Baby For The Bear

All right, then, Samantha decided. She would go into this with her eyes open. She would play chicken with the bear.

With practiced calm, she asked, “What would you like to ask?”

Ken took a breath, a measured beat. Then, in a tone just as measured, he put the question to her. “Ms. Vance…are you mad at me?”

And there it was, just as she suspected. The very question she was anticipating—and dreading. The very steel trap set before her, waiting for her to put down her foot. The next few minutes would decide it all.

But still, she was careful. “I beg your pardon?”

“Are you mad at me?” he repeated. “We both know why I’m asking that. I know where you worked in your last job, and I think you’re aware that I know. And we both know what happened, why you’re not there anymore. You know where you are right now, and you know who I am. And what I did. I admit, it was my decision to automate Metro Foods. And the order to downsize—that came from me. You and I wouldn’t be speaking right now if not for that. So what I’d like to ask, Ms. Vance, and what you’re free to answer honestly if you want, is…,” and he took just the slightest beat for emphasis, “are you mad at me?”

Samantha did not answer him at first. She did not even look at him at first. She looked away instead, out into the luxuriously furnished office from which he had made the decisions that had thrown her life into such uncertainty, such fear and anxiety. She must right now be sitting in the very place where those decisions were made. What had put her in such jeopardy must have happened right across the very desk in front of her. This was Fate’s sense of humor.

She looked back at him and said, “Mr. Brecker, I don’t think anyone is ever happy to lose a job unless they hated the job. And I didn’t hate working for Metro Foods. I didn’t hate where I was. I didn’t hate the work or the people. I looked forward to being there for a long time and I looked forward to moving ahead, having more responsibility, being promoted. I’m sorry that will never get to happen. I wanted that and I’m sorry I’ll have to look for it somewhere else.

“You did what you did because you thought it would save the company money, because a machine is just something you buy one time, and you put it there and install it and you maybe have to call maintenance for it once in a while. But you don’t have to pay it a salary every week and you don’t have to give it health and dental and breaks and vacation time. And you get to give your shareholders a bigger dividend, and that’s really what people like you care about the most anyway, isn’t it?” She could feel the cold perspiration on her back turning to a heat all over her body. “Only the shareholders count. The people who work for you are just tools, and you don’t have to care what a tool needs or if it can feed itself or take care of its family or go to the doctor. And if a tool isn’t convenient for you, you can just throw it away. And it’s not personal. It’s never personal. Your relationship with a tool, it’s never personal and it doesn’t matter. So am I mad at you? Mr. Brecker, a tool isn’t mad when the one using it decides he doesn’t need it anymore and throws it away. A tool doesn’t care, just like the user doesn’t care.”

She realized she had started to lean forward at him and raise her voice, and she stopped herself. With a hard, huffing exhale, Samantha sat back in her seat again. She stared across the table at him, waiting for whatever he’d say next and not actually caring what he said now. He had asked the question and she had given him the honesty that he asked for. And she was certain now that she had blown the whole thing.

Fine. Let the damned bear man find some other woman to sire his precious cub. Samantha Vance had given him back some of his own and she was not sorry. She would go back to the apartment that she did not know how she would pay for, she would take her unemployment money, and she would forget this good-for-nothing bear and do her job hunting somewhere else in the forest.

Ken took in everything that she had just said, and he multiplied those feelings by so many other employees at Metro Foods and so many other places that he had bought and automated, or broken up and sold off, turning out the people who worked there. And he knew that Samantha had probably just spoken right to his face for every single one of them. It was something that a person in his position hardly ever had to face. Someone like Ken was too big, too important, too wealthy to care about someone like Samantha Vance. And he felt the sting of her words as a bear would feel the sting of bees into whose hive he had poked his hungry snout.

A silence descended upon the room like the silence in the forest when a feared predator is passing through and all the other animals scurry up a tree, into the bushes, under a log, anywhere that they get away and hide until the dread creature is gone. When Ken spoke at last, Samantha was surprised at what he said.

“I understand,” he told her.

He watched Samantha, who sat otherwise motionless, arch her brows and blink her eyes at that—a restrained reaction, to be sure.

“You must be wondering how it is I can possibly say that,” Ken said. “How could someone like me, in my position, possibly understand someone like you in yours, right? And you’re right about that much. I admit I don’t have any frame of reference for what’s happened to you, what you’re going through. And I admit I never will. It’s a whole world that I’ll never know. That’s not what I mean when I say I understand.

“I know you’ve heard the expression, ‘We’re in business to make money.’ And that’s true. For someone like me, the profit motive is the only motive. Everything else comes second if it comes at all. That’s another thing I admit. It’s how I was raised. It’s what I was always taught. We Breckers are a business family. That’s how business thinks. And when you’re in a position like ours, you don’t see the effects your decisions have on other people. You hear about them, but you get to brush them off. Or it just can’t get through your fur, you might say. So how the things you do affect other people, it’s all…I guess abstract is the word. It’s never anything solid; it’s all abstract. But having you come here, and be brave enough—and angry enough—to say these things right to my face… This has put a face on something, and it’s given a voice to something, that I never had a face or a voice for. Because of you, this isn’t an abstract thing for me now. It’s a real thing. That’s why I say I understand. That’s probably not enough for you, Ms. Vance. But I do.”