by James King
“Yes, I saw the numbers,” Wayne said. “They didn’t seem to me to be all that awful.”
“They were less than everyone else’s on the team. I have to be fair. As a manager.”
“I understand,” Wayne said. He always recited that little empathetic acknowledgment whenever he was about to disagree with someone. “It’s just that it doesn’t look fair. Especially when you get a cut of future telesales and she doesn’t, since you took the account away from her. And now you’ve fired her.”
Wayne was starting to irritate him, as Stephanie had, although she had been more direct. Fair? Give me a fucking break. You’re nothing but a parasite. You can’t cut it in sales anymore, so you’re making a living off the commissions others generate. How fair is that, asshole?
After all and as always, Wayne had apparently gathered and mastered the pertinent facts and figures. Mike could see him ordering Judy, his assistant, to bring in the records. He had no doubt spent hours poring over them, looking at the situation from every conceivable angle. He wouldn’t be caught short. Wayne should’ve been a goddamned lawyer himself.
“Wayne, you’ve always told me to run my territory the way I see fit. And remember your memo about head count? Every region had to cut back—even if it meant some of our high-potential people had to go. Stephanie was my most inexperienced rep. She had a lot of potential, but she wasn’t pulling in the numbers the other guys were. I gave her every opportunity to make up for the loss of Transcon. I kept reminding her to fill the pipeline. I kept her on as long as I could. But I can’t let her affect the overall performance of the team. I had no choice.”
Blow me, she had said.
Mike saw the skepticism in Wayne’s narrowed eyes. But, so far, nothing had been said that would incriminate either of them. The figures—when presented in a certain way—could be used to justify his actions. From a legal standpoint, anyway.
“That’s it?” Wayne asked. “Everything I need to know?”
Good old Wayne. Just making sure his ass was adequately covered.
“What else would there be?” Mike asked. He couldn’t help himself. Instead of just saying, Yep, that’s it, old buddy, he had to push it. Move closer to the line.
“Just wanted to make sure,” Wayne said. He put his wallet back in the pocket of his blue suit coat and stood. The meeting was apparently over.
“I can back you on workforce reduction. But if there are any other, ah, surprises . . .”
Mike nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I hate surprises, too.”
But as he drove home, Mike thought about that particular lie. He didn’t hate all surprises. He liked, most especially, the ones that came with unbuttoning, unzipping, unclasping.
But could those really be considered surprises? He had long ago ceased being astonished when women consented, some almost eagerly, to be with him. So the seduction itself was not novel. Maybe it was the variety he enjoyed: the varying fullness of lips, the different shape and sway of breasts, the different reactions to his touch, the responses to that first moment—the grabbers, the guiders, the aggressive, the passive, the moaners, the laughers, the shouters, the shudderers, the sighers. That was it, he decided: He liked variety, not surprises. So his mood darkened considerably when he saw Stephanie Kraus’s car parked on the street in front of his house.
He stopped halfway up the driveway to make sure it was her. After all, there were plenty of Volvos in the state of Illinois; hell, there were plenty on his own street. The summer sun was low in the sky now, casting shadows, and he couldn’t tell if someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. He pulled the car into the garage. He turned off the ignition and sat for a while, thinking what he might say to her. Nothing came to him. He’d just have to wing it. He got out of the car and walked outside, starting down the driveway at a steady, confident, no-nonsense pace. But the car was gone.
What was she up to? She had driven two and a half hours for . . . what? Mike stared at the spot where the Volvo had been parked, as if it might suddenly reappear. And now the words came to him. Can’t take things so personally, Stef. Don’t let your anger get the best of you. You can’t prove anything. My word against yours. Nothing personal. We both had some fun while it lasted, didn’t we? Why don’t we leave it at that?
Colleen’s back was to him when he entered the house through the kitchen, lugging his overnight bag and briefcase. She was scrubbing a pot. He smelled . . . hamburger? Pizza?
She glanced over her shoulder when the door closed.
“Hi, hon,” she called. She continued scrubbing.
So much for “hail the conquering hero,” Mike thought. When he was little and his dad came home from work, his mother would stop whatever she was doing—cooking, washing dishes, whatever. She’d wipe her hands on her apron, walk over, put her arms around his neck, and wouldn’t let go. No perfunctory kisses. Real kisses. Long kisses. No embarrassment when Mike and Nick came in to greet their dad. They’d see their mom, her slip showing a little as she reached up and held on. Their father would laugh and squirm and eventually their mom would go back to whatever she was doing, with a look on her face that Mike would remember years later and, only then, recognize as one of anticipation.
“How was your trip?” Colleen asked, turning back to the pot.
“Fine,” Mike said. What to do: go over and kiss her neck, maybe reach around and give her a friendly little double squeeze, or unpack? “I stopped for a drink, a meeting with Wayne.” Mike almost laughed: this time, the truth.
“How’s he doing?” Colleen asked, still scrubbing.
“A little balder. A little fatter.”
Colleen laughed. She turned off the water, grabbed a sponge, and kissed Mike on the cheek as she went to wipe down the table. “Not everyone can stay as buff as you, dear,” she said.
Was she being suggestive . . . or mocking? Mike made an effort not to pinch his midsection.
“Where are the kids?” he asked.
“Upstairs. Homework. Whatever.”
Whatever was Clare on the phone texting or talking with several friends. Whatever was Ty on his computer—maybe doing homework, probably surfing porn sites. This didn’t alarm Mike. If the technology had been available to him when he was Ty’s age, he would never have left his room. Whatever they were doing, gone were the days when they’d hide in the mudroom or the dining room or family room, waiting for him to come home and call out to them, yelling to Colleen to call the police, that someone had absconded with their children.
Absconded? Colleen would yell back, theatrically.
Absconded! Mike would reply.
He’d hear them giggling, waiting for the run-and-catch to begin.
Mike looked at Colleen as she sponged down the table. Since he’d walked in the door, he’d seen more of her backside than of her face.
“Guess I’ll go unpack,” he said.
“Oh, wait. I can’t believe I forgot this. You’ll never guess who called today.”
Mike felt a jolt of adrenaline, but in the same moment reassured himself that if Stephanie had called, Colleen wouldn’t have waited to confront him. She would have been sitting at the kitchen table when he’d walked in. Waiting.
“Who?” he asked.
“Your brother,” she said.
This couldn’t be good, either, but it would be a cakewalk compared to the first scenario. Mike assumed the call was related to the letter he’d gotten—and promptly thrown, unopened, into his briefcase. Maybe he should have read it. But it had been enough to see his father’s handwriting to make him decide he’d deal with it—whatever it was that his father was writing about—later. Maybe he’d started sucking down Jack Daniels again.
“Mike? Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry. Just thinking about work.” He put his overnight bag down. “So Nick called?”
“Yeah. It’s been so long, I wasn’t sure who it was at first. And it was kind of a strange call.”
Strange call. What was strange was that
Nick had called at all. He usually fobbed his messages off on Marcy. Like the one about Marilyn’s death. Awful for Nick, sure. Nick was going through a tough time, obviously. But he couldn’t call his own brother himself with the news? He had to go through Marcy? What had he ever done to Nick that was so awful? When things got tough, Nick always seemed to run to Marcy. And she always ran to Nick. What was that all about?
“Are you all right, Michael?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Don’t you want to know why it was kind of a strange call?”
Mike laughed to hide the wave of annoyance rising up inside him. “Why was it kind of a strange call, Col?”
Colleen picked up the pad that she kept by the wall phone. “Well, he said everything was probably okay, but that you need to call him right away about this message your father left him.”
She handed the note to Michael. 10-10. Gate 8. 2 p.m. June 17.
Mike knew—immediately—exactly what it meant. But whatever was supposed to happen on June 17—tomorrow—was obviously going to have to happen without him. He should have read the letter from his father. He hoped it was still in his briefcase.
“Michael, what’s this all about?”
He could truthfully have said he didn’t know what this was all about, but he wasn’t sure it would appease her this time around. Something in the way Colleen asked the question resurrected the niggling message from somewhere deep inside his consciousness that, after twenty-three years of marriage, she deserved to know more about his family than he was inclined to share. Mike had become so expert in cordoning off this topic that months could pass before he even entertained the notion that he was—as Colleen had long ago accused him—being selfish with this part of his life. She had learned to live with it. But now Nick, with a phone call, was threatening to fuck it all up.
The front doorbell rang, and Mike heard a thump above him.
“I’ll get it,” Clare screamed, followed immediately by the sound of her footsteps running down the hall and down the front steps.
Mike looked at Colleen. “New boyfriend?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Maybe I should ring the doorbell when I come home,” he said.
Colleen laughed.
“Mom?” Clare called from the front door. “Someone for you.”
Colleen frowned. “No idea,” she muttered. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and patted her hair into place. “So are you going to?”
“Going to what?”
“Do what we’ve been talking about. Call your brother!”
Colleen left the kitchen, passing Clare on her way out.
“Hi, Daddy. How was your trip?”
Mike hugged his daughter. “Fine,” he said. But he wasn’t thinking about his trip. He was thinking that he needed to find that note right now.
“Excuse me, honey,” he said, letting her go. Released from her perfunctory hug, she was already out of the kitchen when he opened his briefcase and started riffling through his files.
He froze when he heard a familiar voice coming from the front hall. Not Colleen’s, he told himself, as if undertaking a complex process of elimination. Not Clare’s; she was probably already back upstairs and on the phone or online. Certainly not Ty’s voice, which was getting deeper every day.
“What are you saying?” he heard Colleen ask.
There was now no mistaking the voice that answered. Deep. Husky. The voice, he once told her after they’d made love, that could launch a thousand erections.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bill thought he’d gotten away with breaking wind, but a few moments after the silent event, April rolled her window down.
“Hot in here,” she said.
Generous, Bill thought; more so than he would have been. And it was hot. But it was mid-June and this was the Midwest, after all. Without turning, he watched her adjust the earbuds of her gizmo. He patted his shirt pocket, then his pants pockets. Where’d that damn pipe go?
“How long are we going to sit here looking at this ugly thing?” April asked.
The ugly thing was Spartan Stadium. They had been sitting there—specifically, near Gate 5—for an hour.
“Not much longer,” Bill said.
He wasn’t sure yet how much of his plan, if any, he wanted to share with April. Fact was, he was making it up as he went along, ever since she’d shown up on his doorstep more than a week ago, yellow duffel bag in hand, asking if she could “crash” for a while. Bill had made her call her mother to let her know where she was and that she was safe. But when April handed him the phone, apparently at her mother’s insistence, and he tried to reassure Marcy that everything would be okay and that everyone just needed a little time to cool off, Marcy had just two words for him before slamming the phone down: Keep her.
“You want to tell me what this is all about?” he’d asked April as he threw her a clean pillowcase. He’d put clean sheets on his bed and insisted on bunking out on the living room couch.
“No,” April said, punching the pillow—pretty hard, Bill noticed—into the pillowcase. “Yeah. It’s all about me getting as far away from that bitch as possible.”
Bill stopped smoothing the top sheet and looked at her. “That’s your mother and my daughter,” he said. “Never call her that again.”
He waited until April nodded.
“This your first stop? Seeing as how you want to get as far away as possible and all.”
He’d been down this particular road before. Nick had once come into the kitchen one evening when he was half April’s age, lugging a suitcase nearly bigger than he was, and announced that he was running away from home and nothing they could say would change his mind. He and Clare had exchanged glances. Clare was signaling that he should not laugh. “You all set with bus fare?” he’d asked Nick, who stared at both of them for a moment, then stomped back upstairs, the suitcase banging against each step as he did.
“You know what ‘far away as possible’ is for me, Grandpa?” April asked.
“Shoot.”
“California.”
“Makes sense,” Bill said as he put the top cover back on the bed. “Can’t get much farther without getting wet.”
“I’m serious, Grandpa. This singer I know? With this band? Well, I don’t actually know her—she got her start in San Francisco. There are lots of bands out there looking for singers and songwriters.”
Bill nodded. He remembered Clare’s admonition against laughing.
“Sounds like a plan,” Bill said, not knowing what else to say that wouldn’t sound like a smart remark.
“I wish it were,” April said. “I got no money, no way to get there. I’m pretty much stuck with this pathetic existence in Loserville until I’m old enough to get a job, get a car, and get the hell—heck, sorry—out of here.”
By morning, however, there was indeed a plan firmly in place, thanks to a lumpy couch and Bill’s inability to shake from his mind the dual problems of an unhappy granddaughter and three children who couldn’t seem to find a good reason to visit him.
Well before dawn, he’d gotten off the couch, found some paper, envelopes, and a pen, and written letters to his children. In the letters he assured them, especially Marcy, that April was safe. But—and he wrote the “but” in all capital letters—if they wanted to reunite mother and child, it was going to have to be a family effort. Sometime soon, he wrote, one of them would receive a clue about a location that he and April would soon be visiting. Chances were, he advised them, that the person who received the clue would not understand it; however, one of the others would. They’d actually have to TALK TO EACH OTHER to figure it out. And then all three of them would have to travel to the specified destination, where Bill would “deliver” April to them. But ONLY if all three were present. Mike. Nick. Marcy.
The arrangement he presented to April, however, was a bit different. He told her he’d get her to San Francisco—even resume teaching her how to drive along the way—
if and only if she agreed to make some stops—at least three of them. She also had to promise that she wouldn’t try to talk to her mother again until he gave the okay.
April agreed almost before he finished his first sentence.
To allow time for the letters to reach all three of his kids, he told April she needed to spend a few days brushing up on her driving skills—in parking lots, this time, so as not to risk being discovered or cause injury to any local mailboxes. But today, the seventeenth, they’d set out for Spartan Stadium.
Bill found his pipe, filled it, and lit up. He wondered how the conversation between Nick and Mike had gone. His first clue—10-10. Gate 8. 2 p.m. June 17—had been included on a small, blank postcard that he sent along with the letter to Nick. Seemed that those two had the most trouble talking to each other.
He could understand why they’d stopped talking to him, but he had never figured out what had driven a wedge between the three of them, or at least between Mike and the others. Didn’t they realize how lucky they were? Bill thought of Jack, his only sibling, ten years older, who had been killed in the final days of the Second World War. Bill never got to know his older brother as an adult, the way his own kids could know each other now. For Bill, Jack was always—even now—the older, heroic brother. He was the reason Bill joined the marines, the reason he wanted at least two boys. When Clare wanted to try for a girl, Bill readily agreed but secretly hoped for a third son. If something should happen, god forbid, to one of the boys, the remaining two would still have a brother.
Hearing a scratching sound, he looked over to see April hunched over a small notebook of some sort, scribbling away furiously.
“What are you writing there?” he asked.
She didn’t hear him. She still had those damned earbuds in. It seemed as though they’d been in her ears since they’d left Woodlake and arrived in East Lansing.