PART 2 — THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER
My mother’s business is Oyen Aske Millwork.
Two names. I grew up with that on a sign and on invoices and on the side of a truck and I never once thought about it, the way you do not think about your own address.
Corbin Aske started that shop with her in 1986. Two men’s worth of tools in a rented unit in Draymoor.
The story I was raised on is that Corbin and my mother fell out badly in 1998, that he took what he was owed and went, and that nobody heard from him again.
She kept the name on the sign. Everybody always said that was very decent of her.
The thirtieth anniversary dinner was in 2016. Forty people in a function room at the Pell County golf club. Staff, suppliers, my mother’s accountant, two of her oldest customers.
Gethin had been a foreman there since 2004. He had been at that company for twelve years at that point and had brought in the contract that carried it through 2009.
He stood up after the meal with a card in his hand. Four lines, he told me afterward, that he had written in the car.
My mother came round the table.
She took that card out of his hand — he did not let go straight away and it came free after a second — and she folded it once and put it under her own bread plate.
And she said, to forty people:
“Give me that. You don’t speak for this company, Gethin. You never have, and you know exactly why. Now sit down.”
The room went silent.
Forty people. Her accountant four feet away. Two men who had worked in that shop for twenty years.
Nobody said one word.
And my husband said, “All right, Rowena,” and sat down, and ate his dessert, and drove us home.
I asked him in the car. He said, “She’s had a long day.”
I was forty-three years old and I let that answer stand, and it is the single thing in this entire account that I would go back and change, because I had been given the same sentence twice by then.
You know exactly what you did.
You know exactly why.
Two sentences, eleven years apart, and both times my husband agreed with her.
