I drove to the office before anyone else, but I did not go in to that building. I drove instead to a diner across the street, and I called an old friend, a man named Harold I had worked alongside years before, who had left to start his own supply company and had begged me a dozen times to come help him run it.
I had always said no, out of loyalty to a company that, it turned out, had none for me. That morning, over coffee, I called Harold and told him I was free at last.
He did not hesitate for a heartbeat: he said he had kept a desk waiting for me for years, half joking, half hoping, and that if I came he would make me a partner, because he knew what I was, which was the best office manager in the state.
I took his hand on it right there over the phone. I did not poach one client or one secret from my old employer. Everything I brought to Harold was my own, my skill, my judgment, my good name in a town that knew it.
Harolds company had been scrappy and struggling. With me running the office, it steadied and then it soared. We were fair to our vendors, kind to our clients, and honest in everything, and business came to us the way it always comes to people who do right.
My old company, without me, drifted. The nephew could not hold it, and it shrank year by year. Some of its old clients, dissatisfied, found their way to Harold and me, not because we lured them, but because word gets around about who takes care of people and who does not.
Within a few years, Harolds company had passed my old one clean by. We were the firm everyone in Cheyenne wanted to work with. And I was a partner, an owner, my name right there beside Harolds on the sign.
The young woman who had taken my office, the nephews girlfriend, came to me one day, long after, asking for a job. The nephew was long gone from her life and from the old company both. I hired her. She had only ever been a pawn, and I do not hold a grudge against a pawn.
She works for Harold and me now, trained right, valued right, doing well. She tells people the woman she was hired to replace turned out to be the best boss she ever had.
Twenty-six years I gave a company that called me furniture. Harold gave me a partnership on a single phone call. The mug my late husband gave me sits on my partners desk now. Some mornings I look at it and think how a door slamming shut behind you can turn out to be the kindest thing that ever happened, if you have the nerve to walk through the next one.