“Dad!” Richard said. “You can’t seriously mean to take—”
“If you want to precipitate a landslide in the middle of a hurricane,” Praxis told him, “then be prepared for the consequences.”
“Now, now, now,” Leonard quavered. “There’s no need for hasty action. There’s plenty of time for us to sit down and work through—”
“Work through what?” Praxis asked angrily. “How will these circumstances change if we delay until tomorrow? Or next week? Next month? You’ve forced me to a decision, and I’ve made it. What can change now, except your arguments and my mind?”
“Then we’ll survive without you.” Leonard said, suddenly cold.
“We’ve survived a lot worse than this,” Richard said.
“I hope you’re right,” Praxis replied.
* * *
“We’ve reached the tipping point,” Ted Bridger said quietly as they went over the practice’s books for another month. Antigone Wells could see what he meant.
Having let Carolyn Boggs go as well as Sully Mkubwa, and put her assistant Madeline on part time, they had nowhere else to cut in terms of staff—unless Wells wanted to open her own mail and type her own letters, as well as Ted’s, like a rookie just starting out from law school. Their income for the month barely covered office rent and utilities.
“Where did the huge fees of the last couple of years go?” she wondered, thinking of BB&W’s share of the recovery in the St. Brigid’s case—the last of her glory days.
“To keep us afloat through the thin times of the past year,” he said.
“I guess I haven’t been as productive as … before.”
“Neither have I, come to mention it.”
“Are we getting too old?”
“I am. You’re not,” he said. “I swear, Antigone, you look younger and more alive than you ever did … before.”
“Before my brain exploded, you mean.”
“Well, whatever it was.”
“I’m getting better. Soon I’ll be back up to my usual pace, you know.”
“You might, but I won’t. I’ve grown senile, my dear. Time for me to go.”
“What’s the—” She hesitated. “—the protocol for a situation like this?”
“You should offer to buy me out. But …” Now he hesitated. “Don’t.”
“I have resources of my own,” she said. “I can manage the cost.”
“I know. And the value of the practice has declined to the point where you could probably afford to buy it outright. But honestly, in these times? With this future?”
“Lots of work. Nobody able to pay.”
“If you bought my share, you’d still be bankrupt next month—and personally broke to boot.”
“Then …” she said, “I’ll draw up the liquidation papers and alert the landlord.” She ran her hand over the burled maple of her desktop. “The furniture ought to fetch a good price. And we can sell the computers on eBay.”
“Not much value in liquidations,” he said. “Anymore.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
“Tend to my garden. And you?”
“Oh …” She realized hadn’t ever considered a life beyond the law. Best Damn Attorney in San Francisco, now bankrupt, seeks suitable employment … “Live off my hump for a while,” she said. What could she get for a top-floor condominium apartment on Divisadero Street? “Maybe travel for a bit. I’ve got a sister Oklahoma I haven’t seen in a couple of years.”
“Isn’t that on the other side of the border?” he asked.
“What border? They’re not another country yet, are they?”
“Well, go then. But just take care of yourself.”
* * *
Callie Praxis was performing a bit of rudimentary bonsai on her mother’s purple African violet, trimming away dead leaves with a pair of kitchen shears. Yesterday Adele had looked at the plant, walked away, turned back, and touched the pale brown leaves with a frown. Working on the theory that, if her mother could still love anything in her confused state, it might be a living thing, Callie had taken the plant in hand and tried to coax it back to life. She had found some liquid fertilizer in the garage, and as soon as she’d cleared enough of the leaves to give the plant breathing space, she planned to apply it.
Her cell phone caught her in mid-snip. When she picked it up, she didn’t recognize the number. It was from somewhere in Texas. She answered it anyway, because her days were just not that busy anymore. “Hello?”
“Hello, Miz Praxis? My name is Kevin Lowe, and I’m a marketing vice president with Intelligeneering Systems Inc. I got your private number from the operators at Praxis Engineering—”
“Uh-huh? Right, Mr. Lowe. You need to know that I’m no longer with that company and not in a position to recommend your services.” She had her fingertip poised to press “end.”
“I understand that, ma’am,” he said quickly. “They told me you’d left. But I’m following up on a call you made two weeks ago to our technical support line. The subject matter was unusual enough that they referred it to my attention.”
“Oh? Yes … ‘Mr. Andy.’ ”
“Yes. I’ve listened to the recording. This is not something we reveal in a routine service call, you understand. But as you are—or were—an officer of the company, our legal staff has asked me to contact you and tell you the information he gave out was not entirely accurate. It’s in the fine print on your contract that, during installation and testing of any software package, we may from time to time interrupt the various databases for the purposes of seeding sample data. And then, of course, we delete it. Such additions and deletions are not recorded in the system access files, for obvious reasons.”
“Name one.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me an obvious reason for not recording a transaction,” she said.
“Well, during testing, we’re not making actual accounting entries, nothing that would show up on your company’s books. So we don’t want to clutter your system with meaningless data.”
“And when you’re finished with the installation, you—how do you say—remove that access? Close those back doors?”
“Yes, that would be customary.”
“ ‘Customary’?” she said. “Don’t you have a rule about it?”
“You must understand, Miz Praxis. Every installation is a major undertaking and a lot more complicated than you can imagine—”
“I can imagine quite a bit.”
“Sometimes, when our engineers know they may have to return for additional troubleshooting, they leave these access points in place. It’s a precaution we take for your benefit, actually.”
“Does anyone in Praxis Engineering know about this unsanctioned access?” she asked. A picture was beginning to form in her mind.
“We don’t make it widely known, for obvious reasons. But as I said, it’s noted in the contract. And we make a practice of informing the most senior executives in the financial end of the business.”
“But would anyone inside Praxis Engineering have that access?” she pressed. “Would they know how to use the back door?”
“Oh, I doubt it!” Lowe said, almost but not quite laughing. “The coding is very subtle and requires a piece of software with the right keys. Your average senior executive would be lost, really. And your information technology staff should know better than to try poking around.”
“I see,” Callie replied. She remembered that Richard had been a math wizard as a child. He had cried for his first computer, an old S-100 hobby system running CP/M, at age eleven, and a year later he was making it do tricks that weren’t even in the manuals by coding at what he called “binary level.” The rest of the family thought it was adorable that he thought he could actually make sense of all those paired zeroes and ones glowing in green on the monitor screen.
Of course, there was nothing she could do about his implied treachery now. The paperwork for her removal was all signed. The Coup—as her f
ather called it—had already taken place. The company was effectively broken and launched on a glide path to destruction. And no amount of angry accusations, techno-babble, and hate-filled he-said-she-saids could ever put it back together.
“Thank you for your call, sir,” she told the man on the phone. “You’ve answered my original question.”
“I’m glad we could oblige, ma’am.”
And then she did press “end.”
* * *
Antigone Wells understood that John Praxis owned a house in Sea Cliff, but she had never seen it. When he asked her to come out one evening and gave her the address, she didn’t know what to expect.
He met her himself at the front door, took her through into the study, and sat her down at his eighteenth-century desk, taking one of the chairs in front for himself. On the green leather blotter was an envelope in heavy, cream-colored vellum.
“What is this, John?” she asked.
“My revocable living trust and a durable power of attorney.”
“I see.” Wells had kept in touch with Jeanne Hale, who was now the full-time caregiver for Praxis’s wife. Without violating a confidence, Jeanne had let her know that the woman was failing fast. “You want to change the terms, I guess, in case your wife … does not survive you?”
His gaze held steady. “No, the succession is fairly clear and covers a number of contingencies. I want it changed now so that my daughter Callie becomes trustee, chief inheritor, and agent on my behalf.”
“Oh!” Jeanne had also mentioned some kind of upheaval at the engineering company, after Callista’s forced withdrawal. The daughter had moved into the family home full time, John himself was spending most days at home, and the entire household had suddenly gone tense and quiet, except for the fitfully dreaming Adele. Using admirable discretion, Jeanne had only discussed her sense of foreboding, not any juicy tidbits she might have picked up from overheard conversations.
“You can pretty much make that change with a word processor and a notary public,” Wells said now. “You don’t need an attorney for that.”
“Let’s just say I’m cautious. I want this ironclad and unbreakable.”
“I understand.” She opened the envelope, unfolded the documents and began scanning them.
“My sons can be very persuasive,” he went on. “And they will have a lot of power at their backs. I want to be sure any attempt they make to overturn this gets stopped dead in its tracks.” His voice was calm enough, but under the surface she could sense a suppressed rage.
“I understand.” A thought occurred to her. “What about Adele’s will? If it follows the pattern here—with your eldest son as trustee, followed by your other son, and only after him your daughter—and Adele should outlive you …”
“It don’t think that’s a reasonable possibility.”
Wells nodded. She turned a page and was studying the list of assets. Praxis was a wealthy man, she found, even by the standards of Sea Cliff.
“One other thing is that list,” he said. “Right now, it’s all tied up with shares in Praxis Engineering. I will soon be surrendering those outright. So we’ll need to show cash or some other liquid asset. I’m not sure what I’ll convert the shares to right now. Times are so unsettled. This has to be a work in progress.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you get started, John,” she said. “But I may not see it through. We’re dissolving the practice, Ted and I, and I may not be in town much longer. I’ll handle the trusteeship and inheritance issues right away, of course. But you may need to find someone else to work on the assets. I know two good attorneys, former associates of mine, who can do that for you. And you will want to stop my retainer as of the end of the month.”
“Oh?” It was his turn to look puzzled. “I didn’t realize you had … troubles.”
“Not trouble. But it feels like all the air’s gone out of the room.”
“I know what you mean. Like we’re all on short time.”
She gathered the documents. “We’ll survive.”
He took her hand. “I sure hope we do.”
* * *
Praxis entered in and ran the San Francisco Marathon that June. Although the organizers offered a pair of back-to-back half-marathon courses, he decided to try for the full twenty-six miles, which meant climbing and descending elevation changes of two to three hundred feet at least five times. He sternly told himself to have no expectations. He would run until he was tired, then he would drop out, cool down, and go home.
He gave himself the longest possible estimated finish time, six hours, and received a bib with the number 80,679. He would be starting a full hour after the fastest runners, but still early—six-thirty on a Sunday morning. Toward the end of the race, around noon, he thought he might be stumbling over a course littered with dispensed water bottles and fallen bodies.
The starting point was the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street. The course went around the waterfront on the Embarcadero, through Fisherman’s Wharf, Marina Green, and Crissy Field. Then he was on familiar territory, up over the Golden Gate Bridge and back. From there he went down the western slope of the city, passing within three blocks of home, and across the Avenues. The course looped forward and back through Golden Gate Park, then proceeded east on Haight Street, crossed to 16th Street, down to the foot of Potrero Hill, and finally back along the Embarcadero to within a block of his office—his former office—on Steuart Street. It only felt like he was running half of the famous Forty-Nine Mile Drive around the city.
He did not push himself too hard, but he never let himself give up, either. He passed many younger, stronger people who sagged by the side of the road in defeat. For the last six miles his knees and ankles, shins and thigh muscles were throbbing, and he knew he would be hobbling around the house for a week. He wondered what it would cost, and how painful it would be, to have to have the doctors replace the joints where cartilage now rubbed against bone with implements of steel and ceramic, or maybe new bearing points grown from his stem cells. He was staggering and gasping and hating himself for the last mile.
But his heart felt fine, clocking a steady one hundred forty beats per minute.
He was a mess. He was a wreck. He was invincible.
* * *
Callie tried to spend at least an hour a day with her mother, to be there even if Adele wasn’t always aware. On the good days, when her mother decided to dress, they would sit downstairs and watch daytime television or maybe go out into the garden when the sky was clear and the sun warmed the wrought-iron bench. On the bad days, Callie would sit by her bedside while Adele nodded and dozed.
Once, when Callie had first come home, her mother asked her for a drink. Callie had consulted with the caregiver, Jeanne, who pursed her lips and frowned. “She’s not supposed to have it,” the woman said. “But I can’t see it makes a bit of difference now.”
So Callie had mixed a tablespoon of bourbon in three fingers of soda and given it to her mother. Adele took it, gulped it down, grimaced, and burped from the bubbles. The “daily soother” became a morning ritual, until Adele forgot to ask, then forgot who Callie was, and finally forgot who she was herself. But still Callie sat beside her and held her thin, pale hand.
When her mother seemed capable of hearing, Callie helped Adele remember her life through the stories from Callie’s childhood. She recalled the time Leonard tried to make a pet of a stray mongoose, when they were all living at the dam site in Ghana, and the animal bit him. She told about the time the family traveled to see the tidal bore, the “Silver Dragon,” on the Quiantang River in China. She remembered the mountain lion that chased Callie and Richard up a tree when their father was renovating the missile site in Idaho, and how Adele shot the beast in the shoulder—her father always claimed it was through the heart—with a Winchester rifle. She remembered the time she and her brothers, who had been raised on four different contents and in six different cultures, finally went to Disneyland and simply goggled at Main Street,
the Mississippi riverboat, and the Fantasyland castle—although Richard said he’d seen bigger ones in Germany.
Sometimes Adele smiled. More often she simply nodded or shrugged. Once she asked, “Was I there?” And Callie said, “You were the glue that held us together, Mom.”
Lately, Adele simply slept. Fifteen hours a day. Then twenty.
Jeanne Hale took Callie and her father into the study one evening and said quietly, “There’s only so much I can do. Soon she’s going to need real medical support—the sort she can only get in a hospital or skilled nursing facility.”
Her father nodded. “Can you help with arrangements?”
“Of course. I’ll start making calls tomorrow.”
“She won’t like leaving the house.”
“I doubt she’ll know about it.”
“A blessing, I guess.”
* * *
Because the community center had no locker room for her to change in, Antigone Wells had vastly simplified her preparations and dress for going to and from class.
Instead of more complicated layers of underwear, she wore a simple pink nylon leotard under sweat pants and a fleece jacket, and slip-on sneakers without socks on her feet. Then, when she got to the ladies room—or even out in the corridor or in a corner of the exercise room—she could simply strip off the pants and jacket, shed the sneakers, and pull on her white cotton uniform gi trousers with their draw-string tie and the loose-fitting jacket that was closed only by the heavily stitched white obi belt around her hips. The leotard took care of any modesty issues as she bent and twisted during the workout. She had long ago stopped carrying a purse but instead put her house keys in one pants pocket, her money and cards in a billfold in the other. All she had to carry then was the gi, which she rolled into a compact bundle and tied with the belt.
That lack of encumbrance probably saved her life.
Wells was walking home after dark on Divisadero Street, and once again the streetlights were out. She could navigate only by the indirect light coming from the few open store fronts, lit porch lamps, upper-story windows, and the occasional sweep of headlights from passing cars. Otherwise she moved from shadow to shadow, and she could feel the tension rising in her neck and shoulder muscles.
Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Page 19
