I watched the flames consume the paper, turning it into black flakes of nothing.
“Last thing,” Nolan said. “You gotta pay this forward like Ash did. Time’s gonna come when Walker, Jensen or I ask for redirection.”
I noticed he didn’t say “if,” but “when.” I raised my glass in agreement.
The conversation tapered off from the serious topics to other things. Football and hockey, mostly. The music had gotten louder. More people had shown up at the bar. I looked around and wondered what had drawn my brother to this place. Normally he preferred sports bars.
You sure? In the two years since you took the CFO position, how many times have you gone out and hit the bars with Walker?
Not once.
Walker and Nolan were debating the outcome of Sunday’s Vikings game. I looked at Ash. He had his phone out and was typing furiously, his brow furrowed.
Ash had taken over as COO of Lund Industries two years before I’d been offered the CFO position. Although my bachelor’s degrees in accounting and economics, plus my dual master’s degrees in finance and business administration, played a huge part in getting the CFO position, I also knew that Ash had gone to bat for me. Especially when the two dissenters on the board of directors had gotten pissy, claiming I was too young for such responsibility—despite the fact I’d been working in the family business since age eighteen.
Ash glanced up at me, flashed a sheepish grin and set his phone down. “Not providing you with a very good example of how to leave work at the office, am I?”
“Was that work related?”
“Actually . . . no. Dallas is bitching via text because the players have private rooms and the cheerleaders have to share.”
“I forgot to look at the schedule this week. Who is U of M playing?”
“Hawkeyes.” He shook his head. “Sometimes my little sister forgets that she’s lucky the cheerleaders get to travel with the team during the regular season, and not just cheer at home like most collegiate cheerleaders.” Ash took a drink of his beer. “But you don’t care about Dallas’s cheer dramas. What’s up? You’re looking at me like you’ve got a specific question.”
I’d planned to ask about a wrinkle we were having with the rising costs of raw material for the packaged-food division, but I found myself blurting out, “How’d you learn to do it?”
“What? Feel like I’m giving my all to the company and still manage to have a life?”
I nodded.
He studied me for a moment. “It’s a weird story. Remember Max Miner?”
“The snowboarder? X Games world champ, Olympic medalist? Ended up paralyzed?”
“Yeah. Him. Right around the time you moved up to CFO, and I broke it off with Veronica, I went to hear him speak. The program started out listing all of Max’s accomplishments, video clips of him from the time he was a young kid. His obsession with snowboarding. His wins. Then it talked about his accident. The challenges he faced during his recovery. I was waiting for the ‘You can do anything even in a wheelchair’ motivational portion to start, but it turned out that wasn’t the focus.” Ash fiddled with the bar napkin beneath his beer mug. “When he rolled out in his wheelchair, he said, ‘Name two things in your life’—besides your job and your family, which counted as one thing—‘that are important to you.’ Then his assistant started walking through the audience, randomly picking people to stand up and share what gave them joy. What motivated, inspired and fulfilled them.”
“No pressure.”
“No kidding. So I sat there, panicked I’d be put on the spot, because I realized I had nothing.”
I would’ve had that same panicked feeling—because I had nothing but those two things in my life either.
“It hit home for me, especially when Max said if we couldn’t name two things, then we were emotionally crippled.” Ash looked at me. “I realized he was right. While I still define myself by what I do as COO, I also have found other things that matter to me.”
“Such as?”
Ash shook his head. “Tell you what. When you come up with your two things, I’ll tell you mine.”
“Fair enough.”
Nolan leaned over. “Finish your beers. We’re heading out.”
I pushed away from the table. “I gotta hit the can first.” I wound my way to the front and noticed a crowd had gathered around the bar. Chants of “Do it, do it!” erupted into applause and whistles when two women jumped up on the bar. The brunette was familiar because she was our waitress. So it didn’t make sense why the blond woman seemed familiar too. She spun around in a sexy move that would’ve done any stripper proud.