by Susan Wolfe
“Our team-building nut-flipper?” Zack said, grinning.
Ken flushed as his eyes flicked to Georgia and away again. “Buck Gibbons, yes. What should we do about him? Zack, let’s start with you.”
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be any question that Buck flipped Ben’s nuts, since Glen saw it happen. In spite of Glen’s ridiculous statement about team building, I think it pretty much amounted to a sexual assault. Can you imagine if Buck did that to a woman?”
Ken held up a cautionary palm. “Well, but he didn’t do it to a woman. He did it to a man. Any chance that would fall outside the definition of sexual harassment?”
“You mean, no sexual intent? I doubt it.” Zack was hunched forward, resting his forearms comfortably on his loose-fitting khakis. “Why would a guy do that except with sexual intent?”
Ken shrugged. “Just trying to humiliate him? No better, of course, just different. Anyway, please continue.”
“In any case, we’re still on notice of a harmful or offensive touching. Can you imagine our liability if he ever does this again? Can you imagine the publicity in the Wall Street Journal? I say we fire him, unless he has some compelling explanation.”
Georgia snorted. “And what would that be? A signed invitation from Ben?”
Ken turned to her. “So I take it you agree with Zack?”
Did everybody like being asked their opinion this much? She sat up a little straighter. “Well, I agree we ought to fire Buck, but Glen loves the guy.”
“Loves the revenue he brings in,” Ken clarified.
“But if we don’t fire him,” Georgia continued, “will Ben sue us?”
Zack shook his head confidently. “Don’t think so, as long as we protect his job. Doesn’t seem much like a troublemaker to me.”
“That’s my biggest concern,” Ken said, “both from a human and a legal standpoint. If we don’t fire Buck, how do we protect Ben Larkin’s job?”
“My concern is that he’ll keep doing it,” Georgia said, “because he won’t be able to stop. I mean, would you do that even once if you could stop yourself?”
Ken’s green eyes flashed with suppressed laughter. “Sorry, Georgia, that’s one I’m really not equipped to answer.” She wished those eyes of his were slightly less attractive. The bow ties truthfully didn’t counteract them much.
“Who cares what Glen’s opinion is?” Zack threw his hands wide above the table. “He doesn’t run the company. Surely Roy’s gonna see we have to fire him.”
Ken allowed one vertebra to sag slightly. “Don’t think so, Zack. His gut reaction will be to protect the revenue, same as Glen. But I agree, it’s too risky to keep Buck around after this.” He snapped the vertebra back into correct military formation. “Thanks, guys. I’ll take it from here.”
Now that Georgia had organized the Futuresoft diligence documents, she was spending time with the employees who came down to the basement room to review them. This afternoon she was reading employment agreements with a young woman from Human Resources, whom Georgia had silently nicknamed Prim Lucy. Every hair Prim Lucy owned had been sprayed into rigid submission. Thick, coke-bottle lenses dragged her pink plastic frames down her nose, so that she constantly scooted them up again.
“Oh!” Prim Lucy said, looking at her watch. “Almost six already. I have to go.” She jumped up, smoothing the skirt of a shapeless, tan dress with a priestly collar. “I’m due at my mom’s to make dinner.”
“That’s nice of you.”
She pushed her glasses up her nose.” Well, she’s in a wheelchair, so it’s not easy for her to get out any more. My sister goes over there on Sundays, and I do dinner every Wednesday.”
“You should get going, then. I’ll put this stuff away.”
A few minutes later Georgia glanced up through the strip of window into the parking lot and was surprised to see Prim Lucy climb into a bright red Mini Cooper with black racing stripes and zoom out the back exit. How exactly did that car fit with coke bottle glasses?
She snapped the agreements back into their binder, then climbed to the second floor conference room and called Katie-Ann.
“Katie-Ann, it’s me. Can you talk?”
“No problem. Mama’s got the TV on and she’s, you know.”
“Johnny’s not there?”
“Nope. Haven’t seen him all day.”
“Okay. Well, I signed the lease yesterday.”
“We have an apartment?”
“Yep.”
“Oh my God, that’s fabulous!”
“I know. I was so excited I went straight to Salvation Army and bought two pots with lids and some serving spoons.”
“Please tell me our life isn’t going to be that boring when I get there.”
“When you get here we will party big time, I promise. I pick the key up on the 30th. Gonna be a little under-furnished for a while.”
“Who cares? I love camping. You have my sleeping bag, right?”
“Right there in my trunk with the new pots. Now I can go next week and get you registered for school. I checked the Greyhound schedule. You can walk into Searcy and catch the 3 p.m. bus on the Friday before Labor Day. Then you change to the bus for San Jose in Little Rock, and you’ll be here by Sunday noon.”
“Hope I can sleep on the bus.”
“You sleep anywhere, Katie-Ann. Just pretend you’re in geometry.”
“Cut it out. I got a B.”
“Nice. How’s your money?”
“I’ll have enough for the bus fare by the end of this week, so I should have some extra by the time of the trip.”
“Just don’t spend it on cigarettes, okay?” Stubborn silence. “How are your clothes?”
“Getting there. I sneak out one backpackful a day to my school locker. Doing pajamas and stuff next.” She lowered her voice and almost whispered into the phone, “Can’t believe it’s only two weeks now.”
“Just two more weeks to avoid Johnny’s laying on of hands.”
“I can do it.”
“I know you can. You’re locking your bedroom door?”
“Yeah, but he and Mama are gonna be madder’n yellow jackets if they figure that out.”
“If they figure it out, that means you needed your door locked, Katie-Ann. We have to make sure he doesn’t get a whiff of this trip you’re taking. He’s the one that would be upset.”
Katie-Ann was silent a moment, and Georgia pictured her winding a strand of blond hair around her finger. “I just hope he doesn’t drop Mama like a hot potato when he finds out I’m gone.”
“She’ll be better off if he does. Maybe she’ll wake up and realize what a hypocrite he is. Mama’s a great big grown-up, you know. She needs to save herself.” Now Katie-Ann’s silence sounded sad. “Listen, we’ll call her as soon as you’re out here. We’ll tell her it’s temporary, just until she gets back on her feet. She’ll be okay.”
“I got an extra shift at the WhistleStop, Georgia.”
“Way to hustle. Heard any more about Robbie?”
“No. Deke hasn’t paraded any more ugly girlfriends through, either.”
“Good on both counts. Well, I guess we’d better hang up now. I’ll try to call you again before the big day. You have my number at work in case you need anything?”
“I have it. Bye, Georgia. I’m thrilled about the apartment.”
She sat in the passenger seat of her car that night, teeth brushed, doors locked, gazing up through the windshield at Orion glittering in the night sky. They had the apartment. Katie-Ann had her ticket money. They were ready for the school year. Grit and determination had caused these wonderful circumstances to converge. This wasn’t yet escape velocity, but with Georgia’s able assistance Katie-Ann Griffin was about to launch.
CHAPTER 8
Georgia and Zack were the first to arrive for their Crooks and Dirt document review. (She’d been warned never to call it that around Bland Burt.) Burt arrived late, while Zack was under the table plugging in his laptop, and he sho
ved Zack’s laptop aside and supplanted him at the head of the table. “Before we start,” Burt announced, “I want to point out that I have a mandate from Roy to get this deal done and signed in the next five days.”
Zack hoisted himself up from the floor and agreeably moved to a side seat. “Great. Hope we can do it. Let’s start with Lucy regarding HR.” Ah yes. Prim Lucy, who made dinner for her mom on Wednesday nights. Andrea began juggling her pen in its customary figure eight around the knuckles of her right hand.
“This little company has been sued five times by its own employees in three years,” Lucy warned as she pushed her heavy glasses up her nose. “That just sets off alarm bells for a company this size. We need to follow up with interviews, make sure the employees are committed to the company.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Burt stated firmly. “The investment bankers and CEO assure me that the employees are very happy. They don’t want us in there disrupting people while they’re trying to run the business.”
Honestly. What else would the bankers say, when they were the ones trying to sell the company? Georgia sighed. It was just sad her father was stuck in jail with this fat, luscious Burt pigeon strutting up and back under everyone’s nose. It would be heaven to watch his feathers shoot forty feet in the air.
“Well, this is my recommendation to Sally,” Lucy reiterated. “I’m sure she’d be happy to hear your perspective, Burt.”
Interesting. Lucy had that schoolmarmish way of dressing, with her body-concealing dresses and those pink, coke-bottle glasses, but she confidently stood her ground with the likes of Burt Plowfield. And she had those racing stripes on her car.
“Thanks, Lucy,” Zack said. “Let’s move to Georgia and Jill on key contracts.”
Jill Chamberlain, their outside lawyer from Woodrow, Mantella, had a bad haircut and rumpled suit that made her look like an unmade bed. After working with her for several days, Georgia admired her as a bottomless well of patience and expertise.
“Most of the contracts we reviewed are in decent shape,” Jill told the group. “However . . .” The word ‘however’ caused Andrea to stop juggling her pen. “. . . they do seem to have dangerous agreements with two of our major competitors. They sold unlimited product to Cordova and Oracle for a flat fee, including rights to all future related products.”
“That’s no problem,” Burt explained. “Once we acquire them, there won’t be any future related products.”
“I’m afraid it’s the opposite,” Jill corrected him. “If you ever integrate one piece of Futuresoft code into your Lumina code—which of course you will—your two chief competitors can claim that every one of your products is a ‘related product’ and try to get them for free.”
“Oh no,” Quan said quietly, touching the wire temples of his glasses. “And could they modify and sell them?”
“Yes,” Jill confirmed. “That’s exactly what they could do.”
“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Zack said, dropping his forearms heavily onto the table.
“Deal-killer,” Andrea pronounced.
“So how do we fix it?” Burt asked. “Remember, Roy wants this deal done in the next five days.”
“I think,” Jill said, wincing slightly in anticipation of Burt’s response, “Futuresoft has to go back and renegotiate those contracts.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Burt snapped. “The minute they try it, Oracle will know something’s up and jack the price sky high.” His tone suddenly turned patient. “Okay, Jill and Georgia, you girls have done a good job of bringing this to my attention, but now I think it’s time to turn it over to my team to take it from here.” Take it and bury it somewhere, no doubt.
“Well,” Jill replied evenly, “we’ll report our findings to Ken, and he’ll guide us on next steps.”
“Don’t bother with that,” Burt said generously. “You girls just leave it with me, and I’ll work it out with Ken.”
“You keep saying ‘girls,’” Andrea noted, glancing around with mock curiosity. “Are there children in this room?”
“Oh, pardon me. Lay-dees. I know some lay-dees who prefer to be called girls.”
Andrea laughed cheerfully. “Is there a special school to learn ‘patronizing,’ Burt, or is it all natural talent?”
So Bland Burt had a nasty little tiger in his tank. They should definitely get Futuresoft’s woman lawyer into that negotiating room. She glanced at Quan, who caught her eye and nodded to acknowledge he was thinking the same thing.
“Let’s move on,” Zack said briskly, “to Quan and Andrea on intellectual property.”
Quan held up some papers. “We’ve learned that Futuresoft freely uses open source in their product, including GPL licensed code. You all know what GPL is?” Georgia knew open source was free software you could download from the Internet, but she wrote “GPL?” on her notepad.
“GPL is a special subset of open source, isn’t it?” Zack offered. “It turns all your code into open source.”
“Exactly. If you integrate free GPL source code into your own private source code, then you have to make your entire product available for free as well. It completely destroys the commercial value of your software.”
Was she hearing this correctly? Next to ‘GPL’ she wrote ‘Greatly Poisons Lucre?’
“Well, that can’t be right,” Burt protested. “How has Futuresoft gotten around it?”
“It appears Futuresoft is so small that nobody ever noticed, and demanded free software,” Quan replied.
“Well, they’ve been around for almost ten years,” Burt said. “If nobody’s noticed it by now, it’s nothing to worry about.”
“We need to worry about it a lot, I’m afraid,” Andrea said. “We could gut the value of our intellectual property. For this very reason, by the way, we warrant to Microsoft that our code contains no GPL of any kind.”
“Good point,” Quan confirmed. “If we acquire their software the way it is now, we’ll be in immediate breach of our warranties to Microsoft.”
Okay, so she was hearing it right. She crossed out the question mark after Greatly Poisons Lucre. This whole Futuresoft deal was starting to smell like a hog pen at high noon.
“Well, so what’s the solution?” Burt demanded. His round, white face had turned a mottled red.
“They have to get the GPL code out of their product before we buy it,” Andrea stated.
“They’ll never agree to that,” Burt growled with disgust. “This is ridiculous. I’m going to take it to the investment bankers.”
“You should,” Andrea agreed, “and I’ll talk to the two founders in charge of the code. It’s not a deal breaker, just some work. But they’ve got to understand this isn’t negotiable.”
“Everything’s negotiable,” Burt snapped. “If you could just find a way to talk to the other side so they don’t feel like their manhood is at risk.”
All action in the room ceased. For an instant Andrea looked genuinely puzzled. “Manhood?” she repeated. “Oh, I get it. Your imitation of a fifties moron.” She nodded appreciatively, eyebrows elevated. “Convincing. But shouldn’t we focus on our deal? Two problems if we let them think it’s negotiable. First, it’ll slow things down while they fight about it, and second, they’ll eventually feel like we’ve pulled the rug out from under them when they have to do it anyway.”
Burt’s face was now an alarming, dark red. “I abso. . . !”
“It sounds like Andrea and Burt will talk to their respective counterparts,” Quan summarized helpfully.
“Great.” Zack stood up, practically shooing them from the room. “I’d say we’re done. Ten minutes early, too. Thanks everybody. See you Thursday.”
Georgia watched quietly while everyone but Zack grabbed their laptops and hurried from the room. “Wow,” she said as the door to the stairwell banged shut, “does this dry business stuff always get people so riled up?”
“More than you’d expect,” he acknowledged. “Business is done by people, and pe
ople can be pretty emotional.”
“Do Burt and Andrea hate each other?”
He grinned. “They don’t seem to like each other much, do they? But they do make a fine vaudeville team.”
“That’s a positive take on it.”
“Yeah, I get accused of being positive sometimes. Even by my wife. I remember when she was pregnant, she had a lot of freaky, vivid dreams. One morning she clutched my arm and said, ‘Zack! I dreamed our baby was born without a head!’ So I said ‘Oh, Cindy, don’t worry. If the baby’s born without a head, we’ll give it the best life it can possibly have.’”
Georgia snorted. “Okay, but are you feeling positive about this Futuresoft deal? The problems seem insurmountable.”
“They do, don’t they?” He tucked his laptop under his arm and headed for the door. “I think it’ll probably work out, but now you know my outlook.”
“How cool is this!” Nikki exclaimed quietly over her shoulder as they followed the elegant young hostess to their table at Evvia restaurant. Seen from behind, Nikki’s tight jeans and high boots accentuated the grace of her healthy body. Georgia’s jeans were squeaky clean, and her second-hand black Ralph Lauren shirt fit well enough. After three sweaty nights sleeping in her car, she’d stood for twenty minutes in the hot shower at the office gym just to steam the grit out of her pores and feel she belonged in this fancy Palo Alto restaurant. Which had sort of worked. She was probably still the only person in the room trying not to smell like alfalfa.
Over the tops of their menus, they took in the noisy atmosphere of the deep, cool room. Light from the open rotisserie fire danced on the high oak beam ceilings and flickered on the gleaming, hammered copper pots hanging above the open kitchen. Bottles of different shapes and sizes had been filled with brightly colored liquid, arranged on shelves, and then backlit on the rear wall. Nikki accepted the wine list, and said, “Don’t you just love this place? I still can’t believe you jumped higher than all those guys on the trampoline. You won the big prize, and now I get to share it with you.”