by RM Johnson
8
At 8:30 A.M. Nate stood in the parking garage of the high-rise he lived in, wearing a gray Versace suit, his briefcase in one hand and an umbrella in the other, for it looked as though there could be rain approaching.
He waited for the valet attendant to bring around his car, which was taking a little longer than it should’ve, even though Nate had pressed a fifty-dollar bill into the middle-aged white man’s hand upon seeing him.
He could’ve as easily arranged for a limo to pick him up for the short trip to work in the mornings. It wouldn’t have cost him anything; he could have just written it off as a business expense. But Nate enjoyed driving himself in what he considered one of the most beautiful automobiles ever made. Two years ago, he had purchased the ’62 Bentley, which of course was now a classic. Only ten or twelve were still running in the world. He had bought it at an auction for the very nice price of $150,000, but he was sure that now, with the added work he had had done to it, it was worth almost a quarter of a million.
Nate turned his head to see the valet attendant finally driving up with his car. The man came around the corner very slowly, pulled up to the curb cautiously, making sure not to brush the whitewall tires. He threw the car in park, then quickly hopped out and held the door open for Nate.
“Sorry for the delay, Mr. Kenny. One of the other valets had parked very near to your car, and I didn’t want to take a chance in pulling yours out until the other one was moved. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“Thank you, Collins,” Nate said, slapping the man on the shoulder, then lowering himself into his car. “I can always depend on you to take care of my baby.”
When the elevator doors opened, Nate stepped around the wall of people that had crowded in after him, and exited onto the floor that was solely dedicated to his business.
The words KENNY CORPORATION, in huge silver letters, were fixed to the wall above the reception area, where two beautiful women, wearing headsets, took and directed calls.
“Good morning, Mr. Kenny,” both women said, almost in unison.
“Good morning,” Nate said, his words barely audible, as he walked past them.
He walked through cubicles on his left, consultation areas on his right, where his employees worked busily at their stations, making phone calls, checking stock quotes, and following up on leads that could be profitable buys.
“Good morning, Mr. Kenny.” “Morning, sir,” more of his employees said as he quickly passed them. There were ninety-seven of them in all, from the lowest entry-level employee to his highest senior vice president. He interviewed, hired, paid the salaries of each one of them, and fired them if necessary. He was the reason they were here, could make a living, provide for their families and themselves.
Nate continued walking, down the corridor that led to the executive offices, and out the other end, which led to the lounge. He stopped there, stood in front of the large flat-screen plasma television, which aired financial news reports twenty-four hours a day.
He walked to the back wall, which was made entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out upon the northwest side of Chicago. There was a beautiful view of the skyline, Lake Michigan, and the far North Side.
He stood there, very close to the glass, looking out. He hadn’t appreciated this view in so long, hadn’t really appreciated his success in quite a while as well, and it was a shame it took someone threatening all of it for that to be brought to his attention.
One year after his marriage to Monica, he decided to venture out, leave the brokerage firm he was working for, and open his own. When he had told Monica that he was waiting to find the right woman and settle down before he took that risk, he was not lying to her. He needed that stability; he needed a woman that he knew he could trust, that would allow him to take care of his business at work and assure him that everything would be fine at home. Monica did that for him.
But over the four years they had been married, Monica was more to him than just a supporter. She was his partner, his best friend.
He remembered the times they had had before she lied to him about the baby. They used to have so much fun together, just sharing each other’s company, and then Nate thought about the last time they made love. It was two weeks ago, and as he gazed up into her face, he couldn’t believe how fortunate he was.
Afterward, she hugged him from behind, kissed the nape of his neck, and told him how much she loved him. He smiled, feeling perfect contentment, knowing that he had done the right thing by marrying this woman.
But now, Nate realized, the woman he married, the woman that knew how much family meant to him, had sabotaged his opportunity to have what he’d always wanted, and now, because he told her that divorce had entered his mind, she wanted to take everything he had.
That would not happen, Nate thought, stepping away from the window and walking purposefully back toward the entrance to his offices. That would never happen. If it was the last thing he did, he would stop her.
9
Monica was unable to go in to work the morning after her husband had refused to make love to her. After he had forced her off him the night before, Monica carried herself, tears streaming down her face and all, into the bathroom.
She tried quieting her sobbing as best she could, turned on the water faucet, making it more difficult for her husband to hear how badly she was crying, but she doubted it did much good.
She stood at the mirror, leaning hard on the sink, her legs feeling almost too weak to support her. The tears were still pouring from her puffy eyes, her body continuing to tremble from emotion.
She had not thought it would be this way, had not expected anything to stop her from being a mother, and she had never thought that her husband would react to it the way he had.
Why me? was all she could ask herself, and she wondered just how bad her situation with her husband really was.
He had practically thrown her out of bed, after waking up and looking at her as though she repulsed him. Where did they stand? It was a question Monica could not begin to answer.
After washing her face with a hot cloth and stopping her crying as best she could, she quietly moved back out into their bedroom. The light had been turned off, Nate sleeping on his side. Monica slipped in the bed beside him, wanting to move closer to him, wrap her arms around him, regardless of what he did, but she just remained on her side of the bed.
When she awoke the next morning, the first thing she did was call Tabatha.
“I won’t be able to make it this morning. Something happened.”
“Are you all right?” Tabatha asked, and Monica could hear the concern in her best friend’s voice.
“Me and Nate are at it again, that’s all.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” Monica said, needing to hurry off the phone for fear that she would start crying again. “It’s up to me to find out what needs to be done.”
Monica had spent all morning in her darkened bedroom, the drapes drawn closed, the blankets pulled up over her head. She stayed there, curled in a ball under those covers, trying to find some solution to the problem she was facing, and after almost four hours of racking her brain, she told herself there was only one answer.
When she reached this decision, automatically she started to feel a little better. She climbed from bed, not bothering to slip on a robe or slippers, because with each step she took, she felt her excitement regarding the idea building a little more.
By the time Monica reached the middle of the long hallway that led to her husband’s office, she was almost running across the long expensive Persian rug under her feet.
Nate’s office door was closed as it always was, but she threw it open, rushed around the huge old oak desk, and plopped down into the leather executive chair.
Monica quickly surveyed the wide desk. It was cluttered but organized, and she would try not to disturb any of the papers he had stacked on different areas of its surface.
She rea
ched over and clicked on the banker’s lamp, noticing the snapshot of her and Nate smiling during their trip to Australia.
That seemed like another life, Monica thought to herself, as she swiveled around to the far side of his desk, where her husband kept his laptop. She lifted it open, waited for the screen to refresh itself, then she grabbed the mouse and clicked the Web icon.
Monica was still excited, but she was also starting to worry a little as she clicked to open a search engine.
When she told herself that this was the only chance that her marriage had left, she was not kidding herself. If this didn’t work, she was almost certain nothing would.
Monica closed her eyes, said a tiny prayer, then, in the box provided, typed in the word “adoption.”
10
The day was a beautiful one. Nate squinted against the bright sunlight warming his face as he walked alongside Tim, his younger brother by two years. Oftentimes when Nate was bothered by a problem he could not seem to solve by himself, he would go to his brother for advice. He had been doing this since he was eight years old and Tim was six, and things had not changed a bit.
“Tim, what are you doing?” Nate asked him over the phone this afternoon around lunchtime.
“I’m trying to write, but nothing’s coming. Why?”
“Because I need to talk. Can you meet me at the park around the house in about half an hour?”
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be getting anything good down today, anyway.”
Tim was a writer. He had published in a number of small periodicals, had a story published in an anthology or two, but he had not yet scored a novel. That was what he really wanted, what he devoted the last ten years of his life to, and he was fortunate enough to have a wife like Robin, who allowed him to pursue such a lofty goal.
Nate and Tim walked side by side, slowly, down the center path of the park. Children laughed, yelled, and played as their parents sat on benches, conversing, admiring their children.
“What are we doing here, Nate?”
“Told you. I wanted to talk,” Nate said, looking ahead as though he was entranced.
“We could’ve talked at a bar, had a beer or something. We didn’t have to come here.”
“What’s wrong with here? It’s gorgeous out here. I thought you’d want to get out, enjoy the day a little. Besides,” Nate said, stopping in front of a bench, sitting down, “don’t you like to come out here and watch all the kids playing? I mean, look at them. All of them smiling, running around, not a thing to think or worry about. It reminds me of us when we were their age. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Tim said. There was reluctance in his voice as he sat beside his brother.
“Remember when Dad used to bring us here every weekend? You don’t miss that?” Nate said, turning to his brother, a wistful smile on his face.
“Not really.”
“That’s probably because you’re out here every weekend yourself, tossing the football to Kevin.”
“Nate, I don’t really want to talk about this.”
The smile fell from Nate’s lips, because he knew why his brother didn’t want to talk about it. Tim’s wife, Robin, had given him two beautiful children, an eight-year-old boy named Kevin and a girl, ten years old, named Michelle.
Nate spent so much time with his niece and nephew that Tim often kidded him by asking him was he really their father.
“It’s all in preparation for when I have my family. Just want to make sure how to do it right,” Nate said, always so happy when he was speaking of his future family.
But one night, past 1 A.M., Tim’s phone rang. When he picked it up, it was Nate.
“What are you doing?” Nate asked. His words were badly slurred.
“I’m sleeping.” Tim’s voice was groggy, barely over a whisper. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“Meet me. I want to talk.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. At a bar.”
“Which one, Nate?”
“Don’t know. Just a bar. It says ‘bar’ outside on the door, I guess.”
After Tim convinced Nate to pass his cell phone to someone in the bar so that Tim could get directions, he hurried out.
When Tim arrived at the bar half an hour later, there was an ambulance out in front, red-and-blue lights flashing.
Tim hurried out of his car, rushed to the door of the bar to find paramedics hauling his brother, Nate, out on a stretcher.
“I’m his brother. What’s wrong with him!” Tim yelled over the shoulder of one of the EMTs.
“Alcohol poisoning,” the paramedic yelled back to him.
Tim rode with Nate to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, and after he was taken in the emergency room, had his stomach pumped, and had sobered up some, Nate had told Tim why he had gotten so drunk that he could’ve died.
“I’ll never have any children,” Nate remembered telling Tim.
And now, Nate knew this was why his brother didn’t want to talk about anything dealing with kids. He was obviously afraid his big brother would flip out again, go and try to hang himself from the swing set out there in the center of the park or something.
“I’m sorry for bringing this all up again,” Nate said.
“No. It’s nothing to be sorry about. I just don’t want you getting all down again about it.”
“I understand. There’s just some stuff that I’ve been thinking about.” Just then a football landed and rolled toward Nate’s feet. There was a young boy running in Nate’s direction. Nate picked up the ball from the grass.
“Hey! Go out!” Nate yelled to the boy, holding the football behind his head like a quarterback and waving him farther out, as if he were about to throw a touchdown pass.
The boy did as he was told, and Nate threw the ball. It was a perfect spiral, and it landed softly in the running boy’s arms.
“Thanks, mister!” the boy called.
Nate sat down with a huge grin on his face.
“Now what stuff did you say was on your mind?” Tim asked.
Nate still looked toward the boy. “That stuff. I wanted a son, a family. I still want one,” Nate said, turning to Tim, seriousness on his face.
“You’re going to adopt?”
“No. I want my children to be biologically mine.”
“But you said Monica can’t—”
“I’m not talking about with Monica,” Nate said, cutting his brother off.
“How, then?”
“I’m thinking about looking into divorce.”
Tim looked at his brother, his mouth slightly open, astonishment on his face. “You’re going to divorce her,” he gasped.
“I didn’t say I was going to. I said I was going to look into the possibility. I have an appointment later this afternoon,” Nate said, still eyeing the boy across the park, tossing the ball. A slight smile came to his face as he saw the boy run for a touchdown and spike the ball.
“Nate, I can’t tell you all the reasons why you would be wrong to even consider that.”
“Then don’t. I didn’t really ask you here to get your opinion anyway. I just wanted to let you know what I was thinking,” Nate said, standing.
“You know how I feel about Monica,” Tim said. “I thought she was perfect for you the first day you introduced me to her. She doesn’t deserve this. Just think it over before you do something you’ll regret.”
Nate didn’t respond to his brother’s warning, just went into his shirt pocket, pulled out a folded personal check, holding it out for his little brother to take.
“I don’t want that,” Tim said.
“I know you don’t. But since you want to continue to pursue your writing, and won’t come and work for me, I think you probably need this.”
Tim was standing now, looking at the check being held out to him.
“Go on, take it,” Nate urged. “If not for yourself, for Robin and the kids.”
Tim reluctantly did what he
was told.
Nate grabbed Tim by the shoulders, pulled him in and gave him a hug, and clapped him twice on the back.
“Thanks for meeting me out here. And don’t worry about things on my end. Everything will be fine.”
11
After three hours of searching adoption agencies, both locally and nationally, Monica felt she had all the information she needed to go to the next step. She just didn’t know when she would take it.
She had mentioned adoption to Nate the same day that it was confirmed that she would never have children, but her husband quickly disagreed with the idea. Nate probably was far too distraught to have actually been able to rationally think it through. She knew now she should’ve waited a little longer, till he recovered from the shock of it all.
Time had gone by, though, and she figured if she just went about things the right way, presented it to him in such a manner that he understood they had no other recourse than to adopt a child, he would go along with her.
Out of the three adoption agencies in the Chicago area, one stood out. The True Home Adoption Agency. Monica read all the pages of information available to her from their Web site, even printed out some of the information.
She pulled a manila folder from her husband’s desk drawer, made a file, then shut the machine down.
She leaned back in the chair, the folder resting on her knees, a content smile on her face, feeling as though she had found the solution. Everything was in the file before her. She’d do some further investigation in a couple of days, and then, maybe even go down there.
But then again, Monica looked at the clock. It was only three in the afternoon. She could throw on some things in fifteen minutes, and…Monica flipped open the file, checked for the address…She could make it to the adoption agency in nothing more than forty minutes.
Monica found the phone number, called the agency, and made sure it would be okay if she visited today. Afterward, she quickly ran to her bedroom, preparing to take a shower, when the phone rang.