Harper's Rules (16 page)

I remembered when Donald said it was time, about four months into our relationship, to become exclusive. I asked why, and he said, “You're perfect to me, Casey. I can't find anything about you I don't like.” And the moment was horrible, because I lost respect for his judgment. Give me one negative; maybe then I'll believe you really love me.

The last FAQ could have been written about me and helped me see why Harper could not prevent, and did not cause, Wallace Avery's concern about me.

Q:
I was told by someone on the inside at the company that I didn't get the job because of a bad reference, but my recruiter swears he submitted the rave references that I supplied him. What gives?

A:
Your question has been the bane of my existence. The Fair Credit Reporting Act applies to third-party firms like me and your recruiter. The companies themselves are free to “network” and check with people they know who know you. Because you want the job and your recruiter makes money if you get the job, companies tend to believe the “networked reference” more than they do you or your recruiter. It is a flaw in the law, but it is also human nature.

So that's it. Wallace went beyond Harper, asked around about me, and found something. Now Harper is trying to backtrack for me.

I am a divorced woman who was publicly humiliated, and I still don't consider Donald an enemy. I think Donald is a really good guy who acted like a total idiot for too long. He openly cheated on me and ignored sacred vows, but I still think of him as the most decent and trustworthy guy I ever knew.

Just before I logged out, I saw that Facebook had listed Abby Taylor as a “friend suggestion.” I always adored Abby, but she was one of the spoils of divorce; Donald got Abby. On a whim, I sent Abby an invite anyway. Starbucks distracted me for a second, and by the time I looked back on the screen Abby had already accepted me. I went to her page, looked at her photo, and saw her most recent status update: “Shopping for my friend Sasha's baby shower. Don't tell Joe, but it makes me want another baby. Someone slap me silly.”

Donald wanted kids from day one and I held him off. Of course they were going to get pregnant. At some level I knew this would happen.

So why am I upset? I grabbed my cell phone and scrolled to Donald's number. It irritated me to no end that he was still “scrollable.” I didn't know how to defriend someone on Facebook. Maybe there
was
no bad reference; maybe Wallace was just appalled that a young woman with a relatively high disposable income had no children. Maybe he just didn't want someone so self-absorbed on his sales team.

My cell phone vibrated. Harper. Thank God.

“Harper, I'm going to be thirty-five in three weeks. A lot of people die at seventy. I could be halfway through my life, I am middle-aged, and what have I got? I'll tell you what . . . Nothing!”

“I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that I caught you at a bad time. Casey, I got the name. Doria Colangelo.”

My depression was instantly swept away in a cleansing rush of anger.

“Doria Colangelo. My God.”

“According to the story she has told people that know Wallace, when you worked together at ParaSource, you knowingly sold an untested home health-care solution to a hospital alliance. She claims your error forced ParaSource to do a second rollout for free in order to avoid a lawsuit. She said you buried key data to close the deal. She's made it seem pretty ugly.”

“That's what she said, huh?”

“Look, I know it's not true. I know there's the official and the unofficial version. Tell me what happened, I pass your version on to Wallace, he gives you the benefit of the doubt, and we get past this. Wallace likes you. So tell me.”

Doria cut corners. She would show up late for software training sessions and as a result would routinely tell customers our product could do something it couldn't, forcing
someone to do damage control. And she was a user; someone was always cutting and pasting a PowerPoint for her because she got home so late the night before that she had “ran out of runway.” Somehow this was overlooked by management, and it infuriated the sales staff, especially the women who were older and not as willing to wear skirts way above the knee or shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel.

The
coup de grâce
came after Doria finished her second full quarter dead last among our sales team and was inexplicably added to the coveted health-care vertical. I was promoted to health care because I had been 140 percent of my goal for the year. I was thrilled because health care is where the money is in the twenty-first century. Every software company in its right mind was peddling software solutions to hospitals, clinics, and universities. And our technologists came up with an awesome one—a “have to have.” In software sales, you want to be a “have to have”, not a “nice to have.”

“Nice to have” software is the home abdominal machine you ordered at 2
A.M.
after inhaling a box of Oreos.

A “have to have” means your business couldn't run without it, or it saves you so much money you must buy it. Windows, Word, Quicken, Excel . . . the giants of the “have to haves.” Every salesperson wants to sell the “have to haves,” and we are no different in our dating lives. When I think of my marriage, Donald was my “nice to have,” and I was his “have to have.” Until I was not.

Our tech guys came up with a killer “have to have” app for our home health-care vertical. We all knew this product would rock. And then, one of our developers came up with the icing on the cake for the app: voice recognition. With this, we would completely bury the competition. We would be bulletproof.

Our tech team made it very clear that the product was ready for rollout and implementation, but that it would take six months to a year to have voice recognition fully functional.

Doria's casual relationship with the truth either didn't allow her to hear this part, or she chose to ignore it. A couple of months later, she called me and asked if I wanted to split a deal. She had a hospital alliance in Brattleboro very close to committing to a three-year, three-million-dollar deal on the new application, but she had to get past a final presentation to the chief technologists and the CFO. This was known to be my specialty. Doria said she would give me one third of the commission dollars if I went on the final meeting with her. This is found money, and as much as I was reluctant to partner up with someone known to be sloppy, mercurial, and untested, it made no financial sense not to do it.

I could tell the CFO loved Doria and wanted to make this happen. It could potentially save them a ton of money, so why not? Win-win, right?

And then the CFO made a request.

“And Doria, we decided we want the voice recognition built in, so you can implement that as well, right?”

I looked at Doria, but she kept her eyes focused on the CFO and, like all good liars, was not at all thrown.

“No worries. I'll take care of it.”

Anticipating my ire, on the way home she told me she would call back and explain the voice recognition would be implemented as soon as it was available, but that it would not come with the package.

“You better spell that out, sister, and document it so they don't call you on it later.”

And that was the end of it. It wasn't my deal.

Then my boss called me while I was on the road in D.C. saying he wanted to talk to me when I got back later in the week about the Brattleboro deal. He wouldn't elaborate. An hour later I got a call from Doria saying she needed to talk and would I have lunch with her? I said I was in D.C. and she said she knew I was, that I was at the Fairmont and she was in the lobby.

At lunch, Doria told me she was a mess and needed someone to talk to. Her brother, Austin, her mentor and hero, the person she loved the most in the world, was very sick. He had already had kidney cancer when he was a teenager, but they removed the kidney before it had spread. Now, a decade later, it was back. If he didn't receive a transplanted kidney quickly, he would be gone. She told me all this in fragments because she kept having to stop to cry and gather herself.

The doctors recommended everyone in the family be evaluated as possible donors. She said “of course,” made the appointment, and pulled a no-show. She loved her brother more than anyone she had ever known. And yet she didn't want to give him her kidney. She didn't want to get cut into, she didn't want to be sick, she didn't want to live in fear of losing her one remaining kidney.

This was such an extraordinary display of vulnerability and honesty I was blown away. To have the courage to admit something so monstrously selfish showed a depth to Doria I didn't know existed. We held hands. We cried. We were a mess, make-up ruined, and when she asked if she could come to my room to freshen up, I didn't think anything of it. When we got to the room, she noticed my laptop and asked if she could log in to work and check on some things. I told her I was already connected and just to close me out and help herself. When I came out of the bedroom ready to go to my client, she closed the laptop quickly. Her mood had improved tremendously. Suddenly she was in a hurry.

Later that week I came in to meet my boss, T. J., a former top producer who had crossed over to management. I stopped at my desk, and there was a gift-wrapped bottle
of Dom Perignon and a card from Doria. She wanted me to know the doctors had found a donor for Austin.

As soon as I sat down opposite T. J., he told me he wanted me to know he was disappointed in me, that I wasn't as clever as I thought.

I assured him I had no idea in hell what he was talking about.

“Casey, our profit on the Brattleboro rollout would be around 300K after taxes. But because you promised them a voice-recognition component we cannot currently provide, they want to cancel the implementation, and if we claim breach of contract, they will sue for—guess what?—about 300K.”

“I never promised them any such thing. I was not the account manager who wrote up that deal and you know it. I made a cameo appearance to close the thing for a rookie.”

He removed a document from a folder and placed it in front of me. It was a printout of an email from me to Doria. I looked at the time and date. I had to smile. Doria had sent it from my account in my hotel room at the Fairmont, written by her on my laptop. She wrote on my behalf that we had to find a way to get Geoff to okay the voice-recognition beta for Brattleboro, or find some way to buy time on the implementation, or the whole thing “was going to blow up in our faces.”

I felt pure hate, a liquid current coursing through me. I calmly handed the document to my boss and told him I never wrote it.

“Who did?” he asked. I lifted my head and stared directly into his eyes.

“Did Doria have access to your email?”

I nodded.

“Can you prove it?”

“No, and I won't try. You know me, you know her. Make the call.”

“What did you to do to her that would make her go this far?”

“Nothing. That's the beauty of it. In a way, I think she likes me a lot.”

He exhaled deeply and sat back in his chair.

“I don't know why I gave up selling for management. You people exhaust me.”

I got an email the next day saying management was “satisfied the misunderstanding was not of my making, and no permanent record would be in my file, nor action taken.” Doria was gone within a month. I never thought I'd hear her name again.

“So,” Harper said, “you've taken your Samuel Beckett pause to gather yourself. Now give me your side of the story so I can fight this with Wallace.”

“You can tell Wallace it's not true. But that's all you can tell him.”

“Casey, that won't be good enough.”

“Where does it end, Harper? You can call it reference checking, and granted,
employers need to know whom they are hiring. But I don't care what the law says, the system is flawed; it doesn't get at the truth. The truth is somewhere in the middle; that's where it lives. If that costs me the job, so be it. Bye, Harper.”

It wasn't until after I hung up and started unloading my dishwasher that I realized I had plagiarized from Donald and what he said to me the day we passed the point of no return.

“Do you want to be with her?” I had asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you don't love me.”

“I do. The truth is in the middle; that's where it lives.”

I dried my hands and reached for my phone. I knew he would recognize my number.

“Casey?”

“So I'm thinking Casey works as a girl's name or a boy's name, just in case you get a girl but want a boy and decide to use her name as a way to scar her for life.”

“I was going to tell you,” Donald said.

“No, you weren't.”

“No, I wasn't. But I'm glad you know now.”

“I'm really happy for you, Donny. You'll be a spectacular dad.”

“God,” he sighed, “I hope so.”

“Remember the macaroni and cheese?” I said.

He had set the table with our best linens and our formal dishes; wine awaited me at the door. A sex setup normally, but Donald's plan was to formally ask me to begin trying to have a baby. He said it was time, that in order for love to be sustained, it had to be immersed in growth. It didn't work; I talked him off the ledge. Resigned, he brought out the macaroni and cheese.

“It was lame,” I said. “I want you to know, if you had made better macaroni and cheese that night, we might have a five-year-old now. Live with that, Donald.”

Donald cracked up. I knew that no one, not Sasha or, God forbid, anyone that comes after her, could make him laugh like I could.

“So, now that it doesn't matter, why didn't you want to have a family with me? Did you know we weren't going to make it even then?” he said.

A fair question, and since I called him, I guess I owed it to him to tell the truth, even though it remains in the middle.