Until Death

by Alicia Rasley

  “But that’s—” I couldn’t finish. That must have been the building—

  “Oh, right. The building.” Will did his you humans are so weird face, and added, “Okay, we won’t go by there. Anyway, that’s the only building I got planned. The rest of the land I might keep pristine. Maybe even have some farmer cultivate it. You know, like this land used to be before we put up all the buildings.”

  I turned away to hide my agitation and looked out. This glass elevator and sky were clear enough I could see, well, not to Chicago, but at least to the horizon-smudge of smog put up by the refinery east of there. In between was the pale green of the new soybean crop, pierced by the highway heading north and the river winding along in the sun. “Farm acreage in an office complex. That would be interesting.”

  “And cows.” Will looked nostalgic. For cows? Midwesterners always revert to farm nostalgia. What they forget is the aroma of the manure, wafting back in the summer breeze.

  Once in my car, Will reprogrammed my radio, trading the hip-hop Tommy liked and my alternate rock for a couple of oldies stations. Then he leaned back in his seat with a sigh. “Foreigner. God, it’s good to get in a car and not have to pretend I like Beyonce and Ja- what’s his name.”

  “Why pretend?”

  “The girlfriends. Common interests.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I was so relieved we were buddies again, I spoke candidly. “Will, you’ve got a trillion dollars. I’d think that would provide common interests.”

  He gave me a hard look. “You’re saying they’re only interested in my money?”

  I concentrated on driving out of the Netmore campus without glancing south at that new building. When we were safely out of the gates, I said, “No, I’m saying that your money should at least make up for the terrible sin of listening to the oldies station. I mean, don’t you think you’re good enough the way you are?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be that way,” he said. “Maybe I want to be young and cool.”

  “But you’re plenty cool now. You don’t want to give up all you’ve done or become in the last thirty years just to be young. Besides, that way you’d have to pretend that you like her music and that you’re really truly interested in who Zac Effron is secretly engaged to.”

  I could see the question forming on his lips—Zac who?—but instead he said, “Trouble is, I look back at that thirty years and think, what did I do with my time? I could’ve, you know, done more, risked more. Maybe it would have kept me young and hip.”

  I guess he’d read an article in a men’s magazine, between the one about the best cigars and the one about the most supportive jockstraps. (Oops. Sexism alert.) I glanced over at him. He looked sincere, sincerely bummed. Just another midlife man. How desperately they grabbed for emotion now, after ignoring it ever since the high school football team lost in the state finals. Unfortunately, I’d heard it all before. I wished I had the nerve to confess that the melancholy of a middle-aged billionaire had its amusement value but wasn’t something I took quite as seriously as, say, kids going without immunizations in the inner city.

  Fortunately, I was pulling into the school lot. “Much as I’d like to get going on that trading of woulda-shoulda-couldas, you got a date with kids who want to know what you did right. I’m sure you can come up with a few successes from those lost decades.”

  In the classroom, the teacher was happy to turn over his class to Concord’s technology czar. Will started talking about computer careers and ended recounting his own, the good old days, the first big sale, the time he sued Microsoft and won. The kids were full of questions. “You own that tight Diablo, don’t you? I saw it outside McDonalds once.”

  “So, can we wear shorts to work like you?”

  “How much money you make?”

  “Are you married?” That was a girl. Boys never ask that.

  When one student asked what they should major in, Will diverged from the standard line of most classroom speakers. “Doesn’t really matter. Dropouts do fine, long as they can code.”

  Not the message I wanted the students to take home to their parents. As the starstruck teacher was speechless, I intervened. “So you dropped out of high school?”

  “No, actually, I have a masters in electrical engineering. Purdue.” He gave me a hard look. “You know that.”

  “But if you interviewed a programmer with a degree in information science, and a high school dropout, which would you choose?”

  “The one with the degree, but—”

  “Aww, Mom,” I heard Tommy say from the back row.

  “Okay, so don’t drop out.” Will flashed his rebel grin. “Major in English. But learn to code now. This is a young man’s game.”

  I cleared my throat. Will glanced around, saw the four girls. “I mean, a young person’s game. Develop your first product while you’re still in college, and you’ll be right on target.”

  As we left, I heard the buzz behind me, the sound of kids’ brains in motion. If the teacher had any sense, he’d have them come up with a product this afternoon as a class project and steal it from them. They were too young to sue him, anyway.

  Will was jazzed as we emerged into the plaza in front of the school. “Those kids are great. Only maybe too serious, worrying about college majors and all that. I should have told them more about how much fun we had when we were young. Remember? Joe and me building the servers in the barn, drinking cheap beer, and every now and then you’d come along with some food, because you thought your only tenants were going to starve and stick you with the rent.”

  I remembered. I remembered them huddling in the winter, their hands purple with cold, a kerosene heater perilously close to a hay bale, and me checking to see if our fire insurance was up to date. It didn’t look like much fun then, but in retrospect . . .

  “You guys were good to us.” Will yanked open the passenger door as soon as I clicked the unlock button. “You let us run quite a tab up with the rent some months.”

  “Only because we didn’t have enough money to evict you.”

  “But you helped out. You typed up our first loan application, remember?”

  “Vaguely.” It was smotheringly hot inside the car. I cranked open the window and turned the air-conditioner on full. “So why didn’t I get a cut of your stock?”

  “You wanted cash. Just think if you’d had more faith.”

  “I think that month we had to prepay the hospital bill for Tommy’s arrival. No insurance.”

  We ordered at the drive-through of the sub shop. I paid—Will had forgotten his wallet—and headed back towards Netmore. This was the second time in two weeks I’d shared a meal with a man from the past. In my favorite romance novels, the man from the past comes in a yacht complete with a gourmet cook. I get men from the past complete with my old mini-van and fast food. This time it was on my dime. “Do I get some stock since I bought lunch?”

  “Let’s see, at yesterday’s close, this sub—” He held up his sandwich. “—is worth a twentieth of a share.” He added, “Jeez, you’re the only person left who remembers those days.”

  “What about Joe?”

  “He’s down in Key West. He sold out a few years ago when the board brought in that banker as CEO and kicked us both downstairs. Joe thought it was a slam on the way we ran the company. He took his stock options and left. But hey, they were slamming both of us, and I stuck around.” All his animation was gone. “I still run Development, and that’s the department that counts. The rest is just . . . marketing. Hey, take a left here.”

  I swerved into the deserted lane, along what we in Indiana called a hill but was just a furrow in the landscape to everyone else. At the bottom was the farmhouse where Netmore started. I bet that Will hadn’t been here in years. But there were tire tracks in the drive and the gate was open. “Someone been staying here?”<
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  He glanced over at me. “Well, Don. He put the construction office here. You know. So he could oversee the progress down the way.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to know that to feel Don all around here. The old white-frame house, all that was left of Don’s Uncle Stu’s family farm, looked lonely and scared in the middle of a high-tech forest. It reminded me that it was Puritans who had first settled this stretch of Indiana. The house was two stories tall, but narrow and spare, just like the ancestor of Don’s who built the place; his grim portrait still hung over my fireplace. A split-rail fence, like Abe Lincoln’s and about as ancient, surrounded the crabbed little lot. No one who lived here saw the value of a yard when you could cultivate crops from lot line to lot line.

  Will got out and walked over to the fence. He yanked at the gate, an old iron monstrosity, heavy as a rhino. It opened with a reluctant creak. I thought of the Victorian house Barb was restoring. “Hey, can I buy that gate for my friend’s garden?”

  “Tell the grounds department I said sure. Not that I carry much weight these days, not since the last IPO when I sold most of my stock.”

  It must be strange, to have been the emperor, and now to be reduced to just another department head. I wondered how much of this land purchase was an attempt to regain some of the power he’d lost when he and Joe sold out for their multi-millions.

  Will stood there staring at the narrow weathered front. “Remember where the barn was?”

  I pointed uphill, towards a grotto furnished with stone picnic tables. “It was falling down, the old barn.” Don and I had argued, but Don won, so Netmore got its grotto.

  “I miss it.” He stopped on the steps and kicked a fallen bird’s nest out of the way. “You ever think of those days?”

  “Once in a while.” I didn’t want to get into the conundrum of memory, how the good times made me long for the old life when I needed to focus on the new life. Now, not then.

  Will was back in then, however. “Things were simpler.”

  Life reduced to its elementals: Will the tenants pay the rent, how many times will the baby wake up tonight. “That they were.”

  He climbed to the porch and tried the door. Locked. “I guess Don has the key. I mean, had.”

  “I remember you used to keep one under the third step. But probably Netmore has changed the locks since. Or—or Don.”

  It still felt odd saying his name, but Will didn’t notice. He was bending to look at the door jamb. “Nah, this lock’s the same as ever. I’m telling you, no one at Netmore gave a damn about this place.” He backed away, came down the steps and stood next to me, staring up at the shimmering glass of the old windows. “Neither did I, you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking that.” And I wasn’t. All around, I smelled dust, must, decay, and felt the walls of memory close in. In the early days, this old dusty house and its farmed-out acreage were our ticket to a new life. We first thought, little by little, we’d fix the whole house. But Will and Joe moved in, got their business going, and complained that plaster dust from our renovation sabotaged their hardware components. By the time the place started falling apart again, they’d made their first million, leased another fifty acres, and hired us to put up a modern office building. I don’t know why we didn’t ever pull down the old house. Maybe we knew it would be bad luck.

  Twilight-Zone shiver. After we pulled down the barn, Don met Wanda at the health club.

  As if he heard my thoughts, Will echoed my words. “They’re going to tear this down.” He abruptly headed down the path. “Netmore. More building. For the corporate retreat.” He yanked on the big iron gate and it shut with a harsh rasp. “Maybe I should try and stop it.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” But I figured if he couldn’t even promise me the old gate, he wouldn’t be able to save the old house. I don’t care, I told myself. It’s just a memory.

  He kicked a rock and watched it roll down the ditch. “I never thought I’d say this, but these guys don’t respect the past enough. The whole company started right there. You remember.”

  “I remember.”

  “A company, an industry, a new technology. And it’s like it doesn’t even matter to them.”

  That brief moment of defiance had faded, and now he looked sad. I couldn’t help it. I had to rally him. “It is your company. You’ve got some authority here, don’t you?”

  “Not anymore. I own one percent of the stock. That’s what Joe was trying to tell me. We took it public, and this is the price. It isn’t ours anymore.”

  He sounded despairing. Mike Warren had a term for that—he had a term for everything—globalizing, expanding one problem to include everything. For Will, the farmhouse was a symbol of all that was wrong with him. It was more of that old midlife crisis. I couldn’t do anything about the global part, but the farmhouse problem . . . “So you buy the farmhouse for a dollar and move it a mile south.”

  “You mean to my new land? But it’ll fall apart.”

  “No, it won’t, if you do it right. It’s stood up to tornadoes for a century, remember.”

  “You’ve moved houses?”

  “Sure. Sometimes we’d buy some farm, and the house would be a great federal style, or some big Victorian. I’d have it moved to a new lot and sell it as a fixer-upper. There are companies that specialize in it. They cut the house off the old site, load it onto a flatbed truck, drive it to the new site, and settle it right down on a new foundation.” I surveyed the road above. “This would be easier than those jobs. The utilities here are buried, so the lines wouldn’t have to be tied up out of the way.” My imagination was working overtime. “Netmore’s birthplace. I always thought it was cool that a high-tech company started in an old farmhouse. You can restore it, kind of do a museum.”

  “Wow,” he said. We looked at each other, wild surmises jumping back and forth. “What a great idea.” Now the microchips were beginning to hum. All his gloom was gone.

  Then I remembered. “The lawsuit. You can’t go to all this trouble till that’s settled, though.”

  Now he was defiant. The old radical was ready to march. “The hell with that. No stupid legality is going to keep me from doing what I want.”

  I thought of the mess if he started the process of moving this house and then lost the land in a lawsuit. But there was no use reasoning with Will when he had a scheme in mind, so I just followed him as he marched back to the car.

  As we drove away, he asked abruptly, “So why did Don do it?”

  The mention of Don was a bucket of cold water on the flickering flame of my thoughts. I yanked myself dripping back to the present. “Do what?”

  “Jump out that window.”

  I kept driving. I just stopped breathing. Then I found my voice. “I told you. He fell. And there wasn’t even a window.”

  “Well, yeah. I know that’s the official story. But I heard different.”

  I relaxed my grip on the wheel. “When did you hear anything?” I was angry now. It felt better than stunned incomprehension. “You didn’t even know he was dead till yesterday.”

  He didn’t look abashed. He just looked certain. “I knew someone had died over at the new building. Everyone here was talking about it. And when you told me it was Don, well, I called a couple of people, and they said he was acting screwy there in the end, like dumping you and grabbing that younger wife.”

  “If that’s screwy, then we’ve got an epidemic. Half the forty-something men in town have done that.” I couldn’t help it. I got mean. “You’d do it, too, if you had an old wife to dump.”

  “Maybe so. But there were some things I heard from the other developers. They talked about how maybe things were going bad for him, with this lawsuit and all.”

  “They want your business, so they’ll talk Don down now he’s gone, and you’re more or less up for gra
bs. That’s all it is. Developers talking trash.” It was stupid. It was crazy. I didn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it.

  He must have sensed that, because he lost that insistent look and pulled himself back. “Hey, no problem. Maybe I heard wrong. Maybe it’s just a rumor. You’d know best, I guess.”

  His retraction was insincere, but I settled for that. “Someone’s always going to speculate about something. Human nature. Well, here we are.” I stopped in front of the office building. He said goodbye and told me to give him a call sometime. It was all warm and friendly and normal. But as I drove away, I couldn’t let go of what he had implied.

  Suicide.

  Don wouldn’t kill himself. Maybe someone else would kill him. But he would never have killed himself. I knew that, if I knew anything.

  Chapter Six

  VINCE NOTICED MY preoccupation when he came by for our walk later. “What’s wrong?”

  I glanced at him to assess if he was being polite or if he really wanted to know. Then I went ahead and said it. “I heard something strange. I was wondering if you could ask around, you know, among the members of the chamber—” Vince was the marketing director for the chamber of commerce. “—and see if anyone’s talking about Don . . . committing suicide.”

  Vince was quiet for a block. Finally, he said, “I didn’t want to upset you, but any time a businessman dies in an accident like that, everyone speculates. And so yeah, they’re talking.”

  It was all I could do to keep walking up the hill towards the yacht club. Eventually, I managed to say, “So there are rumors. That he killed himself. Does anyone speculate why?”

  “The usual. Maybe he was in trouble financially. Maybe the divorce hurt him so bad that he couldn’t meet his payments.”

  That annoyed me. “Tell them the divorce barely broke his stride.”

  “They mean his new wife, that he got pushed up a spending category when he married her.”