Free Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen

had there been to compete with? The Beast? She had been sent to six weeks of a summer sales management course at not-really Harvard, of which she was very proud at the time but which she knew would be a joke to people with real colleges. Now she was out at Baxter Blume, and out as an undertaker, and those were good things. As she walked through today’s parking lot toward the gym doors, the Beast was nowhere near.
    Carol was not coming to the town gym to bury anybody; she was coming to get a reading on her industry.
    She was not coming here to see Easy Parsons, but as soon as Parks had mentioned the meeting, she had understood she might.
    The signage sent her in a side door and down a hall of trophy cases. The listed participants in the meeting were acronyms: state and federal ocean regulatory and research agencies, environmental interest groups, fishermen’s civic and industry groups. She could hear a cheap sound system working against a basketball court’s height of girders and banners. This was like no meeting she would ever have held; there would be discussion here, it seemed. When Carol had showed up to run a meeting, there had been no discussion. Still, she’d had to face gymnasiums full of people hoping she’d change her mind, as if she’d had a mind to change. She’d listened and answered to be respectful, but her answers were never long. This meeting had nothing directly to do with her, and she was glad it didn’t. Despite whatever discussions, it was essentially a bad-news meeting, and instinctively her stomach fisted tight. Since she had no intimate investment in the bad news, she felt as if she were stopping to look at these people’s blood in a wreck beside the road. Although they had some hope of a good outcome, Parks had said. Would they all really be here if there was no hope? She didn’t know.
    She stepped through the double doors to a wall of the backs of workingmen who stood in flannel shirts and fiberfill vests, men she had put out of work by the thousands, men with whom her father had belonged and with whom she should have belonged.
    For a shamefully long time, Carol didn’t think of her father when she was shutting down plants and factories. But once she did, she imagined him every time among the men she faced—and despite the women at Elizabeth’s Fish this morning, it was usually mostly men. She had looked at the faces she fired to give them what humanity she could. She had come to look doubly hard because she never knew which face was going to turn out to be her father, and she wanted him to know she loved him and was sorry and didn’t expect his forgiveness and hoped to have it anyhow. That was a lot to put in a look, ridiculous if you thought about it, certainly nothing you talked about. Just the same, it was real, and it was hard work to stand straight and tough enough to keep anyone from imagining the weakness of second thoughts. Her father wouldn’t have wanted to see weakness either. His proudest moment would have been hearing about her six weeks studying new sales management techniques in a summer classroom on the Harvard campus. He had died the year before, but when she was on the campus, she had told him, out loud, where she was, and she had imagined he could hear.
    She edged through the men as if she didn’t notice she was taller than many of them. When she was inside, she could see that the bleachers were crowded with more men, and still more men sat in the folding chairs set out across the floor. Two hundred fishermen? Three hundred? These men, just like the men she’d had to face year after year, whatever their trade, looked achingly out of place. They’d been boys in gyms like this and they weren’t boys now. Beyond the rows of chairs was the U of tables for the managers and scientists and advocates and whoever was the senior bringer of bad news.
    She took a flyer off a bleacher bench. Apparently conservationists had offered an amendment to radically tighten federal