Suburban Renewal (That Business Between Us Book 3)

by Pamela Morsi

  "He won't get any help from me," Corrie said. "As a mother, I think my son is good enough for anybody anywhere! And anyone who says otherwise, well, they better not say it to my face."

  I laughed. She was a lot like Edna. It was amazing to me—after being married to Corrie for twenty years to see one of the same traits that had so intimidated me in her mother.

  Corrie was working a lot these days. She would come home from school, start dinner and get to work answering e-mails and laying out rooms for clients. She tried to grow by word of mouth. She wanted to do such excellent work that it would loudly speak for itself, and that required a lot of commitment from her.

  She began to travel more. Attending conferences and trade shows, where she could connect with the market for her services, was essential. The school system was amazingly cooperative, allowing her to take an inordinate amount of unpaid leave to pursue her sideline. I thought they were just being generous until the principal let it slip that their lawyer was investigating whether or not the school system was due a percentage of future profits based on the intellectual-property clause in her teaching contract.

  Corrie and I were both stunned, but as there were no profits yet forthcoming, we let it ride.

  I cheered her on and urged her to go, but I missed her—both when she was away and when she was home in front of her computer screen.

  In May, both Nate and Corrie graduated. Nate wore shorts and sneakers under his cap and gown. It was easy to pick him out of the crowd for photographs. He had written in White-Out across the top of his mortarboard: Hell Froze Over!

  "That's our boy!" I told Corrie, rolling my eyes.

  "And we are so proud," she countered facetiously.

  He had made no moves whatsoever as to his future prior to graduation. He took the SATs only because we insisted. But he'd made it very evident to us that he was not remotely interested in pursuing a college degree.

  The summer after graduation, Nate spent lying around. He went out every night and stayed late, which kept him sleeping most of the day. I didn't know if he was still seeing Jin. I hadn't heard any more from Hye Won, so I figured their romance had cooled. That was okay with me.

  But living as a bum in my house, that was not okay. On a hot August evening as he was getting ready to leave the house, I confronted him.

  "I'm willing for you to live here as long as you like," I said. "But if you're not going to school, then you have to go to work."

  He just looked at me curiously and made no response.

  "I'll find a job for you at Okie Tamales if you want one," I continued. "But it will be a real job. And you'll really have to work at it."

  "No thanks, Dad," he answered. "I'm leaving day after tomorrow for Maine."

  "Maine? You mean like the state of Maine."

  "Yeah," he answered. "There's a woodworking school up there, it's one of the best in the country. It's a twelve-week course."

  "You're taking a woodworking course?"

  "Yeah?"

  "How much is this going to cost?"

  "I've already paid for it."

  "Where are you going to stay?"

  "Room and board is included."

  "How are you going to get there?"

  "Airplane," he answered and then added. "Duh, like I'm going to hitchhike fifteen hundred miles. I'm a slacker, but I'm not stupid."

  I admit to being completely dumbfounded by this development. Nate had, if not his future, at least his own plans all worked out.

  Just before he left, Lauren came home for a two-week visit, before heading back to Bible College. She'd spent the summer building a church/hospital facility in Oaxaca, Mexico.

  Once the kids were gone it was just Corrie and I alone. Our first time alone together in twenty years. And it was busy.

  Corrie's master's degree was almost anticlimactic. She was becoming so widely known and respected in her field that being a master was a given. At her orals exam she defended her thesis so well that two members of the faculty committee asked if they could recommend her company to their own administrative board. It was shortly after that at a national education technology conference that she was approached by a venture capital firm. They were blown away with what Corrie could do. They wanted to help her do it bigger and sooner.

  She called me on my cell. I was delivering a minivan load of tamales to our grocery distributor. Between her excitement and the terrible static on the connection she was literally screaming at me over the phone.

  "They want to give me $500,000 in start-up money!" she said.

  "What! You're already started up. Why would you need that money?"

  "It saves me from having to bootstrap my way up," she said. "They believe in me, they believe in my company. They want to help me make it work."

  I know that it felt to Corrie as if she'd won the lottery. Better. This was a lottery awarded not by chance, but because you deserved it. What an endorsement!

  But as I wandered around our house and worked at my job, I began to think about it more and more.

  By the time Corrie was back in Lumkee, I was certain it was the wrong way to go.

  “Look, Corrie, you don't need this money," I told her. “If you were strapped for employees or equipment, okay, but you're not. You're doing all the work yourself and I'm not sure you'd want to take on ten people and teach them what you know."

  "But think how much faster we'll grow," she said.

  "There is such a thing as growing too fast," I said.

  "Changing the landscape of American education can't be done quickly enough," she shot back.

  "I'll give you that," I said. "It would be nice if your vision could be implemented overnight. But would it still be your vision? If it's yours, then all the success is yours and all the risks are yours and so all the vision can be yours. If other people are putting in their two cents or their half-million dollars, they are taking most of the risks and seeking most of the success, so they're going to want most of the vision."

  Corrie didn't have a response, but she was angry and disappointed, and in her eyes, I was the culprit.

  "Look at your own business plan," I said. "The revenue streams are iffy at best. Schools, even expensive private schools, are not big money-making machines. They don't have big discretionary funds for improvements. And they don't have incentives for doing a better job. They won't improve their bottom line by turning out smarter kids."

  "I know teachers," she insisted. "They want to do everything they can to help their students succeed."

  “Teachers may want to do it," I pointed out. "But teachers aren't the target of your business plan, it's the school administration and their priorities have got to be the bottom line."

  "Why are you so negative?" she accused. "Venture capital is what every dot.com out there is shooting for."

  "Honey, listen to me," I told her. "We've been in this place before, almost exactly this place. During the oil boom, all the bankers wanted to give us money. It was burning a hole in everybody's pocket and they wanted it out there working for them. I couldn't have made a go of that business without the bank's money, I had no choice but to take it. And it came around to bite us in the butt. I can't help but worry that this may turn out the same way."

  "What do you know about it?" she shouted back. "You don't know anything about the new economy or public offerings or stock valuations. Why should I listen to you on any of this?"

  "Because I am the one person you can always count on to be on your side in everything you do," I told her.

  "Oh, really? Well, it sounds to me like you're just jealous of my success," she said. "Does it hurt your pride to think that somebody wants to give me a boatload of money for ideas I come up with on my very own? They are my ideas, Sam. Mine. And I don't need to smother them with salsa to get somebody to buy!"

  More was said. Much more. It was a terrible fight, complete with long-ago grievances and even unexpected confessions.

  She told me that she'd seen another man. She said she
hadn't slept with him, but that she'd wanted to. She'd wanted another man because he was her intellectual equal. I thought the top of my head was going to blow off with that one. I was still reeling from that when she got onto my father. I had brought him and his evil into the sanctuary of our home. He'd damaged the psyche of our son and Nate would never recover.

  "My father was a bad man, I admit that. I'm sorry I brought him into our home, but that's over. And Nate is going to be fine."

  "You should have known what kind of man he was," Corrie yelled. "He murdered your mother."

  "It was an accident."

  "How many years are you going to say that?" she asked with searing sarcasm. "I don't know what your genealogy is like, Sam Braydon, but in my family we don't murder people."

  "Oh, yeah? Well, when you get up to heaven, you'd better ask your sainted brother why Cherry Dale had his suicide medicine and how Floyd Braydon really died."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You know those suicide pills Doc put together for Mike? I found the empty bottle in Cherry Dale's trash the morning of my dad's funeral. There is no way she could have gotten hold of those pills without Mike handing them to her himself. So your family knows a little bit about murder, too."

  27

  Corrie

  1997

  That fall alone together turned out to be the longest, most miserable time we had ever spent. Sam and I have never been one of those couples who squabble all the time. Both of us are basically nonconfrontational people, and although I believe my confidence and assertiveness has improved as I've gotten older, I am still never "up for a good fight."

  When it came to the venture capital money for EducationEnvironments.com, a good fight is not what we had. It was a down-in-the-mud, no-holds-barred, below-the-belt, emotional slugfest. The kind only married couples can manage, because they know each other's vulnerabilities so well.

  I had never intended to tell Sam anything about Riv. I had been mentally unfaithful, but I hadn't been actually so. To my way of thinking, that didn't matter. Confession might be good for the soul, but I wasn't all that sure it was good for the marriage. After observing the world of couples, my impression was that the confessor felt much better after getting the truth off his or her chest. But the person confessed to, the injured party, didn't feel better. He or she felt...well...injured.

  I had injured Sam. And he, in turn, lashed out at me with that ridiculous story about my brother. As if Mike would have had anything to do with Floyd Braydon's death. It was ludicrous. Mike had been in his grave for almost a year when that horrible man died. If it hadn't been from natural causes, and I had no reason to believe it wasn't, then it was Cherry Dale or one of her boys who killed him. Mike had nothing to do with it. Why would he?

  As certain as I was of that, I was also bothered by the hint of a memory that I couldn't quite shake. On the morning after our fight, I was standing out on the deck with my coffee. My eyes were drawn to the old washhouse that still stood like some rustic relic in our backyard.

  I walked down the brick path to the doorway. It was locked. It was Nate's workshop now. Filled with his saws and clamps and all the accoutrements of a man who worked with his hands. Sam knew where the key was. I was not about to ask him.

  Standing on the path, I vividly recalled standing in that same spot hearing Mike and Braydon arguing. The Mike I'd heard that day was not the man I knew as my brother. He'd been cold, powerful, threatening on behalf of those he loved. Could he have engineered Braydon's death? Would he have given those drugs to Cherry Dale for the purpose of getting rid of the man?

  Impossible, I firmly decided. Sam might believe that, but I would not. My brother, Mike, was good, all good, up and down, inside out, every way good. Sure he had his problems, his failings. But I was not going to believe this about him—ever.

  I spent the rest of the year working on my business, stalling Dan Lyle at the venture capital firm and walking on eggshells with my husband whenever we were in a room together.

  I missed the buffer that the children would have provided. We never heard from Nate from the time he left until the time he returned. Lauren e-mailed me regularly to let us know that everything was okay, but in early September I received an unexpected tearful phone call.

  "I just can't believe it," Lauren choked out. "I can't believe he would let this happen."

  "Who?" I asked anxiously. "Who let what happen?"

  "God," she answered. "God let this happen. Both of them dead in one week."

  The "both of them" to whom Lauren referred were her beloved fashion plate, Princess Di, and her spiritual beacon, Mother Teresa. Certainly the deaths were a loss. So many people were saddened. To Lauren, however, it provoked a crisis of faith. She left school and came home at the end of the semester.

  It was hard for me to really empathize very much with her pain and doubt. People died. People we love. People we don't even know. I couldn't imagine that losing these total strangers from half a world away should mean so much. I had no idea how to snap her out of it.

  "It's more than just the terrible loss of these lives," she said. "It's...it's...I don't know what it is, Mom. I just feel so angry. I don't like feeling angry."

  I didn't know what to say to her or how to help her.

  The answer came from a very unexpected source— Lauren's little brother came through for her.

  It was a Sunday morning, Sam and I were up and dressed for church. Lauren just refused to go. We thought the only way she could snap out of her grief was to get re-enthused about her life. We were pressing her to make the effort when Nate intervened.

  "Leave her alone," he said. "If she doesn't want to go, nobody should make her."

  "Just because you've got no faith," I told him, "doesn't mean your sister should abandon hers."

  "If God let her down, that's exactly what she should do," Nate said. "I wouldn't want a God who wouldn't follow my directions."

  Lauren's head shot up. "Nate, you are such a stupid jerk!" she said. "You shouldn't even try to talk about things you don't understand. God doesn't need to take directions from anybody. I wouldn't want him to take mine. He sees a broader picture, an eternally broad picture. Humans have such a limited vision, we can't even fathom what his purposes might be."

  "Hey, don't carp at me," Nate answering. "You're the drama queen who's pissed off at the Divine.”

  "I'm not pissed off!" Lauren insisted. "You don't understand anything."

  Lauren got up and headed out to the family room in a huff.

  "Can't stand a little sibling conflict?" Nate called out at her. "Can't deal with a little truth from your baby brother?"

  "Go to hell!" she shot back. "And that is exactly where you are going. I'll pray for you in the service. Right now, I've got to go upstairs and get dressed."

  Once she was out of earshot, Nate turned and actually winked at us.

  "You guys owe me one," he said.

  Nate had returned from Maine invigorated and outgoing. Like his runaway episode in L.A., getting out on his own had made Nate more confident, more ready to pursue his goals. What those goals happened to be wasn't immediately apparent to Sam and myself.

  “Son, you can't just live here without a job," his father told him.

  Nate just grinned at him. "Why not?"

  Sam glanced at me for support. I was pretty sure that nothing that I might say would do anything but confuse the issue.

  "Because people work, Nate," he replied. "Everybody is supposed to work. You're a young, healthy guy. And personally, I'm not willing to work my butt off to pay the bills while a young, healthy guy lies around my house and does nothing."

  Nate nodded. "That's fair enough," he said. "But, Dad, not everybody can work for somebody else. I'm a lot like Paw-Paw, you know."

  "You're not like him at all!" Sam said quickly.

  Nate's eyebrows shot up. He looked surprised at his father's words.

  "No, really, Dad," he said. "I'm just like Paw-Paw, I rea
lly don't work well with other people. I don't think he would have ever been able to hold that supervisor job in the well-service company if you hadn't been the owner. I doubt anyone else would have put up with him."

  Sam didn't dispute that.

  "Paw-Paw kept the janitor job at the school because everybody there was so busy with their own stuff that they never got in his way."

  It was the kind of disparaging observation I might have made myself. But the tone of Nate's phrasing made it seem as if he were speaking of a personality quirk rather than a character failing.

  "I'm that same way," Nate continued. "Just like

  Paw-Paw, I hate other people telling me what to do, I hate having to go with somebody else's plan."

  "Even if that were true," Sam said, "you have to live your life. Everybody has to work."

  "Yeah, but I think I'm going to work for myself," he said.

  "For yourself?"

  Nate nodded. "I made a couple of pieces up in Maine and I sold them, pretty easy."

  "You made a piece of furniture that somebody bought?"

  "Don't sound so shocked, Dad," Nate told him, laughing. "You're living in a house I built, or mostly built, anyway."

  Sam stared at him for a long moment and then he smiled.

  "You've done a lot for this house," he said. "You repaired it, modernized it and doubled it in size. But don't forget that my grandfather was the one who built this house. In 1937 he borrowed the plans from Mr. Tatum who had a house on Poplar Street. He put it together with salvaged timbers worked with hand tools. He knew where every nail was, because he'd hammered them all in himself. Maybe you got some of your skill from him."

  Nate shrugged, but he did look pleased.

  The washhouse/workshop became his place of business. He worked there at his own pace on his own time. No one could fault him for not being productive. He turned out a half dozen pieces that fall. They were beautiful. He was very taken with the mission style, which he constructed out of quarter-sawn oak and darkened by fuming with ammonia. But he also made some handsome pieces in cherry. And some artsy small things in rosewood and ebony. Sam and I were both very impressed with the quality of his work. I honestly wanted to buy them all myself. Sam discouraged me.