Part 4

It was the exact spot where he’d left my laundry basket.

A couple of years later, something happened that I didn’t think much of at the time.

The summer I was twenty-three, a bid came across Harvey’s desk from Iowa State.

One of the older buildings on campus needed its electrical panels replaced, all four floors, and the university wanted it done over summer break while the building was mostly empty.

Harvey slid the paper across his desk to me and tapped the address.

I knew the building.

I’d been inside it a hundred times as a kid.

It was the building where my dad’s office was.

“Don’t have to bid it,” Harvey said.

I sat there for a minute.

Then I said, “Work’s work.”

Harvey grinned, because that was his line, and he’d been waiting four years for me to say it back to him.

We got the job.

Kirby and I spent ten weeks in that building, June through August.

The professors were all gone for the summer, my dad included.

I know because I checked the schedule posted in the lobby every morning.

I replaced every panel on every floor, and when I finished each one, I labeled every breaker the way Harvey taught me.

Tiny, neat block letters.

Room numbers, hallway lights.

Third floor, east hall, panel 3B.

I never saw him once.

I didn’t want to.

I just wanted to do it right.

By the time I was twenty-four, Harvey was sixty-eight, and his knees were done.

One Friday night, he poured two cups of the coffee that had been sitting on the burner since noon and asked if I wanted to buy the shop.

I passed my master electrician’s exam that spring, and I bought Hagadorn Electric that July.

Not given to me.

Bought.

We worked it out with a lawyer in Newton, and I’ve been paying him a monthly note out of the profits ever since.

Harvey wanted to give me a better deal than that.

I wouldn’t let him.

I told him I’d never asked anybody for a dime and I wasn’t going to start with the one person who’d never made me feel like I had to.

He stayed on.

He comes in every day at seven, answers the phone, and tells people he just sweeps.

He has never swept.

I kept the name, too.

Hagadorn Electric.

It was his, and I wanted it to stay his.

And then, not long after I took over, a big data center started going up south of Des Moines.

They’re giant gray buildings with no windows that run the computers behind all this artificial intelligence everybody’s talking about.

They need an unbelievable amount of electricity and an unbelievable number of electricians.

The general contractor needed subcontractors, and we got the call.

By this fall, Hagadorn Electric had eighteen electricians, four apprentices, two full-time office people, and three months of backlog.

At the same time, the same programs those data centers were built to run were eating my brother’s job.

I heard about it from Mom’s birthday card.

Justin’s team at the insurance company had been cut from eleven people to three because the company was using artificial intelligence to write most of the code.

Then Caitlin’s company did the same.

And Alexis graduated with a computer science degree and sent out 140 applications without a single interview.

Dad told everybody it was a temporary market correction.

At Thanksgiving, at Christmas, again in the spring.