Page 32 of Cakes for the Grump

Again, those words carry through my head, making sleep unreachable.

I’m pulling up my phone and typing.

ME

I don’t know what a good leader is. And I don’t pretend to know your world. I’m not sure I want to know it because of how often it makes the news and for what reasons it does. But I don’t think leadership inherently attracts the worst.

I believe it’s when people are afraid to lose their power enough to do bad things, when they keep climbing away and on top of others in fear of someone else coming and taking it all away from them that a crisis of morality occurs.

I think. In my opinion.

Guess it’s comes down to?—

What are you afraid of?

Is it about losing it all?

Will you risk that by doing what is right?

He doesn’t answer my texts even hours later. I’m not surprised.

The next morning, I find myself oddly nervous. Part of me wonders whether he’ll ever show up in the kitchen again as I walk in.

“Rita,” says Luke.

He’s perfectly dressed, and so is my cup of tea. There’s a moment where we look at each other and it’s obvious in the way Luke stiffens that he is waiting for me to bring up his company’s incriminating behavior.

“Have you—do you have a—”Plan?That feels impertinent to ask. “…productive day planned?” I ask instead.

“There will be intensive de-cluttering, so yes.”

Part of our conversation from yesterday comes back to me. He’d said:as a leader you can’t just pull it all apart otherwise things explode. People explode. But I’m going to handle it. All of it.

He is going to handle it.

Do I trust what that means?

Needing to put my hands to work, I start changing into my apron. Bags are shuffled. A fridge is opened and closed. Biscuits are toyed with. I don’t turn around, but I need to ask. “Were you telling the truth at your press conference?”

“I was.”

“Promise?”

“You have my word. But do you trust that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s fine. Time will prove me right.”

An alert on my phone will ping me if any other news breaks about Abbot Industries. I won’t stay uninformed, but for now, what more is there to say? I could demand proof, to see evidence of interviews being done, internal investigations being launched, perpetrators being fired, and equity practices implemented in their hiring process…but Abbot Industries has already released news bulletins with all that information. Their crisis team is a sharp knife hacking away dissent. The true question is whether I believe all that is promised to be happening.

Maybe he’s brainwashing me, one tea serving at a time, because I want to believe him. Believe that he is not as terrible as his family legacy. As the type of business his corporation appears to run. Is that pathetic? Does that make me a bad judge of character?

Or am I choosing to be blindly optimistic because I need his employment to keep paying my bills? Until…maybe…I win this meal kit competition and all my problems go away. Until…I finally get another job… Until someone calls me back with a wage that keeps my dad in rehab…

Simply put, am I okay sitting next to a bad man?Ishe a bad man?

When I finally drink my tea, he’s settled back into his routine of Sudoku and browsing data reports. I tell him he should use a pencil instead of a pen until he gets his puzzle-solving confidence back. Luke pointedly finishesit in front of me without making a single mistake. He tells me the chicken I meal prepped last week was adequate and to make more of that. I call his tastes geriatric.