“She’s my boss. She’s given me the opportunity of a lifetime, working here. What I want doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, come on, Leo. She lectured you about taking an extra ten minutes off at lunch to get a haircut last week.”
“So? I should have scheduled the haircut on my own time.”
“She lectured you about having to get stitches in the emergency room. What were you supposed to do? Stop your bleeding on your own time too?”
“You don’t know what it’s like.” Leo shook his head with profound blind loyalty. “She’s the ticket to my career. I owe her a lot.”
Tom Roscoe gave Sarah a big buy order he wanted her to execute for a client. He explained that he wanted her to buy the same list of commodities for him first, even though the order might drive the price up for the customer. Sarah knew what would happen. When the order went in for the client, it would further raise the price. Then Roscoe would sell his own contract at a profit.
Sarah said, “I thought you wanted me working solely on the other account. I don’t—”
He stopped her. “I know I promised exclusivity. But sometimes there isn’t any choice but to be flexible.” His eyes burned with purpose. “We both know I need someone with a head like yours, especially in a market that’s this unpredictable.”
“I’m flattered, Tom. I am.”
“I’m asking you to take on more than your fair share. I’m aware of that. But we both know what you’re capable of doing.”
“Isn’t front-running illegal?” Sarah asked.
But even if he’d answered yes, Sarah wouldn’t have argued. She felt a sting of conscience but pushed it away. Ever since she’d found out about Lauren losing her post, Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling of impending doom. Even if Tom’s suggestion was legal, Sarah knew it wasn’t ethical. Would she also get fired if she didn’t do exactly as he wanted?
Her heart raced. Her headache pounded. She had to remind herself to breathe.
Tom made it simple. “It’s just another weapon in the arsenal. Everyone does it. And just because I know that Buck Nielsen happened to short sell a large amount of wheat futures and this will make the price go up, well, c’est la vie.”
Tom lavished admiration on Sarah. He told her that Lauren had complained about Sarah’s appointment to the Cornish account and that’s the reason he’d let her go. “No one threatens this team,” he said, “and we all know you’re the best I’ve got. I like the way you think on your feet, Sarah. There aren’t many women like you. You’re an elite breed. You’re a go-getter.”
With each word Tom spoke, Sarah’s heartbeat ran a little slower. Her shoulders relaxed. She wanted to do good and not hurt people, but she needed this. She needed this. Her drive to succeed outweighed everything else. Each of Tom’s words felt like a hit of a drug. They soothed and rescued her. Why can’t Joe make me feel this way? she thought vaguely.
Outside his door, she leaned against the wall, held her hand over her rib cage, and was finally able to take a breath. It was a breath that, for the first time in three hours, finally went clear down to the depths of her lungs.
Sarah found Mitchell slumped over his arms at her huge desk,sound asleep.
“He waited a long time for you,” Leo whispered on his way out.
Sarah peered down at Mitchell. His eyeglasses were seriously askew. She removed them, shook his shoulders, smoothed his hair off his forehead. “Hey, kiddo,” she whispered. “You still with me? Time to head home.”
He lifted his head, and his brow furrowed. There was a red imprint of his sleeve on his cheek. He was still fuzzy from sleep.
“Mom?” Mitchell asked. She followed his gaze out the window. The sunset bloomed over the outline of the city, water-color streaks of apricot and lavender and magenta shining softly through the soiled gauze of Chicago smog. “We’re not going to the skate park anymore, are we?”
She shook her head. “We’re not, buddy,” she said. “It’s too late.”
He was almost too big to carry, but not quite. With her head down and her body hunched, Sarah shouldered him and her enormous purse and toted them down the elevator.
As she strode past the enormous marble security desk, as she burst out through the revolving door the same way a springboard diver bursts through the surface after being under water too long, as she carried her son out to the car in the Smart Park Tower, she was right, it was already too late.
It was too late for a great many things.
Chapter Eight
Sarah hadn’t told Joe, or anyone else for that matter, that she’d made the appointment at Dr. Faber’s office. Something like this wasn’t important enough to bother her friends with. And Joe had been so busy playing the entrepreneur, starting his car business from scratch, that she hadn’t wanted to distract him with anything else.
When she’d walked in the door yesterday, Sarah had noticed the slight flash of joyful expectation on Joe’s face (he must have been expecting Mitchell) before he’d realized who she was and shut down again. Someone has to make a living around here, she’d told Joe. She hadn’t meant to hurt him; she could kick herself for letting those words escape. Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut? But she knew the answer: Joe had a way of always making her feel so angry. When he backed her into the corner like that, she couldn’t keep herself from going on the attack. She imagined he knew exactly what buttons to push to get her to explode and delighted in doing so.
As Dr. Faber recounted the results of her tests, Sarah felt doubly glad she hadn’t told anyone about this meeting. For a great while, every time she’d considered phoning for an appointment, she’d managed to talk herself out of it. Why spend the money if she didn’t need to? Why worry everyone if there wasn’t going to be anything wrong anyway?
She didn’t really believe she was sick. Still, she couldn’t help wondering why nothing seemed to make her happy. Nothing gave her the sense of contentment she wanted. Could something be physically wrong with her? After all, she did have a lot of headaches. They were becoming more frequent and intense. She was tired most of the time.
As the physician explained her blood counts to her, he assured her that everything looked perfectly normal. He couldn’t find any medical reason after the laboratory tests for why she hadn’t been feeling herself lately. “Physically, you’re doing very well,” he told her. “Could be stress,” he said, and even though she laughed at that, she felt irritated that he would even suggest such a thing.
“I have always lived a fast-paced life, and I’ve always felt great about it,” she told him. “Actually, my work is what keeps me going. What I accomplish in life means a lot to me.”
Her doctor flipped through her file as if searching for more clues.
“I didn’t come for you to tell me to slow down. I need something that’s going to fix me,” she told him. “I have to build up my energy level so I can keep up the pace.” But she didn’t say the rest of it, that work took first place over everything else. That it had begun to cut into her time with her family. That she’d missed going to the game with her son this week even though she promised him she would go. That she couldn’t stop punishing Joe for the guilt she felt.
The doctor suggested she try a low dosage of antianxiety medication. She assured him she wasn’t anxious and that she was able to handle life without anxiety medicine. She had left his office without making the follow-up appointment he suggested.
Now, as Sarah drove home from her disastrous day with her son, Mitchell fiddled with the radio buttons until he found the Cubs game. On the air, the announcer said, “Two men on, nobody out. Runners go.” The bat cracked against the ball. The crowd roared to its feet. “That’s a base hit to center field! Soriano scores. The ball off the glove of Cabrera, and Sheffield, with a burst of speed, takes an extra base…”
Sarah glanced across the front seat, trying to read Mitchell’s expression. “Sounds like a good game, huh?”
“Yeah.” Mitchell’s voice was flat. His face was
lost in the flicker of shadows from passing cars. He sat with his skateboard upside down in his lap, absently fingering one wheel. His glasses concealed his eyes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
No answer.
“Mitchell?”
He spun the skateboard wheel again. “It took you a long time.”
“I know.”
“I made about a hundred pictures of myself on the copy machine. You always say you’ll be back any minute. But then you aren’t.”
As they clipped along the expressway, their headlights loomed on the exit sign for the Village of Buffalo Grove. “I do,” she said. “I do come back.” And in a fit of total frustration at the way she felt so trapped all the time, trying to please everyone and seemingly never doing it, Sarah swerved to the right, barely sandwiching the Lincoln between a white pickup and a motorcycle that sped around her, its driver glaring. She took the exit with a hard right veer.
Mitchell glanced out the window for the first time. “Mom?”
“Just a slight detour.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Nona and Harold’s house.”
He sat taller. “We are?”
“Into the right-field corner. Good to score at least a run,” the radio announcer shouted. “Ramirez is plated. Lee to third, and Ryan Theriot has come through here in the fifth.”
“We’re going to Nona’s house now?”
“How about we surprise them?” Sarah couldn’t face going home just yet.
They drove past a stretch that had once been broad, open field dotted with apple orchards, now built up and marked by curving cul-de-sacs and executive houses. They passed Dollar DAYZ and the White Hen Pantry and a massive car lot where light fell in spotlight pools upon the latest automobiles and flags flapped their greetings in the evening breeze.
They rounded the corner, past the American Legion Post, past the pink and green awning bedecking the shop that sold Rizzi’s Spumoni, and found themselves in territory that transported Sarah to her girlhood days. They passed the building that had once been the courthouse and the senior-spirit painted windows at Woolworth’s where Sarah’s mother had bought her notebooks and pencils for school. They passed the huge Lathrop Steel Casings Company where Jane had taken dictation and answered phones and been a senior stenographer for forty-one years running. They passed trees in the park with their leaves scything to the ground, the revamped city pool that had seen its last visitor on Labor Day and wouldn’t open again until next summer.
Sarah gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles pressed into sturdy, white ridges. Whatever had possessed her to leave the expressway and turn down here anyway? She should never have been so spontaneous. She should have thought this through.
Around the next corner, there stood the remodeled church, looking every bit like the long-ago architectural rendering Sarah’s grandmother had been over the moon about, a beautiful contemporary building with the floodlights upon its cross and its unmarred, white steeple. “Oh just look at it, Sarah,” she remembered her grandmother exclaiming the first time the framed drawing had gone on display in the foyer. “Imagine worship in a beautiful place like that! You see the steeple, Sarah? They’ve designed it from the old pictures. That’s the way it used to be.” Sarah had not thought about church in a long, long time.
Tonight the triangular building crouched atop land the way a vast ship might crouch atop water’s horizon, beckoning the way a ship might beckon, “Come journey! Come be carried to a different world.” Sidewalks framed the manicured crest of lawn. Some farsighted landscaper had seen fit to save a few of Buffalo Grove’s old apple trees. The churchyard’s ridges and rises remained studded with them, their dark trunks reaching toward the sky with the same ancient courage as an arthritic hand.
Try as she might, Sarah couldn’t erase her grandmother’s voice from her head. “Just imagine something this fine in the center of Buffalo Grove. People will come from all over just to attend church here. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” a little-girl Sarah had answered. Sarah remembered clenching a hand just as gnarled and timeworn as the tree trunks along the hill. “I do think.” And she remembered gazing into the eyes of the only woman who she ever felt really loved her, eyes that, in spite of age, had remained a clear, sharp blue. She remembered Annie’s face that heightened into pink whenever she was happy; Annie’s silver hair, so thin you could see the flush of her scalp beneath it, iridescent and finely spun on the top of her head into the shape of a Q-tip.
Sarah had never called her grandmother anything except Annie.
At first her mother had interfered, saying it wasn’t respectable for a two-year-old to call a grandma by her first name. Annie had tsk-tsked Jane’s objections almost before they’d started. “It’s the only thing she can say; she can’t even say ‘grandmother’ yet. I’ll live by any name with which my granddaughter christens me. And if it happens to be my given name, well, then so much the better.”
Now, passing the church, Sarah remembered the smell of the wood-paneled rooms and the homemade play dough, the wax candles dripping on the altar, Annie’s lilac perfume. She remembered the cool shade splashing over her face when, later in the day, they sat with their cheeks together beneath one of the trees, Annie’s breath smelling faintly of root-beer mints, reading aloud the stories in the Sunday-school paper. Now, passing the church, Sarah missed her grandmother with an ache that resembled hunger.
She braked. “I can’t do it, Mitchell. I don’t want to go to Nona and Harold’s after all.”
“But Mom, we’re almost there.”
How quickly one little boy’s face could shift from joy to a troubled frown.
“I want to see them, Mama. I want to talk to Harold. I want to see if I can find apples in the tree.”
The car had drawn almost to a stop in the center of the street. She clenched her teeth and drew in air. She ran a hand through her hair, draped it behind her neck, and kneaded the tense muscles there. She didn’t want to see Mitchell disappointed, not again today. Not again. Not ever.
She went through the same emotional upheaval every time she came to the house. She dreaded it and yet she hoped that perhaps this would be the time her mother would be glad to see her. But the same disappointment met her every time she walked in the door, every time she saw Jane and saw how nothing had changed. She shouldn’t have done this; she felt too tired and weary to put herself through it again right now. But it was too late.
“You never want to come to Nona’s house anymore. Mom, please?”
Her shoulders rose and fell with her sigh.
“Please?”
“Okay. I promise,” she said, her voice resolute. “We won’t turn back now.”
She hadn’t even stopped at the curb before Mitchell unhitched his seat belt and flung open the door and galloped to the front porch. Sarah opened her window. Even this late she could smell the apples.
Most of the fruit was snagged from the limbs just as soon as it ripened. But a few pieces fell and fermented in the grass with a sticky sweet smell that attracted wasps and reminded old-timers of long-ago orchards. Annie had always told her the whole town smelled like McIntosh apples at harvest time.
Harold’s silhouette appeared against the light from the living room. “Harold!” Mitchell shouted, bouncing on his toes. “It’s us! We came to see you.”
“Woo ha-he-goodness,” the man’s voice bellowed. “We’ve got company, Jane. Who’s this in the dark jumping around like a chimpanzee? It’s Mitchell.” Sarah could see her stepfather surveying the yard, checking to see who else might be out there. “And I’ll bet Mitchell didn’t drive over here all by himself, did he?”
“Of course I didn’t drive,” Mitchell said as he pushed his way past Harold’s leg and went inside to find his grandma. “I’m only eight years old.”
“You’re eight? And nobody’s taught you how to drive yet? Well, if I had my keys and a phone boo
k for you to sit on, I’d get on that job right now.”
“I don’t think so,” Sarah said, giving her stepfather a squeeze. “But when he gets to be fifteen, I might take you up on it.”
Harold hugged her back, and it felt so good that she wished he’d never let go.
She stepped back and searched his expression. “Are we bad, coming so late?”
“Of course you’re not. You know we’ll take you anytime we can get you.”
“I’m sorry for missing our coffee date, Harold. I wouldn’t have done that to you. I totally spaced it out.”
He gave a little humph, gripped her shoulders, and searched her expression. “Sarah? Are you okay?”
“Yes.” Then, “No.” Then, “Of course I am. Why would you ask? I’m fine.”
“I do need to talk to you.”
She raised her eyebrows in a question.
“Not now. It’ll have to be for another coffee date.”
Her teeth clenched in embarrassment. “Did you wait a long time?”
“Ate three whole pieces of pie.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe next time you can punch it into your computer and have the thing give you an electric shock in the pants or something,” he suggested.
“Harold. I’m so sorry.”
I’ll get over it, his brief smile said. He held open the screen to allow her entrance.
The minute she stepped into the house, she knew she shouldn’t have come. The wooden floors complained beneath each of her steps: You don’t have any right to be here. The old boiler rumbled to life, knocking and hissing like it disapproved of her presence.
“Mama?”
“Good heavens, Sarah. Don’t you know better than to pop in to see people in the middle of the night like this?”
The ancient, upright piano huddled like a watchman in the corner. It was missing several select ivory keys the same way an ancient boxer missed teeth. Beyond the piano, the tiny woman must have leaped from her chair, distraught at first sight of her grandson. Her reading glasses rested upside down in a pool of ice cubes on the floor. With a stained tea towel, she flogged and thrashed at her bathrobe as if she were trying to punish the soda she’d spilled in her lap.
Any Minute: A Novel Page 8
