Jennifer sounded terrified, and he realized he was scowling again.

He looked down at his hands to rewind the small part of his brain that had been listening to her. “Green is getting old. But it doesn't matter. I've never believed these themes do anything for our bottom line. I know Ed loved the marketing sociology but I don't. From now on, cut the bullshit. Show me the bodies you're cutting and the fabric you're buying and tell me why some woman at Macy's is going to pull Fite off the rack and hand over her plastic.”

Jennifer sat down and propped her hands on the table in front of her, biting her lip. “Because they want something fresh, because they love the idea—”