Wednesday at 11:14, I made the call.
I know the exact time because I looked at it afterward, the way you look at something you’ve been dreading to confirm that it happened and you survived it. Later than I wanted. Earlier than noon, which was the only promise I had made myself.
She picked up on the third ring.
Three rings is the sound of someone present but not hovering. I do not know why I noticed that. Maybe because I was noticing everything in the six seconds before she said hello, when there was still technically time to hang up and blame a bad connection.
I said: do you have twenty minutes?
We talked for twenty-two. I know because I watched the timer the way I always watch timers on difficult calls, which is obsessively, while being completely unable to tell you what was said during any specific thirty-second window.
What I remember: somewhere in the first ten minutes she told me they had lost a renewal last August. Not a massive account. But a name she had expected to keep and did not. She said she knew in April it was going sideways and did not act on it in time. Then she said: “We were never bad at the relationship. We were bad at the end of the relationship.”
I said I know exactly what you mean.
I did not have a deck. Not having a deck was the right call. I asked questions instead of explaining, the kind you ask when you actually want to know the answer and not when you want the answer to confirm what you already believe. I think that is what kept the conversation from feeling like a pitch. Whether it also kept it from feeling like a service offer, I am still not sure.
The call went well. Well might not be quite right. The call went real, which is different and possibly more useful.
She did not hire me at the end of twenty-two minutes. That was not what twenty-two minutes was for.
What she said was: I’m going to think about whether I know anyone who would benefit from having this conversation.
I recognized that as a real sentence. Not a polite one. Polite sentences end with “good luck with everything.” Real ones say I’m going to think about this, and you can hear the difference in how she said it. I wrote it down on a post-it note after we hung up. Think about whether I know anyone. It is still on my desk.
What I know now that I did not know Wednesday morning: a conversation does something an email cannot. Not because of warmth or tone or whatever business books say about authentic connection. Because in real time, the other person gets to tell you what they see. Not what you described. What landed.
She did not see a consultant with a methodology. She said, partway through, “I don’t think I’ve been asked that before,” about one of the questions I asked. I do not know if that means I am doing something right or means I am not presenting the service clearly enough. Both are possible. I am keeping that sentence next to the post-it, not because I know what to do with it yet, but because I think I should.
Doug came home around six. I told him I made the call, it went well, and I did not yet know what it meant. He nodded in the way he nods when he is deciding whether to ask a follow-up question. He did not ask one. After a while he said, “Good.”
Good was the right word. Not enthusiastic. Not cautious. Just: the thing you were not doing, you did. He could stop waiting for the thing to happen. I could stop carrying around the fact that it hadn’t.
Zoe is going to find out about this call the way she finds out about everything this summer, which is by reading about it from the other room while I am sitting here not quite knowing what comes next.
I still do not know what comes next. The post-it is on my desk. The conversation ran twenty-two minutes. I have one sentence on a scrap of paper and two unknowns and no idea what she is going to think when she thinks about whether she knows anyone.
That is not nothing. I keep telling myself that is not nothing.