by Gary Parker
He shook his head against the notion. She didn’t remember, never had. Not back in high school when he moved to Hilltop and certainly not now.
“Can I call you when I get back?” he asked.
“If you’d like.”
He smiled at her one more time, then left.
In his car, he took a deep breath, held up his hands, and saw they were trembling slightly. He grabbed the steering wheel to still them. An odd feeling ran through him, and he tried to shake it off. What was going on here? He looked back at Nelson’s house and marveled again at how different Nelson seemed, so settled, so peaceful, so content.
Rem cleared his throat and started the car. Content—not exactly how he’d describe his own life right now. Pulling from the driveway, he focused on what he needed to do to get ready for his meeting the next day. No time for anything but that, he decided. No time for anything else at all.
7
Rem landed in Atlanta at just after nine the next morning, his body wired by three cups of airplane coffee. His partner, Lisa, a late-twenties free spirit with closely cut black hair, purple lipstick, and red-rimmed glasses, met him at the terminal.
“The meeting is set,” she said as they hurried toward her car. “You know yet what you’re going to do?”
Rem shook his head. “It’s not just me,” he said. “You’ve got almost as big a stake as I do. Whatever we do, we’ll do together.”
“But you own 60 percent,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. You disagree with my choice, we don’t do it.”
They reached the car—a three-year-old Volvo with an empty Starbucks coffee cup in each of the two cup holders between the front seats. Lisa handed him a stack of papers, and he settled into his seat and started reading them as she drove away.
“What are the latest figures on the debt?” he asked.
“Close to four,” she said.
“What are they offering?”
“They haven’t indicated exactly.”
Rem studied the papers as Lisa paid the parking attendant and headed north up Interstate 85. “You think they’ll offer six?” he asked. “That would give us enough to settle our debts and clear a little for the two of us.”
“No way to tell.”
Rem pored over the papers for the next ten minutes. A warm sun gleamed through the windows. As they neared Atlanta’s skyline, he laid down the papers and looked up. “How long we been at this?” he asked Lisa, his mood reflective.
Lisa glanced at him, then back to the highway. “You mean this last venture or since we started out?”
“All totaled.”
“We met at State,” she said, her mood shifting with his. “Computer lab, senior year.”
“You tried to hit on me,” Rem said, smiling.
“I did not!” Lisa said. “Just the opposite! But I never responded to your feeble efforts.”
“It didn’t help me that you and Taylor were six months away from the altar.”
“We started working on a software program,” Lisa said.
“It standardized a way for hospitals to track their medicines—purchasing, shipping, receiving. Took three years after graduation to get the bugs out,” Rem recalled. “Then we sold it. Wonder if we sold too soon?”
“Probably.”
Lisa left the interstate and headed toward downtown Atlanta. “If we’d waited until ’98 or ’99, we probably could have gotten ten times as much,” she said.
“We thought four million was plenty,” Rem said.
“Yeah, all the money we’d ever need.” She drove toward a parking garage.
Rem put his papers back in the briefcase. “You think we’ve goofed up?” he asked. “Sold the first program too early, and now waited too late on this one?”
Lisa parked and faced him, her brown eyes kind but firm. “We’re smart people,” she said. “Whether we sold too early or not, I have no clue. But this last thing, it wasn’t ready until now and we both know it. We’ve invested the money we made from our first program in this one, plus we’ve had to go in some debt. But, hey, there’s not a lot of venture capital out there these days. You do what you have to do. Now we’ve got an offer. We don’t know how much yet, and we have a choice to make. That’s the situation, we’ll handle it. No worries.”
Rem sighed. Lisa was right. Their latest program—a software package that enhanced a computer’s ability to recognize and delete unwanted email before it ever entered a person’s mailbox—gave them a chance to pay off their debts and maybe earn a few bucks as well. Maybe they should wait a while longer to sell, but theirs wasn’t the only such program out there, and waiting might mean disaster. What if somebody else put out a better system while they waited on a higher bid?
“What if their offer isn’t enough?” he asked.
“What’s enough?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know. But I’ve gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle. You too. If they offer just enough to pay off our debts, we’ll have nothing left.”
“You can always make more money,” Lisa said. “That’s the great thing about computers. If you’re smart enough, you can always come up with something new. We’ve done it twice, we can do it again.”
He smiled at her. “You’re my inspiration,” he said.
“Let’s go check these numbers again before the meeting,” she said.
They left the car, Rem’s head aching from tension over the decision he faced.
The morning at the Kid’s Delight Day Care passed with no more trauma than normal. One child threw up and Jenna sent for her parents to come get her, and a little boy bit his neighbor at the coloring table, but that was about it for drama. Jenna sat down in her small office about 11:30, took a sip of water from the bottle she usually kept close by, and looked forward to closing for Christmas for the next four days. She needed the break. Between directing the day care and leading the efforts for Mickey’s Miracle, she felt like a welcome mat an army had marched on.
Leaning back for a few moments, her thoughts drifted to the previous night, and she found herself thinking of Rem. Would he come back before Christmas? Would she see him again over the holidays? After the way she’d treated him, probably not. Should that bother her? Absolutely not! She’d decided a long time ago to stay away from faithless men, and he’d given ample evidence last night that not only did he have no faith, but he actually felt a little hostile toward Christian people.
She wondered about the source of that hostility. Not his mother, that was for sure. She’d spent a lot of time in church, sang in the choir, served in the nursery, held the president’s position in the Ladies’ Missions Society. How could a son fall so far from his mom’s beliefs? Of course, Rem’s dad didn’t come to services too often either. Guess Rem took after him.
Jenna rocked forward and squared her shoulders. No time to worry about Rem Lincoln. For all she knew, she’d see him again in about ten years, just like this time. She reached for a pen to sign some papers she needed to mail but then heard footsteps and looked up to see Tom Strack stepping through the door. Tom looked frazzled, his eyes wide, a baseball cap in his hand. Brenda trailed him, her face white and scared. Suddenly fearful, Jenna stood and hugged Brenda, then pointed both her and Tom to the two chairs facing her desk.
“What’s up?” she asked, although not sure she really wanted to know. “How’s Mickey today?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Tom said. “The hospital . . . they . . .” He dropped his eyes, and Jenna looked to Brenda.
“The hospital administrator came this morning,” Brenda said, “all apologetic but with bad news. He said they’d spent all they could on Mickey’s care, almost forty thousand dollars so far. Their bosses up the line said we had to pay it or leave.”
“Say that again.” Jenna couldn’t believe her ears. Nobody could act so badly.
“It’s true,” Tom said, squeezing the bill of his cap. “We were planning to take Mickey home for Christmas day. He’s well enough for that, Dr
. Russell already told us. But they told us today we couldn’t bring him back afterward, said they couldn’t do anything else for him here anyway.”
“I’m confused,” Jenna said. “Dr. Russell said we could keep Mickey there as long as we needed until the transplant.”
Brenda nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “But . . . well . . . the hospital is owned by a health-care group in Nashville, and they’ve got a new regional administrator in Asheville. Least that’s what we’re told. They only allow so much for folks who can’t pay, and we’ve reached that and then some. Besides . . .” She looked to Tom as if to ask him to continue the explanation.
“They don’t think we’ll get the money for the transplant,” Tom whispered.
“What?”
Tom looked like a man facing a hanging. “They know how much money we’ve raised,” he said. “And Mickey’s situation has gotten so bad that if we don’t get the transplant within a few weeks, they know it’ll be too late. But they don’t see how we can get the money in time.”
“So they’re just putting him out with nowhere to go?” Jenna asked, her heart breaking.
“Dr. Russell said he’d come by the house every day,” Brenda said, her eyes filling with tears. “Said if we couldn’t . . . get the transplant, we . . . we might as well make Mickey comfortable at home. Keep him near us. He said he’d prescribe any medicine he needed to keep him out of pain, would charge it to his practice.” She wiped her eyes, but it didn’t do much good.
Jenna turned to Tom, but he didn’t look at her. She wanted to scream and tell them she wouldn’t let this happen, but she felt powerless and knew she had no more options to offer. “I can’t believe this is real,” she said. “Not after we worked so hard, after people gave so much.”
Tom stood, walked to her, and put a hand on her shoulder. “You did everything you could,” he said. “We thank you for that. You poured your heart into this. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Jenna looked up at him, her eyes wet. Could she just let it go like this? Could she let Mickey’s last hope drop? It didn’t seem possible.
“How long . . . ?” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Tom squeezed his hat again. “Dr. Russell doesn’t know,” he said. “I asked him, and he said maybe six weeks, maybe a year. It all depends on whether Mickey catches anything that can . . . well, you know.”
Jenna nodded. It all depended on whether Mickey’s defenseless body caught any disease that could kill him. She wiped her eyes and tried to accept the defeat. She’d done all she could, but the end of the effort had surely come.
“We’ll give the hospital the money we’ve raised,” she said. “They’ll take Mickey back if we do that, won’t they?”
Tom looked at Brenda. “I expect so,” he said. “But that means the transplant is out for sure.”
“I know,” Jenna said. “But . . . well . . . it’s too late in a few weeks anyway. This way Mickey can get the treatment he needs, at least for a while. If he’s in the hospital, he’ll have a better chance to stay shielded from infections. That’ll give us longer to do something else, figure something out.”
“You think there’s something else we can do?” Tom asked.
Jenna rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know. I just don’t.”
“I hate to give up,” Brenda said, still softly crying.
Jenna moved to her and hugged her shoulders. “We all do,” she said. “But I’m stumped right now. I need time to think.”
Brenda sobbed loudly, her head shaking. Holding her, Jenna tried to stay strong. She’d done all she could. Nobody could blame her for this failure, nobody but herself. Just like when her mom and dad had finally split. Nobody had blamed her, except herself. She’d cried herself to sleep so many nights after her dad moved out, cried into her pillow until her face puffed up and she ran out of tears. She knew now that she had nothing to do with their divorce. Then why did she still feel so guilty?
Brenda lifted her head, and Jenna tried to think of another option for Mickey, but nothing came to her. Without a miracle like none she’d ever seen or dreamed, Mickey would die really fast, and she could do absolutely nothing to stop it. She knew miracles didn’t happen, knew because she’d prayed for one at least twice in her life but with no result. No, miracles didn’t happen, never had, never would.
Sitting in his small office, across the table from two men in three-button suits and a woman in a tailored navy pants-and-jacket outfit, Rem drummed his thumb on the table and tried to figure out what to do. The truth was, he didn’t want to sell the software program he and Lisa had developed, but he didn’t see a way to avoid it. They had more debt than assets, more expenditures than income, and a slew of competitors who might come out any day now with a product that did exactly what theirs did. If he got what he needed, selling made a lot of sense, maybe the only sense.
“Okay,” Rem said, gazing steadily at the woman in the navy outfit, a high-powered executive named Holly Stanfield. “You’ve examined the software; you know the strengths, the weaknesses. It’s still got a few bugs, but those are solvable in another couple of months. It’s a quality program; we all know that. So let’s say we cut to the chase. What’s the best offer you can make?”
Stanfield smiled slightly, but Rem kept his face blank. He’d learned in his two other meetings with Stanfield—a woman in her midthirties with a body that looked like she worked out at least two hours a day—that her smile masked a heart as single-minded as a calculator. She liked the facts and nothing but the facts.
“I agree you’ve written a quality program,” Stanfield said. “But you’re not the only one trying to do this. We’ve examined three similar programs in the last two months, all of them also first-rate products.”
“I know we’ve got lots of competition,” Rem said. “But if you didn’t see something worthwhile in our efforts, you wouldn’t be here right before the holidays talking to us. You’d be in somebody else’s office making the same speech to them.”
Stanfield tilted her head, then leaned to the man next to her and exchanged a few whispers with him. Rem drummed his fingers and wondered if Stanfield was married. She wore no ring, but he knew that didn’t always matter these days. Stanfield glanced his way and smiled again, and he sensed that maybe she was flirting with him. He considered the possibilities for a few seconds but then dropped them. Stanfield’s smile brought no warmth with it. It seemed more like a painting of a smile than the real thing. The man next to her took an envelope from his suit jacket and handed it to Stanfield. She slowly opened it, pulled out a slip of paper, and slid it across the table to Rem.
Rem took the paper, nodded at Stanfield, and turned to Lisa. He opened the paper and held it so both he and Lisa could see the information printed on it. Keeping his face as blank as possible, he studied the figures for several seconds, then handed the paper to Lisa and looked back at Stanfield. She licked her lips, and he wondered again if she thought her charms could actually make a difference in a business negotiation. Jenna’s face suddenly popped into his head, and he held it there for an instant but then pushed it aside. No time for that now.
“It’s an interesting offer,” he finally said. “Worthy of our appropriate consideration. My partner and I”—he glanced at Lisa—“would like a day or so to mull it over.”
Stanfield leaned forward, and all her efforts at charm suddenly disappeared. “We came prepared for a response today,” she said. “We hoped we could settle this before we left.”
“I know,” Rem said. “But as I’m sure you understand, you’re talking about something real personal to us—our baby, so to speak. We won’t sell that off without proper evaluation.”
Stanfield looked at Lisa. “You concur with Mr. Lincoln?”
Lisa nodded.
“I’ll give you another twenty-four hours,” Stanfield said. “But that’s it. This has to be done this year.”
“I’m aware of the tax situation,” Rem said. “I’ll get you an answer
before five tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Stanfield and her companions stood as if controlled by a robotic hand. Rem and Lisa copied them. Stanfield and her associates shook their hands, then left the office.
Rem turned to Lisa. “What do you think?” he asked.
Lisa picked up the paper and studied the number again. “Hard to say,” she said. “It all depends on what kind of gamblers we are.”
Rem sighed. “I’ll call you,” he said.
“Tonight?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re going to your condo?”
“No, back to Hilltop.”
Lisa looked a little surprised.
“I can’t explain it now,” he said. “But I need to go back home.”
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just a few crazy things going on.”
“Your dad’s health?”
“No worse than normal.”
“Then what is it?”
He started to tell her about Jenna, about meeting Nelson again, about his ride to the cemetery, about the odd feelings he’d had in the last day or so. But how could he? He didn’t know what any of it meant, so how could he explain it to somebody else? Suddenly he felt tired, wearier than he’d been in a long time. The notion of selling out and taking some time off appealed to him in ways he’d never dreamed possible.
“We’ll talk soon,” he said.
“We better,” she said.
He hugged Lisa.
She took him back to the airport, and he hopped onboard a plane headed back to Asheville. Looking out the window after takeoff, he tried to relax but couldn’t. In the next twenty-four hours he had to make a decision that would change his life forever. And for some strange reason he couldn’t fathom, he wanted to talk to Jenna about it before he did anything.
8