If It’s The Last Thing I Do by David Fitz-Gerald tells the story of Misty Menard, a 69-year-old woman who in 1975 returns to her upstate New York hometown to attend the funeral of her beloved father. She is dumbfounded to find she has inherited his business, making wooden dowels and buttons.
A receptionist for most of her adult life, with no business experience, she is at best ill-suited to the job. Personal problems hang over her as well, as a divorcee determined to keep sober and cigarette-free while in weekly therapy. But to keep her father’s memory alive, she is determined to keep the business afloat while she decides what to do with it in the long term. The last thing she imagined she would be doing on the cusp of 70 was running a business.
She turns the business into an employee-owned enterprise, an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan.) This gives her employees a shot at owning part or all of the business. The skill with which If It’s the Last Thing I Do integrates ESOP into its story, making it digestible, is among its many pleasures.
Her three-man management team is aggressively against it, and the local bank that hosts the trust and handles its transactions is resistant to providing loans to facilitate the deal. As the ESOP continues taking shape, the bank becomes its mortal enemy.
While those issues would be difficult on their own, the collapsing economy of that era pushes Misty’s company to the brink of insolvency.
Buyers emerge offering to purchase it on the cheap. There are unexplained incidents of vandalism on the premises. And in an almost Biblical moment, a huge storm brings raging floods that threaten to destroy the company’s physical foundations.
The decision to turn the company over to its employees, giving them a stake in its future, becomes more complex as the financial noose tightens.
Misty’s family life adds yet more weight to her shoulders.
Her husband abandoned her for another woman. One of her two sons is dead, leaving the other son to bring up his nephew, who in turn has a child. That child, a boy nicknamed Four, has ambitions to become an Olympic skater, but finds his path may not wind up as he envisioned.
Misty is filled with self-doubts. She makes decisions from the heart instead of from practicality. But her belief in the rightness of her decisions, her essential goodness, is one of this novel’s strengths. People both good and wicked drive this story, their motivations and machinations not always apparent at first.
Readers who enjoy a well-paced, gripping novel should put If It’s The Last Thing I Do on top of their reading list. Misty’s complex relationships with her family and her own mortality, combined with her efforts as a CEO, turn this novel into a true page-turner.
