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Continue from Episode 22
Seth hesitated. “Not that it’s any of your business -”
Lauren gasped, and maybe that’s what prompted him to continue instead of ending his thought then and there.
“I’ve been talking to some different NGOs, Non-Governmental Organizations, working in Africa and South America. They’re interested in testing my hypotheses in the field.”
“I could do it better,” Granddaddy boasted. “Faster. More efficiently.”
“I have no doubt about that.”
“Then why the hell are you being so ornery over it?”
“Because my doubts, sir, aren’t about what you’d do first. They’re about what you’d do next.”
Granddaddy flung the drink he’d been holding at the wall behind Seth’s head. Seth ducked to keep from getting a heavy glass tumbler to the face.
“Don’t you think you owe me any Goddamn loyalty, boy? Who else would have given some whelp of a pup without a day’s worth of experience a job the way I did, no questions asked?”
“And I appreciate your generosity,” Seth said, cautiously raising his chin from where he’d been forced to smack it against the table. “Then and now.”
“The hell you do.”
“I also believe that I’ve repaid my debt to you, turning in an honest day’s work every time I reported to one of your construction sites. That, sir, is the extent of what I owed you. Then,” he repeated. “And now.”
“And all the time you spent under my roof? Eating my food? Enjoying my hospitality?”
“That was because of me, Granddaddy,” Lauren interrupted desperately, having previously felt too shell-shocked to say much at all.
“I’m sorry, Laurie,” Seth said softly.
“You going to apologize to me too, boy?”
Seth considered the question, then shook his head. “No, sir.”
He stood up and walked out the dining room door.
A part of Lauren wanted to chase after him. But another part knew it was required of her to keep on sitting exactly as she was.
Granddaddy’s breath came in short, raspy barks as if he’d just gone 10 rounds in the ring – and the referee had yet to declare a winner.
“Lauren?”
“Yes, Granddaddy?” she asked in a small voice, her head turned towards him, her eyes darting helplessly toward the door.
“I don’t want to set eyes on that son of a bitch ever again in my life. Am I making my meaning clear?”
Lauren swallowed hard. “Yes, Granddaddy.”
“I didn’t know he was going to ask you that,” Lauren began when she finally got up the guts to visit Seth in his apartment after Winter Break was over.
“I did,” he appeared a lot less shook up than she was.
“How?”
“My thesis advisor gave me the head’s up that Jeremiah Briggs was asking questions about my research. The department got excited, thought there might be a donation in it for them.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’ll be happening.”
“You mean he didn’t have a change of heart after I left? Christmas miracle and all?”
“Well, he did make a phone call.”
“Yeah. My foreman. Message telling me I was fired was on my machine before I even got home. Guy was real sorry about doing it on Christmas Eve, but when Mr. Briggs has a personnel change…”
“Sorry,” she winced.
“Not your fault. All mine.”
“Couldn’t you maybe reconsider…”
“Did he send you to try and change my mind?”
“No! No, not at all.”
“Good. I’d hate to think of him using you that way.”
“Using me? He wouldn’t. That’s… no!”
“Especially since he could just as easily steal my work as pay me for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Telling me he’d looked into my work? That was your granddaddy’s way of pointing out how magnanimous he was being, offering to fund and merely take a cut of my research, instead of just hiring someone else to build prototypes based on my proposals and keeping all the profits for himself. Guess I warranted the special treatment, being a friend of yours.”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
“Laurie, I’ve worked for your granddaddy for five years now. Giving credit where credit is due, he treats his employees well. Very well. He pays above minimum wage, covers benefits, follows all the safety regulations and then some.”
“Granddaddy says if you want the best workers, you’ve got to offer the best terms.”
“Not just to us, but to men working at other sites, too.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Except I suspect your granddaddy is more interested in his bottom line than theirs.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means the men he offers such generous terms to have a tendency to be working at a competing site. When they leave, that developer ends up losing both time and money. It’s basically industrial sabotage under the guise of goodwill.”
“It’s also their problem,” Lauren shrugged blithely. “That’s how an at-will economy works. They can get fired at any time, sure, but they can also leave anytime for a better offer. It’s their choice, and why shouldn’t they choose the job that pays more? Granddaddy isn’t doing anything wrong there.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t the point he was trying to make, anyway. Especially since he didn’t feel like being the one to tell Lauren that when Mr. Briggs brought on the new crew he’d poached, he often fired the old one.
“But, the rest of his practices leave a lot to be desired, and that’s putting it mildly. When it comes to getting contracts, the man greases palms like it was just another cost of doing business. He digs up inside information to make sure he presents the best bids and, last year, when a City Councilman was the sole vote holding out on changing zoning laws in an area your granddaddy wanted to develop, he set the guy up with a hooker, then sent pictures to the papers to make sure he was voted out. To be fair, the only reason that Councilman was voting against him was because he was being paid off by a competitor.”
“Harrison,” Lauren guessed. “Every time Granddaddy tries to expand across the state line into California, they do their best to keep him out.”
“I realize both sides were equally dirty. But, my point is, there is absolutely nothing to stop your granddaddy from taking the information he obtained from my thesis and hiring a team of experts to reverse engineer my prototypes and create knock-offs he can then patent and sell before I even finish my initial field tests.”
“Why would you assume that?”
Seth looked at her with a combination of exasperation and pity. “It’s what he does, Laurie. It’s how he made his fortune in the first place. Your granddaddy isn’t the only one who can do research, you know. His obsession with the Harrison family, his disproportionate anger with me when he accused me of betraying him and asking if I didn’t think I owed him something after all he’d done for me. You never considered that maybe some of that has to do with your granddaddy’s guilt over how he turned on his own benefactor, what, 30 years ago now?”
“Granddaddy says people don’t know the whole story about what happened there. That it looks like he tried to screw over Calista and Harry’s father, but, in truth -”
“You’re right. I don’t know exactly what happened there. But I do know what’s happening now. If he gets a mind to, your granddaddy could destroy my career before it ever begins.”
Continue to Episode 24
About the Author
Alina Adams wrote the “As the World Turns” tie-ins, “Oakdale Confidential” and “The Man From Oakdale,” and co-wrote “Guiding Light’s” “Jonathan’s Story.” She was the Creative Content Producer for “Another World Today,” and worked on the 2013 relaunches of “All My Children” and “One Life To Live.” Her books include romance novels, figure skating murder mysteries, and the historical family saga, “The Nesting Dolls,” from HarperCollins. Read more at: AlinaAdams.com
