I yawned before answering. “Better. With the new guy I hired, I’ve got a whole lot less on my plate. All the travel was starting to get to me. Now I’m able to divide that part up with him, so I’m enjoying the job again.”
“You’re talking about the guy you stole from that other company, right?”
I laughed. “I didn’t steal him; I made him an attractive offer and he took it. That’s business.”
While I downplayed the scenario, there was a bit of truth to what Terrell had accused me of. Kai, my newest hire, was highly sought after by a number of other organizations who realized the same thing I did; in his previous position, he was underutilized and undervalued. Soon after meeting him, following the lead of an associate, I knew he’d be a perfect fit. There were just two small problems: several other execs had their sights set on him, too; and the second issue was that Kai wasn’t looking to make a career change at the time. He had so many untapped assets, though, so I didn’t take no for an answer. He was professional, had a firm grasp of the construction business at the executive level, and he was multilingual… and all he’d been tasked with in his previous position was to manage a moderately sized team of business analysts. That was it.
Being born in Japan to a Japanese father and a mother of both Japanese and Thai descent, he spoke both languages as fluently as he spoke English. Not to mention, he had a firm grasp on the culture, which was equally important. He had the potential to be the perfect business liaison between our company and our clients in Japan.
After cutting to the chase with him one afternoon over lunch, I discovered the one thing his current position, nor any of his other prospects, offered him: flexibility. Yes, there’d be travel, and probably a lot of it at times, but the compromise we made was that he could manage his own schedule while he was here in the States. Some days he’d come into the office after hours, which I didn’t mind. Other days he’d teleconference from home. I’d even seen him work three, consecutive, fourteen-hour shifts in order to have a long weekend to tend to something personal. Again, I didn’t mind. To say the guy was hardworking was an understatement.
“Hey, I’m not judging,” Terrell concluded with a chuckle. “Do what you gotta do. I was actually asking about having your dad around again, though. It’s working out?”
I chuckled a bit at his question, thinking about the weeks that had passed since my mom and dad officially became New Yorkers. Things had once been so bleak between my father and I that I found myself wishing I could cut him out of my life completely. However, here we were, working together on a daily basis again, forced to speak, forced to find common ground on business matters just like when I was living in Virginia. But… I couldn’t remember a time I’d been happier having him around.
For so many years, I remember wishing I could talk to him about things most guys had their dads around for—good stuff, bad stuff, hell… pointless stuff—but we just didn’t have that. I hated it, but learned how to deal with the hand I’d been dealt. For all intents and purposes, the man my father has become, is not the man I wasted so much time and energy hating. He’d grown a lot. Maybe we both had.
In the beginning of him changing, righting his wrongs, I’d been his biggest critic and skeptic, but those days seemed so far behind us now. There was a period of healing and adjusting, in addition to a mandatory period of him making amends with my wife, but we were in a good place now. We all were. Who would’ve thought I’d actually be the one to encourage my father to move closer—to me, to Sam, to my family. I had, though, and hadn’t regretted it.