by Melissa Good
Chino’s ears perked. She went to the sliding door and stood waiting, her tail lashing back and forth.
“That dog understood what I just said.”
“Yeap.”
“Is that normal?”
KERRY STOOD WITH her hands on Dar’s shoulders as Dar studied a series of printed pages in front of her. “Is it a mess?”
Dar settled back and folded her arms. “It’s a mess.”
“Ah huh.”
“They all have to be rebuilt,” Dar said. “It’s a lot of work.”
“You don’t want to do it?” Kerry leaned forward a little and pressed her body against Dar’s. “Let me rephrase the question. Of course you don’t want to waste your time fixing someone else’s screw up. But you don’t want to do it just because you don’t want to do it.”
“I don’t,” Dar admitted. “I keep looking at these and knowing what effort was put into designing them and the thought some moron just screwed them up is making me nuts.”
“Well, hon...”
“Yes, I know. I offered. We should make it a rule that you stand next to me when I’m on the phone with a roll of duct tape ready.” Dar pushed the sheets aside and pulled over her laptop. “Let me get started on this.”
Kerry kept up her massage, reasoning that no words were appropriate. She glanced over Dar’s shoulder as she started to setup a work session on the large, crisp screen, her body relaxing after a few minutes as she pecked at the keyboard.
Dar was a fast typist. She seemed to not need a connection between her eyeballs and what she was typing and it was a little odd to Kerry to watch those flying fingers and not hear the rattling smack of their older style keyboards. “These laptops are a lot quieter.”
“They sure are. Softer on your fingertips, too.” Dar nudged one of the sheets over with her elbow. “I could probably work on this all night and not keep you up.”
“Like I would let you?”
Dar glanced up over her shoulder and smiled, got a kiss on the top of her head, then went back to typing.
“Can I help you with the setup?” Kerry asked after a few minutes of quiet. “I can see what you’re doing there. Send me the rest of those files and I’ll get them ready for you.”
Dar opened up her mail program without even a grunt of protest and Kerry went over to get her own laptop, settling in the round, almost comfortable, hotel chair next to the desk and flexed her hands. “Glad we picked a hotel with Wi-Fi.”
“Maria put it in our travel profile,” Dar said absently. “Wi-Fi, room service, and big, fluffy king size beds.”
Kerry looked up over the screen of her laptop, one eyebrow lifting. But it seemed Dar was serious so she just chuckled and shook her head.
She retrieved the files from her mail and opened them, placing them onto her desktop while she prepared to work with them.
Plain text files. There was nothing complicated about the configuration in that sense. It was just something edited in a text editor, full of lines of cryptic commands that made the routing system work.
But they were exact and unforgiving. Kerry sighed. “Are you commenting these?”
“No. Fuck them,” Dar said, in a cranky tone. “If they want to know why I do things the way I do them they can read the design archives. Unless they deleted those, too.”
“Want some hot tea?’
“Meh.”
“How about some ice cream?” Kerry tapped at her keys. “Or a milkshake?”
“That has possibilities.”
CECI AND ANDREW were tucked into an outside table at the Italian restaurant on the island, both dogs sitting patiently nearby. “Do you suppose that fellow is going to come out and meet with us?” Ceci nibbled on a bread stick, looking forward to a vegetable lasagna and some minestrone soup.
Andy shrugged. “Knows what’s good for him he won’t.” He picked up a frosty mug of root beer and took a swallow. “What the hell’s he going to say about it, Cec?”
“Maybe he’ll reconsider how unwise it was for him to threaten the kids,” Ceci said. “I mean, you can say a lot you don’t mean in the heat of the moment.”
Andy was quiet for a moment then nodded. “True thing.”
“If he doesn’t we can take a walk around the golf course and enjoy the weather,” Ceci said as their dinner was delivered. She took her first spoon of soup when the door to the restaurant opened and a man came out and approached them. “Ah.”
“You people want to talk to me?” the man said, stopping at the table. “Jim Beakman.”
“Have a seat.” Ceci indicated one of the empty ones. “Thanks for taking the time to chat. I’m Cecelia Roberts and this is my husband, Andrew.” She waited for him to warily take a seat. “We’re Dar’s parents.”
Andrew sat chewing a bite of his pizza, content to let Ceci do the talking for the moment. He knew the man vaguely from seeing him around the island, usually on a gas powered golf cart.
Looked like a construction type of man. He was heavily built and had dark hair, with hard, intent eyes and big, squarely made hands. Acted like a fellow who’d been in charge of things with no contesting it for a good long time.
Andy had known men like that—long timers—in the service. Fellas who had gotten used to command and had carved themselves out a patch where their word was law.
He smiled a little. None of them had much liked him and he didn’t figure this feller was going to end up liking him either.
“You must be real proud then,” Jim said.
“We are,” Ceci said, aware of the sarcasm but answering at face value. “You always hope for the best for your kids but to have Dar become the very successful and stand-up person she is makes me very gratified as a parent.”
Beakman regarded her. “So you don’t care she’s gay?”
Right to the point. Ceci rather liked that. “No. Why would I? I don’t want to sleep with her. She’s my daughter. That would be horrific and probably immoral and perhaps even illegal in Broward County.”
Andrew chuckled.
“You don’t care?” He turned his attention to Andrew. “Bet you’d care if she was a boy.”
Andrew chewed his pizza thoughtfully. “No point in wondering, cause she ain’t,” he said. “But ah probably woulda gotten into a half ton more fights over it if Dar’d been a boy. Ain’t so bad the way it turned out.”
Jim shrugged. “So what did you want to talk to me about? She ready to back down on the threat she made against me?”
Now it was Ceci’s turn to dryly chuckle and she did. “Dar never backs down. My reason for wanting to talk to you is to ask you what the
hell you thought you were doing threatening her and Kerry with
eviction.”
He studied her warily.
“Because while my husband here is not a legally inclined man, I come from a family with a very long history of litigation, who holds very long grudges.” Ceci leaned on one elbow and regarded him with a cold eye. “And I know just how illegal what you said to her was, even here.”
“I don’t care what’s legal or not,” he responded frankly. “I just care about protecting my family.”
Andrew put down the bit of crust he’d been chewing and dusted his hands off. “Now that there’s something you and I can see eye-to-eye on.” He focused his attention on the man. “Cause Dar’s my child. There ain’t nothing at all in the world I won’t do to keep her safe and defend her from jackasses making threats at her.” He paused. “Buddy.”
They stared at each other in silence.
Ceci cleared her throat. “Let me part the machismo for a moment,” she said. “This is an idiotic conversation. It’s idiotic that you want to evict my kid because she’s gay, and it’s idiotic that my husband is having to state the fact that he’s ready to shoot you in the head if you keep on doing that.”
Beakman sat up straight and looked over at her. “What?”
“That’s what he just said,” Ceci advised him. “We do not play games in
this family and we’re more nuts than otherwise. Really. So look.” She leaned toward him again. “I don’t know what you think that either my daughter, or the daughter of the late Roger Stuart, is going to do to your kid, but just stop it. It won’t happen.”
Andrew looked at her, then back at Beakman. “That what you all think?” His voice lifted in surprise. “Dar didn’t say that.”
“I read between the lines,” Ceci muttered.
Andrew snorted. “Boy, let me tell you, Dar ain’t got eyes for nobody else but who she’s married to. She ain’t made that way.” He shook his head. “If that was what this here thing was about, nothing but a big old waste of evr’body’s time.”
He got up. “Let’s go take these here dogs walking.” With another shake of his head he collected both leashes and headed off down the patio, both animals trotting eagerly after him.
Ceci finished her soup and set it aside. “So,” she said to the silently watching Beakman. “What’s your real problem? Since Dar’s been living here for a bunch of years and she hasn’t molested anyone yet and you apparently didn’t care about her lifestyle all that time.”
“That’s right I didn’t,” he said, after a long pause. “Kept to herself, didn’t make much trouble. But now she’s got my daughter all interested in things she has no business being interested in.”
“Huh?”
“Since that other night, now she’s some kind of hero. I don’t want my kid thinking no pervert is a hero,” he said. “It’s got my wife upset and we’re not going to risk her running off and getting herself into trouble.”
Ceci blinked at him for a long moment. “Oh,” she finally said. “So the problem isn’t Dar, it’s your daughter.”
“This is my patch,” Beakman said. “You get that? She belongs here.”
“I get it,” Ceci said. “So the fact that Dar saved your kid from being raped, or worse, doesn’t matter.”
He shook his head. “You can call me a shithead for that and I probably am,” he admitted. “But I’m not having her think something like that should make her turn into a freak.” He got up. “I’m not afraid of you people. I’m not going to have my family chased off my patch. You understand?”
“Better than you could possibly imagine,” Ceci responded. “Had a great-great-great-grand-something who fought with Washington at Valley Forge, and Andy’s great-great-grand something was a Confederate general in a place that war hasn’t quite ended yet. I get it.”
He paused and regarded her somberly.
“That’s what Dar’s heritage is,” Ceci said. “So while I do get it, and on some level as a parent myself I have a sympathy for wanting to protect your family, think about evils and the lesser of them before you do anything.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“We’re better friends than enemies,” Ceci concluded, lifting her glass of wine and raising it in his direction.
He nodded briefly, then turned and walked away.
Ceci sighed. “Well, mother goddess, I tried.” She shook her head and went back to her plate. “Complete and utter waste of my time, and a pizza I think.”
“IS THAT ALL of them?” Kerry was lying on her stomach on the bed, her head resting on her arms. “It’s almost five a.m., Dar.”
“Couple more pecks.” Dar glanced at a page on the desk, then back at her screen. “I think I’m getting too old for this all night crap anymore.”
Kerry opened one eye and regarded her drolly. “Let me go order you a bowl of prunes, grandma.”
Dar chuckled and finished her amendments, running her eyes over the scripts one last time. “What a pain in the ass this has been.” She saved the last changes and lifted her hands off the keyboard, flexing them and then cracking her knuckles.
“Done?”
Dar assembled the group of new files into an archive and then opened up her email program. “Let me just send these to Mark.” She
attached the archive and sent it on its way. “That is, I hope, the end of
that.”
Kerry snorted softly.
The light in the room altered as Dar shut off the lamp and got up from the desk, moving over to join Kerry on the bed. “Ugh.”
“Alarm set?” Kerry mumbled indistinctly.
“Yeah.” Dar got the covers over them and wrapped Kerry up in her arms, all in the same unlikely motion. “Let’s hope the presentation is short and easy.”
“Like me?” Kerry started chuckling silently as she felt Dar do the same. “Let’s get through your demo and come back here and take a nap.”
“Sounds good to me.”
DAR TOWELED HER hair dry and regarded her reflection. She made a face at herself and stuck her tongue out after a moment. “I’m not a morning person today.”
Kerry edged in next to her, dressed in only a towel. “I’m never a morning person.” She leaned both hands on the sink basin and eyed Dar through damp, disheveled pale hair. “I definitely am too old for this all night crap.”
“Funny,” Dar drawled. “You kept me up all night just the other mphf—”
Kerry removed her hastily clapped hand from Dar’s mouth. “That’s different.”
“It sure was a hell of a lot more fun than editing router configs.” Dar ran a brush through her hair and pondered if using a dryer was in the cards. She felt a nibble on her arm and looked down to find Kerry leaning against her, eyes half closed. “You are tanked.”
“I need some stronger coffee,” Kerry said. She straightened up and pulled over her toiletry bag. “I think it’s mostly that I keep thinking about having to sit in the room and listen to two dozen people like my father deliberately misunderstand every single word you say.”
“Just think,” Dar said. “Next week at this time we’ll be picking up the RV and heading out on the road.”
Kerry visibly perked up. “Boy I can’t wait for that. I’m looking forward to that rafting trip. I just want to flush the world out of my head for a while and see new stuff.”
“Me too.” Dar decided against the blow dryer. “Let me go get my duds on and I’ll call down for some double shot espressos.”
“That sounds wonderful.” Kerry brushed her hair out and started to put on the light makeup she now very seldom used. She listened to Dar ramble around in the outer room, hearing the low whistling.
She got into fresh underthings and went out into the other room, going over to their joint suitcase and taking out the conservatively cut business suit that had been in the back of her closet for at least a month.
Dar buttoned the sleeves on her silk shirt. “Know what I forgot to throw in? Hose. Oh well. Guess they’ll just have to deal with my tan.”
“I’ve never seen you wear hose. You have some?” Kerry adjusted the belt on her skirt. “Oh wait, I remember seeing a pair stuck in the back of your sock drawer. I thought they were just a token.”
Dar chuckled. “They are.” She tucked in the shirt. “I like that teal color on you.” She studied Kerry. “You want to do this demo? You look better than I do.”
Kerry glanced at her reflection in the mirror. “I don’t think so. You look good in burgundy and I really like that shirt.”
They both fell silent as they finished fastening and buckling then Dar looked up. “We done being girly now?”
“Hehe.” Kerry pulled on her jacket and tugged the sleeves straight. “Hey we are girls.” She walked over and straightened the collar on Dar’s shirt. “Are you going to wear your microchip pin?” she asked. “We can stop in the coffee shop downstairs. We don’t need them to bring something up.”
“Sounds good.” Dar removed her jacket from its hanger. “I didn’t bring the pin with me. But let me get my earrings.”
Kerry went over and made sure Dar’s messenger bag had all her notes in it, then buckled it shut as the windows took on a pink glow from the rising sun. They had the presentation scheduled at the White House, then the grilling from Congress, hopefully a break in the afternoon, then dinner
at Gerry Easton’s.
Then an early morning flight the next day back home. Kerry got her sunglasses and tucked them into the belt on her skirt. She draped the messenger bag over her shoulder as Dar finished fastening her earrings. “Ready?”
“Let’s go.” Dar put the key to the hotel room in her pocket and went to the door, opening it and stepping back to let Kerry go through. “Mark should be sending off those files right about now,” she said. “Glad that’s behind us.”
Kerry headed down the hall to the elevator stack. “You think that’s enough information for them to fix the problem? Is there anyone even left there to fix it?”
Dar shrugged. “Any competent engineer could apply those configs and would understand them. I’m sure if they offer enough money they can get some hot shot in there to do it.”
They offered their valet ticket up on the curb and waited. Kerry opened the back door and put the bag inside, then went around to the driver’s seat and slid behind the wheel. She got her sunglasses settled as the valet closed the door and spent a moment adjusting her position.
Dar eyed her. “Sorry about that. Should have adjusted the seat when I got out.”
“No problem, hon.” Kerry got the car into drive and started off,
pulling out and turning right onto reasonably well-remembered streets. “Better for me than you anyway. You always end up cracking your chin on your knees,”
“There’s a Starbucks.” Dar pointed. “And it has a drive through.”
“Awesome.” Kerry turned in the driveway and rolled down her window as she pulled up to the ordering station.
Dar settled back and took out her Handspring, thumbing through the messages. She saw a new one from Mark and opened it, reading through it and making a noise of disgusted irritation. “Doesn’t it just figure?” she said. “I stay up all night fixing that crap and they boot the guy.”
“Huh?” Kerry turned and looked at her.
“Mail bounced back as nonexistent.” Dar held the phone up. “They deleted his inbox. Can you believe it?”
“Augh.”