by Claire Adams
"Of course, of course," he said, "If you need anything, anything at all, just ask."
"Thanks, Mike," I said swallowing the lump in my throat. "I'll call as soon as I have an idea of when I'll be back. I just don't know what I'll need to do."
"Hey, don't worry about a thing," he said reassuringly. "But do you think you'll be able to get back in time for the Miter meeting?"
"Mike..." I trailed off unable to conjure a response.
"Too soon?" he asked before answering his own question. "Yeah, of course, don't be worried, Grace. We'll figure out a way to make it work. Just take care of yourself and your family."
"I will, thanks," I said as the tears welled up and I swallowed another sob. I disconnected and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the kitchen floor with my forehead resting on my knees and let the tears flow freely.
I cried as I remembered the seasons I'd spent in the big, white house helping Mamm make meals for our growing family and helping Dat in the fields or at the store. I remembered the way it felt to sit on the hard bench during Sunday services trying not to wiggle or fall asleep, and the way that Dat would encourage good behavior with a smile or a wink. I remembered the way I would boss my younger sisters around, mimicking the way the Mamm ran the household. I remembered the day that Mamm brought Daniel home and introduced him to all of us by explaining that he was a special gift from God and would need all of us girls to watch over him. I remembered the way that Mamm and Dat had encouraged me to make my own decisions after my rumspringa, and then had stood in the doorway smiling and waving as I made the jump from Amish to English the day I left for college.
Daniel. I cried harder when I thought about how we would explain this immense loss to him. Without Mamm and Dat as the center of his universe, how would he adjust? I took a deep breath and willed myself to stop crying. I needed to pack and get down to the farm as quickly as possible so I could help Verity and Honor prepare for the funeral. I knew the lion's share of the work would fall to Verity and me since Faith and Hope had families of their own to take care of, and Honor was a wild card—or at least that was what Mamm had written in her most recent letters.
"Pull it together, Grace," I muttered as I stood up and moved to the bedroom to pack my things. The good part about visiting my family was that I didn't need to pack much clothing. The only stipulation my parents had ever made about my returning from the English world was that when I was with them, I had to wear plain Amish clothing and a kapp covering my hair. It seemed like a small sacrifice, so I gladly adhered to their rules when I visited.
After having grown accustomed to a wide variety of soft fabrics in the clothes I bought off the rack at department stores and boutiques, I hated the plain, brown dress and the way the scratchy, cotton fabric felt against my skin, and I especially disliked the fact that the only fasteners I could use were straight pins. The Amish didn't believe in adornment, and buttons were considered a gateway to vanity. On the outside, I adhered to every convention, but underneath my dresses, I wore beautiful lingerie that I'd bought at La Perla or one of the many high-end stores on the Magnificent Mile. I loved the feeling of lace and silk against my skin, and when I was home, my lingerie reminded me that I had a life outside of the Amish.
Once I'd packed everything I thought I'd need for a week or two, I stopped in the front office to let them know I'd be out of town. Frank, the doorman, expressed his sympathies as he took my suitcase and loaded it in the trunk of the car I'd hired to drive me to Corner Grove, and I went back upstairs and did a final sweep of the apartment to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Once I was satisfied, I took the elevator back downstairs. Frank put a protective arm around my shoulder as he walked me to the curb telling me, "You take care of yourself, Gracie, you hear?"
I nodded, gave him a quick hug and the climbed into the back seat to begin the dreadful drive south.
I hadn't visited the farm since Christmas, and it was now early June and the scenery along the drive had changed dramatically. We drove down Lake Shore until we hit the highway heading out of the city and away from the concrete and asphalt. As the landscape slowly began to unfurl, small subdivisions with immaculately kept lawns on neat, little blocks near the plants and factories quickly gave way to large fields carpeted with newly sprouted soybeans and short corn stalks. The fields were lush and green and stretched as far as the eye could see on either side of the highway interrupted by an occasional, white farmhouse and big barn where the farmers kept the sowing and threshing machines.
I smiled as I remembered how Dat would shepherd Faith, Hope, and me out into the fields to pick and detassel corn in late July. We'd always complain that the English used machines and not children to do the hard work of reaping the corn, and Dat would calmly reply, "Machines do not bring us closer to God, my daughters." He'd calmly ask us to feel the warmth of the ground beneath our bare feet, sun on our faces, and the satisfaction of knowing we were contributing to our family's well-being by providing food and sustenance. We'd grumble a little, but mostly we'd work together, feeling the pride that Dat had instilled in us.
Thankfully the car's driver remained silent as we made the trek, and when a small sob escaped from my lips as I tried to imagine what home would be like when I arrived, he handed me a box of tissues before turning the radio up a little louder. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I looked up and caught his eye in the rearview mirror and offered a weak, but grateful, smile.
Chapter Six
Adam
"Jeez, that's hard core," Bugsy said as I recounted my parents' reaction to the news that we'd be running the Agape Resources wind turbine project on our own. "An arranged marriage in this day and age? That's some kind of serious fucked up!"
Jeffrey "Bugsy" Wiseman had been my best friend since the first day in fourth grade when we'd punched it out on the playground to prove who was a more loyal Chicago Bears fan. Bugsy had won the fight by landing a punch that had broken my nose, but afterwards he'd led me to the nurse's office and asked her to call his father, a world-renowned plastic surgeon, then solemnly waited until his father had shown up to assess the damage. Once Dr. Wiseman had declared that there would be no lasting damage, but that I needed to avoid sneezing for a few days, Bugsy held out his hand and declared a truce. I solemnly shook it and from that day on we were best friends.
I quickly learned that Bugsy had been nicknamed for his ability to emulate the famous Jewish mobster, Bugsy Siegel. Like his namesake, my blond-haired, blue-eyed friend with the jaw that, even as a child, looked like it was made of chiseled marble, was exceptionally handsome and had a charismatic personality that could charm even the most reticent. My friend was also adept at wheeling and dealing on the playground, and often wound up with a pocket full of lunch money after running a card or dice game somewhere out of view of the adult who monitored the playground. No one ever reported him because Bugsy had a way of making your loss feel like the biggest win of your life.
We'd gone to the same college prep school and had both been admitted to MIT the same year. We'd roomed together and earned a reputation on campus as the mobster and his sidekick, which was mostly attributed to Bugsy's penchant for dressing like a modern version of a character out of a 1930s gangster movie. Not many could have pulled it off, but, for Bugsy, it worked. Girls fell for him with such regularity that I often had to run interference and deliver the news that he had moved on and they should, too. Sometimes the girls would cry, and then it would be my job to comfort them. Often, the girls would turn their attention from Bugsy to me, but those infatuations had more to do with the girls wanting to stay inside Bugsy's orbit than wanting to date me, so I shrugged it off and spent a lot of time in the engineering lab. I watched Bugsy work his magic, though, and over time I cultivated my own methods of impressing girls. But despite my efforts, I often struck out. Soon I gave up chasing girls and focused my attention on the engineering lab where I could work on one of the many projects that Bugsy and I conjured up during our late night drin
king sessions.
The lab was where Bugsy and I did our best work. During our freshman year, we'd heard an engineer from Denmark talk about the potential of wind power and I had become obsessed with creating a turbine that could be used in smaller areas than the traditional wind farms required. We spent years mapping out potential designs and then testing them in various yards around the MIT campus, but what we accumulated was failed project after failed project. Nothing had panned out—until we were seniors.
One afternoon, we were in the sustainable energy engineering lab when Bugsy and I finally hit upon an idea that seemed like it could work for the individual consumer. It was an individual turbine that generated more than enough power for one home, and allowed for the excess power to be transferred to a holding station where it could be redistributed to those without turbine power. The design was small and sleek, which brought down the cost of manufacturing it, and the cost of installing the turbine would be recouped through the sale of energy back to the grid, and the overall cost of energy for the consumer would be dramatically lowered. It took us another year to perfect the design and test it, and by then we were both being courted by MIT to pursue Master's degrees.
Bugsy turned down MIT's funding offer in order to start Agape Resources. His father gave him a small portion of the start-up money, and Bugsy had hustled in his usual way to come up with the rest. We discussed asking my father to invest, but both of us had decided that this would be an absolute last resort. Bugsy understood that my father was a hardline oilman who was not going to take kindly to his son developing the technology to cut into his profits. He had also witnessed the results of my father's violent temper, but we had an unspoken agreement never to discuss this aspect of my family.
When I approached my father about starting my own business, he told me in no uncertain terms that I could either pursue a master's or step into a position at Wallace Oil: those were my only two options. So, I'd started down the road to the Master's degree, but a year into it, I'd realized that all the theoretical knowledge I was amassing wasn't anywhere near as interesting as working with my best friend to try and make our dream a reality. In the middle of the spring semester, I quit school and took an entry-level job in R&D at my father's company. It had been the kind of job that kept me busy enough, but not so busy that I couldn't spend part of my work day consulting with Bugsy on turbine designs and possible investment avenues. For the past four years, I'd split my time between the bogus job at Wallace Oil and my project with Bugsy. Now that I found myself without a job and exiled from my family, I was unsure what the next step was going to be.
"It was cold. They're both cold, and I'm just a tool in their game," I replied. "The question is, what am I going to do now? I've got few assets and no place to live, and I'm definitely not going to marry that girl. I don't care if she's queen of the universe with the face of an angel and the body of a porn star."
"Hmmm, you sure you don't want to reconsider? Well, you're welcome to stay with me as long as you need to," Bugsy said as he motioned me over toward a display he'd had set up in one corner of the office. Agape Resources' offices were, in reality, a space that had once been leased by the Church of the Divine, a fly-by-night religious ministry that had moved out quickly, leaving the office space full of church-related materials that Bugsy had incorporated into the office layout. Bugsy hadn't bothered to remodel. Instead, he'd set up his desk on the platform where the preacher had given his Sunday sermons and put my desk at the bottom of the steps, making me the single member of the co-worker congregation. I hadn't even gotten a desk chair; instead, I sat on a wooden pew, which, in all honesty, made for the perfect place to stretch out and think when things got stressful.
"I was thinking maybe we could move up the northern Indiana project, and I could go on the road," I suggested as Bugsy handed me a stack of printouts that he'd dug out of the bottom of a pile of papers. He wasn't neat, but there was a definite order to his disorganization.
"Take a look at that report," he said as if he hadn't heard me. "It talks about the potential for individual power generation. Harvard did the study."
"Did you hear me?" I asked as I sat down on a step and began reading the introduction to the study. Irritated, I muttered, "I already saw that one. In fact, I was the one who gave it to you, Bugs."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard you," he muttered as he tapped the keyboard and then printed something out. He walked over to the printer, pulled out the sheets of paper, and then walked over to me where he sat down and handed me the sheets. "Here's your car rental, a room at the local Amish B&B, and a list of contacts for Corner Grove. Why don't you hold off on leaving for a few days and we'll celebrate your independence?"
"What the hell?" I said as I took the papers. "When did you do this?"
"Eh, I've been working on the Indiana project for a while now," he said. "Piece by piece, my friend, that's how you eat the whole elephant."
"Are you on drugs?" I asked looking up at him on his platform.
"No, but that could be arranged. Interested?" he asked. When I shook my head, he continued, "C'mon, Wallace, we need to cut loose and have some fun! Besides, I've already arranged a night of pure debauchery for us."
"What the hell, Bugs?"
"I'm always three steps ahead of you when it comes to planning," he said grinning mischievously. "We'll head out to the clubs and throw a blowout bash to end all parties. We'll get the usual suspects to pony up and foot the bill, and then we'll rake in some cash to fund the next phase of Agape's development."
"Are you serious?" I asked.
"As a heart attack, my friend," he grinned. "I'm serious, Adam. We can fund this thing fully if we play our cards right. We'll get some investments and we'll plough them back into the business and fund your trip. Plus, we'll have some fun doing it. Don't tell me you've forgotten how to have fun!"
"What do you think?" I shot back defensively.
"Now that's the spirit!" Bugsy said as he cheerfully punched my shoulder. He turned serious for a moment and said, "You know you're going to have to live on a budget while you're selling the project, don't you? Can you do that?"
"You're an asshole, you know that?" I said shaking my head. "I practically live like a monk."
"Uh huh, a monk who wears Prada and Ferragamo," he said with a knowing look. "Look, all I'm saying is that you need to keep the expenses to the absolute minimum on this trip, but you need to make it look like we have all the money in the world. We need to land the contract and get the turbines into production with the money we have right now. We can't afford any additional expenses because my dad's investment money runs out at the end of the summer. I want to put as much as possible in savings so we don't have to cut corners on the design elements."
"I get it, I get it," I said waving him off without looking up from the report I was reading. Bugsy had always respected the fact that I remembered more of the technical details than he did, and that my methods of researching and designing the turbines had been what had gotten us to this point. He was the public face of Agape Resources, but he never failed to acknowledge that we were equal partners in the business. I muttered as I read, "Besides, I'll only need to be down there for two days—three at the most.
"I hope that's all the time you'll need. What do you think?" he asked after I'd quickly skimmed the report.
"I think we'd better get moving on our plan or else these engineers are going to beat us to the punch," I said seriously. "They've got a lot more funding behind them and since they're being touted by Harvard and its alumni, they'll get more publicity. However, I'm not convinced that their turbine can beat ours."
"Well, there's that good news," Bugsy said with a grim smile as he ran a hand through his tousled, blond curls. Over the past few months, he'd morphed his look from modern old-school gangster to hygienic surfer dude. It wasn't the first time Bugsy had changed his look, but I knew this look wouldn't last long because it didn't offer the seriousness he was going to need as he negotiated contracts.
I, on the other hand, had a look that hadn't changed much since the fourth grade. Tall and lanky with dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and full lips, I'd occasionally let my curly black mop of hair grow only to head into the barber and request that he hack it back into a more tamed look. But no matter what I did with it, my hair always looked slightly wild, making me always appear to be more serious than I actually was. I attributed part of this to the fact that next to Bugsy, everyone looked serious."
"So, let's get this party started, shall we?" Bugsy said as he began tapping the screen on his phone. He scrolled through his contacts and zeroed in on the gang he wanted to fund tonight's action.
While I finished rereading the Harvard study and making notes on the plans, Bugsy called around and found a bar in the South Loop that was willing to host the festivities. In true Bugsy fashion, he arranged for everything to be ready to go in a short period of time, and then winked at me as he finished his last call.
"Let's go have a sauna at the club and then grab some dinner," he said as he tucked the phone in his front pocket and motioned toward the door. "Tonight we're going to let it all hang out, my good friend! We’ve got ten days until you’ve got to get out and sell, sell, sell! Let’s make the most of it!"
I knew from experience that this statement could have many different meanings, but I'd also learned that it was usually better not to try and anticipate what they might be.
#
"Will you look at that?" Bugsy said as he flashed me a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. When we pulled up at the front door of Blast, Bugsy's nightclub of choice, there was a line stretching out almost two blocks. Club kids dressed in a wide array of designer clothes texted each other as they waited to find out if they'd be deemed worthy of entry.
"This is insane!" I said as Bugsy tossed the keys to his black Audi R8, a graduation gift from his parents, to the valet and warned him not to scratch it.