by Paula Hiatt
Chapter Six
February turned to March as Ryoki worked like a man possessed. The acquisition was completed, the licensing well underway, and he had carefully calculated the second week of April as the optimum time to reach São Paulo and implement the new plan. For the good of the company he intended to master that deadline and rise above his father’s petty, short-sighted refusal.
He’d explained his goals in detail to Kate, and she had worked through lunches and dinners, roping in staff whenever she could. Brian, as understanding and supportive as his father was not, made every possible resource available, but schedules were already tight and for the most part it was just Ryoki and Kate working later and later. Before going to bed at night, he obsessively measured his progress against the calendar, his mouth moving silently like a miser counting out his gold. Some nights he drifted into sleep without hope, writhing and twisting through forgotten dreams to awaken hollow-eyed in the morning, cursing the hard hotel mattress. But on the night of March 16 he fell asleep with a smile on his lips, the schedule sheet still clutched in his hand, and dreamed of diving into a cool, clear pool on a hot day. For the first time in weeks he had beaten the calendar, which made Kate’s behavior the following evening entirely incomprehensible.
At 9:00 p.m. on March 17, she leaned on the edge of his desk and said, “I’m going home.” He looked up, nearly snapping before he focused, really looked at her for the first time in days. Face pale, purplish moons under glazed eyes.
“Goodnight,” he said as kindly as he could muster.
Kate didn’t move. “I think you should leave with me.”
“What are you suggesting, Kate?” He wasn’t in the mood for meaningless banter and he wished she’d be quick.
She looked at him for a single beat. “I’m saying you’re exhausted and you need to unwind a little, maybe take the day off tomorrow. I could arrange some golf or tennis, or sleeping pills—anything you want.”
Ryoki stared at her, his kindly impulses evaporating. He spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Please don’t try to undermine my efforts with misplaced sympathy.” His voice gained irritation with each word, the last coming out sharp and angry. He stopped speaking, he shouldn’t yell. She was just doing what women do, and as Brian’s niece she could say certain things without repercussions. “Forgive me. I’ll do my best,” he said, looking back at his screen, discussion closed. He expected to hear a brief apology and the click of the door as she left the office, her concerns duly noted. She did stand up straight and step away from his desk, but moved no further.
“‘I’ll do my best’ which translates into ‘What you ask is impossible?’ Are you aware that when you try to be polite you speak in code like a girl?”
“I speak like a Japanese,” he said very slowly. If she heard the note of warning in his voice, she ignored it.
“At this rate you’ll be dead before you’re forty,” she said, her face set. “Dark circles don’t lie.”
After a pause he spoke again, his voice carefully controlled. “Kate, I am in the middle of an important project without adequate staff. There’s no one to take up the slack. I can rest once the project is complete.”
“When it’s complete?” she asked. “This is all preparation. You’re already exhausted and the project hasn’t started. I thought you worked too hard when you first arrived. For the last month, you’ve moved straight on to insane.”
Ryoki’s voice rose a single decibel, which between them had the effect of shouting. “I work like a Japanese! You cannot possibly understand. Please keep your opinions to yourself.”
Kate kept her voice level. “You’re like a hummingbird in a cage.”
“As I said—” But she cut him off.
“I’ve read reports about your amaaazing progress in Europe. But I see this exhausted, angry man in front of me, and I’m wondering if a year ago your father was serious when he said his stupid son was killing himself. Maybe you really are killing yourself, and I’m just a little late.” She pursed her lips, eyeing him steadily.
Ryoki stared, too angry to speak. For long moments she held his gaze without flinching, eye to eye. Stalemate. Finally she turned in disgust and left his office without another word, her footsteps even, measured, and hard.
Forty-five minutes later Ryoki stormed out of the office, his concentration blown, half-blind with rage, wanting to roar, ‘Be fair! Be fair!’ until his voice gave out. He should have fired Kate on the spot, yelled at her to get out of his life, but she had left before he recovered his senses, careless and irresponsible as his mother.
He picked up dinner at the first drive-through he saw and ended up with the wrong order, a greasy burger prepared by a teenager who’d just been dumped by his girlfriend and couldn’t focus on minor details like pickles versus jalapenos or mayonnaise versus horseradish. He wolfed it down as he tried to work in his hotel room, but in an hour had a scorching case of indigestion. Giving up, he took some antacid and went to bed without bothering to measure the day’s progress.
That night he dreamed he was walking down a dark city street in a great hurry, his feet ringing authoritatively on the pavement, nearly masking a strange clicking sound from somewhere off in the night. Head bent, intent on his errand, he didn’t register the growing noise until it grew close enough to break his train of thought. Impatiently he turned his head and felt a long hairy mass brush past his cheek. A giant spider dropped, snatched him in her jaws, injected her paralyzing poison and wrapped him round and round to eat him at her leisure.
At 4:00 a.m. he awoke sweating and trembling, pleading for Kate to bring her scissors.
He got out of bed, opened a bottle of cold water, splashed his face and downed the rest in great, heaving gulps. He dropped back on the bed to breathe and think. Shuddering, he rubbed his arms as the air conditioner growled to life, sending hairy tendrils of air prickling across his skin. Slumping against the headboard, he reviewed the day, stopping at the moment Kate leaned against his desk.
Idiotic. That’s what she was. Bull-headed—
Her eyes bruised purple with exhaustion.
That’s what stood out—purple against pale skin.
To quell his own trembling he tried dredging up some righteous indignation to fan the brimstone that had driven him from the office, but found his heart too vacant for anger. Maybe there was some truth to what she said. She shouldn’t have said it, of course. But still, maybe there was some truth.
He tried to think rationally, to place their argument in the proper context. At this point she would be very hard—no, impossible—to replace. Finding and training someone new would cause delays, possibly make him miss his deadline, which was unthinkable. For the greater good, he would have to be the bigger person, make allowances for this quirk in her personality, accept her apology, then be sure to send her home earlier so she wouldn’t get overtired and overwrought. She’s worn out. That’s the real trouble. He bore some responsibility there.
He tossed the empty water bottle to the wastebasket, missing by a foot, and lay back down, shuddering one last time as the velum blanket grazed his back like the hairs of the spider. He slept hard and dreamlessly for three hours.
The next morning, feeling gracious and benevolent, he waited for her. At 8:21 a.m. the door opened and she entered wearing a somber gray skirt and white blouse. Without so much as a glance in his direction, she went directly to her cubicle. He heard a drawer open, the slick click of her long pearls as she leaned over her desk, but she did not once come to him, even for instructions. For a panicked moment he feared she was clearing out without a word. But he relaxed when he heard the familiar electronic whirs and beeps as her computer booted up. After lunch she approached his desk with her morning’s work, took his direction and went to a desk in the outer office, a place she generally avoided because of the ambient noise. For three days they moved around each other in a strangely sterile silence, stingy with their words. By the end of the first day Ryoki had given up waiting for her to
apologize, consoling himself that she continued to do her work with increasingly crisp and impersonal efficiency, which, after all, is exactly what he’d asked. So it was to be an apology through action. That would be sufficient.
At the end of two days entirely devoid of inane snippets and inside jokes, he expected to have made great progress, but upon measuring found his own time inexplicably less productive. His head had begun aching with fatigue as his nightmares had grown worse. He kept feeling his forehead for fever, waiting for chills or coughs, some sign of oncoming sickness to explain his troubles, but none appeared. On the morning of the third day he started a spreadsheet, intent on examining the constraints and assets of his particular circumstances, hoping to reveal why his own productivity for the last two days had fallen so horribly short. After laying out the hard facts he discovered that within the structure of this admittedly difficult situation, things were as good as they could possibly be, a practically perfect environment for maximum productivity. He rubbed his throbbing head and looked again, determined to find the invisible glitch. The only X-factor was Kate. He’d wanted her to be a machine, and now she was finally acting like one, a perfect, silent robot working as fast as she could. That was the only variation.
His vision, blurred by his headache, unfocused and refocused as he began to see a vague pattern glimmering behind the pixels on his screen, like a three-dimensional scene hidden within a mass of seemingly random one-dimensional dots. He leaned back, rubbing his eyes. She was the only variable.
He thought carefully about their work over the last weeks and began to discern some oblique blueprint for the role she had actually played on this project. Untrained as she was, Kate apparently performed some vital function secreted between the lines that buoyed him up, and gave him the ability to face his task. He couldn’t quantify this variable or record it on his spreadsheet, but without “X” the full dead weight of his hideous load crushed down on him, like Atlas groaning under the weight of the world. He needed Kate to be Kate, bull-headed or not.
On the morning of March 21, he knocked on her cubicle and poked his head around the divider. “May I come in?”
Kate nodded, indicating a chair next to the wall, but he remained standing, half-leaning on the edge of her desk. He pulled a light blue box from his pocket and placed it in front of her. She didn’t move.
“It’s my return gift, from Valentine’s Day,” he said, but she gave him a blank look. “Today’s White Day,” he clarified.
“Oh, White Day, yeah. Japanese—thing,” she said, almost to herself. “I gave you cookies. I thought the return gift was supposed to be of equal value. They don’t sell cookies at Tiffany’s.”
“You gave me a novel too,” he said.
“Also not sold at Tiffany’s.”
He reached over, untied the ribbon, removed the lid and opened the inner case, revealing a simple but beautiful gold brooch. He was brilliant at picking gifts.
“I’m also making up with a woman,” he said.
“I’m the one who offended you. I’m aware of that.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to revise your opinion?”
She looked at him, unblinking.
“I admit, I am tired. Maybe we can agree to disagree and leave it at that,” he said.
Kate looked at the brooch. “It’s very pretty,” she said, but she made no move to touch it.
“We have to go to Las Vegas for meetings next week. Maybe we can have some fun while we’re there. We’re on schedule, so it wouldn’t hurt.” He used the word “we” on purpose, for solidarity. She didn’t answer at once, but she did appear to be thinking. A good sign.
“Actually, I have to go to Salt Lake on Friday,” she said. “My sister Corinne is coming from Virginia and we’re all getting together at my dad’s house. It’s pretty close to Las Vegas, especially by plane. Will you come?”
A whole weekend lost. She was exacting a heavy price, more expensive than anything they’d shown him at Tiffany’s. He could almost feel the golden minutes spilling from the desk to disappear into the cracks forever. On the other hand, how productive had he been the last few days, the kinetic energy mysteriously diverted by discord? He looked at her concerned expression.
“Yes, I’ll come,” he said, too worn out to fight her anymore.
She looked at the brooch still sitting in its box. “You have good taste,” she said and smiled a small, conciliatory smile, but still did not touch it.
Ryoki pulled the brooch out of the box and leaned toward her. Startled, Kate pulled back a fraction, stiffening as he gently took her lapel between two fingertips, slid the pin into the fabric and fastened the clasp. He felt the intimacy of the act the moment he touched the fabric, an act too intimate for the office and certainly too intimate for Kate. But by Ryoki’s reckoning, she had violated his space; now he was violating hers—an even exchange.
Chapter Seven
Late Friday evening Kate’s sister Corinne met them at baggage claim at Salt Lake International, her two-year-old daughter running full tilt, dodging legs, her arms outstretched for Kate to catch her, whisk her up, and spin her around. Kate’s face lit to match the child’s, her guarded reserve evaporating as chubby arms went around her neck and they spun together like dancers atop a music box. “She took a three-hour nap at five,” Corinne said, blowing a lock of hair out of her face. “She’s going to be up all night.” Kate put the child down and seemed on the verge of making an introduction, when the little girl shrieked, “PUPPY!” and escaped into the crowd.
Both sisters gave chase, returning with the unrepentant little convict who periodically picked up her feet to swing between them as they talked at light speed, apparently attempting to expel every word in their heads in five minutes or less. Ryoki smiled to discover this new Kate, this bubbly bubblegum Kate, he had never met.
Not wanting to interrupt, he hung back and waited to be introduced, feeling like a hulking mass next to the two slight women. Kate had still never addressed him directly by name, but she couldn’t avoid it now. He wondered how she would phrase it, how his name would sound in her mouth. Just then Corinne looked up and smiled. “You must be Ryoki Tanaka. I’m Corinne. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Ryoki looked sideways at Kate, wondering whether any of it was good. But Kate had already turned to Corinne and said, “Remember, I work for him, so try not to make me look bad,” her tone ranking him right on the line between human and humanish.
The child freed one hand from her mother’s grasp and began tugging urgently on Kate’s pant leg. “Apple!” she said, pointing to the Red Delicious embroidered on her jumper, “Apple!”
“Yes, apple,” Kate said. “It’s very beautiful.”
Ryoki wrinkled his eyebrows. A sardonic smile played across his lips. “Apple,” his ex-wife’s nickname. Naturally Kate managed to say that, rather than his own name.
The Porter home turned out to be a rambling red brick colonial nestled in a comfortable tree-lined neighborhood in the Wasatch Foothills, the kind of place where people clumped to gossip whenever the weather was good and the power was out. Kate entered the family room into a barrage of welcoming siblings and spouses. A knot of young, pajama-clad children burst from a blanket fort in the corner, all squealing and ricocheting off the furniture, not allowing her a word.
Given Kate’s tidy habits, the room was not as quiet or as neat as Ryoki had expected, nor was the house as grand as Brian Porter’s mansion. But the large family room had the same comfortable, overstuffed club room feel with a popping fire, deep brown leather furniture and three walls lined with built-in bookcases crammed with volumes haphazardly stacked in every direction. Off to the left sat an elaborate inlaid chess table Ryoki recognized as the twin of the one in Brian Porter’s home, and to the right sat a gleaming baby grand, with an ornate harp and wooden music stand in the corner—a solid six feet of floor-to-ceiling bookcases devoted to music books.
Ryoki was looking hopefully at the piano, when a cheer
ful young man with sandy hair and an open, honest face stepped forward to shake hands, introducing himself as Doug Carson, Corinne’s husband. He motioned toward the chittering group, now mostly females, simultaneously conversing together and calming the jumping, prancing children vying for their attention. “Can I offer you a drink or anything?”
“Water would be nice,” Ryoki said, liking him right way.
As they were leaving the room a young father stood up. “Okay, guys, Kate’s home, that was the deal. Time for B—E—”
“D” a few children said sadly, slumping their shoulders, until one bright-eyed boy piped up, “I’m hungwy can I have something to eat?” and every child burst into the same chorus.
“Ben, if you want to make your next birthday—”
