by Melissa Good
Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out and stepped to one side to avoid the crowd on the stairs. “Kerry Stuart,” she answered, covering her free ear.
“Hey,” Dar’s voice echoed softly. “Where are you?”
“Just leaving the courthouse.” Kerry glanced around. “Why?”
“Meet you for lunch? My noon conference call just got canceled,” Dar said. “Big storm over in Europe, everyone’s going home.”
“Sure,” Kerry said. “Thai place, ten minutes.”
“See ya.”
Kerry hung up the phone and leaned against the stone wall, collecting her wits and composure. The process hadn’t gone at all how she’d expected it to, and now she was really glad that Dar was coming out to join her for lunch. She wanted to talk. About the court, and about Dar’s sudden revelation.
All of a sudden the world seemed to be moving too fast.
“SO IT’S DONE?” Dar looked almost comically astonished. She slid into the back booth in their favorite little lunch place and rested her hands on the table. “Holy crap.”
“Yeah I...” Kerry glanced at the waitress. “Usual for me.”
“Me too.” Dar leaned forward as the waitress left. “It was that fast?”
Kerry took a breath and released it. “It’s not all the way over. They have to call me for a hearing, but...I mean, I thought I had to post it up in public and all that but I guess not anymore. Serves me right for trusting the Internet.” She looked across the table as Dar removed her sunglasses, and found herself captivated by her pale eyes. “So I guess now I wait to hear from them, then they sign it and it’s done.”
Dar grinned. “I sent an email to my parents telling them. My mom said my dad wants to formally adopt you.”
Kerry blinked. “Can he do that?”
Dar shrugged. “We could check the Internet. But you know he really loves you. They both do.”
Kerry felt unexpected tears sting her eyes.
“And of course, I do,” Dar added gently. “You look freaked out.”
“I am.”
The waitress came back and delivered two ice teas and two bowls of soup. She put them down and retreated in silence.
“Why?”
Kerry took a sip of her tea. “You know, I’m not really sure. Could be because I’m due for my period tomorrow.”
“Ah.” Dar reached over and chafed her hand. “We got supplies?”
The talk of something so prosaic and mundane snapped Kerry right out of her funk. She chuckled softly and felt her body relax. “Yeah, I’m good.” She released Dar’s hand and picked up her soup spoon. “Dar, would that make me your sister? Because that would be really, really weird.”
Dar started laughing, almost spilling her tea. “I think he just wanted to express the intent, hon.” She picked up her soup bowl, drinking directly from it. “He already considers you one of his kids.”
Kerry watched her fondly. “So.” She dipped her spoon into her soup and consumed it in a more conventional manner. “So what made you decide to pull back your resignation? Was it something someone said, or...”
Dar paused to think about it, setting her bowl down. “Yeah,” she said. “Something Alastair said stuck in my monkey brain. I was thinking about it while we were down at the cabin, about how walking out right now just didn’t feel good to me.”
“Mm.”
“Or it could just be my ego doesn’t want to let go of this position,” Dar said, in a wry tone. “Sometimes I like being me.”
Kerry smiled. “I think you do enjoy it. I enjoy you being you. Why shouldn’t you have fun with it too?” She finished her soup and pushed the bowl aside. “But, Dar, you’ll be successful at whatever you end up doing. Don’t you want to be your own boss?”
The waitress came back with their lunch and set it down. Dar had her hands folded on the table, and she waited for the woman to leave again. “Do I?” She applied herself to mixing her curry with its attendant rice. “Yeah, I do. I’d like to be rid of that damn board, and not have to answer to anyone.”
Kerry felt a sense of relief. “That’s what I thought. I know I would.”
“It’s just hard for me to turn my back on the responsibility.” Dar rested her head on one hand. “And... will I like being a consultant? Just suggesting things without having the ability to make those things happen?”
Oh. Kerry paused in her motion, as the words penetrated. “I didn’t really think about that.”
“Mm.” Dar sighed. “Occurred to me when Alastair was at our place for dinner. He’s sort of in that place, you know? He has to take crap from everyone, but he depends on people like me to make things happen in the right way.”
“Well. We don’t have to be consultants. We can make our own super high speed network and sell it to people,” Kerry said. “You know you’re really good at that.”
Dar tapped her fork against her lips. “You mean, build out infrastructure in direct competition with my own design here? That’d take a lot of money to bootstrap.”
Kerry watched the little twitches shift on Dar’s face. “It would,” she agreed. “But we could start just in Florida, and build out as we get customers. Sort of like what you did, with provisioning only where we had clients.”
“Hm.” Dar’s eyebrows arched up. “We had a hell of a time finding an alternate datacenter, maybe we can offer that service too. I know we could find someplace on the west side of Dade or Broward to put one in.” She reached over and tweaked Kerry’s nose. “I like that idea, partner.”
Kerry munched her peanut chicken in contented silence. It was hard for her to really put her finger on why she was so intent on a life change, but she knew she was, and she really wanted Dar to buy into that. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate the sentiments about responsibility, and their staff trusting and needing them. She did. She understood at a gut level the ties that held Dar in place, and why it was hard to break them.
But she was determined to. “You know what I think it is, Dar?”
“Bet I’m about to.” Dar grinned at her.
“You were right. We waited too long. We should have done it in October. Wrapped up everything while everyone was still in a tailspin and gotten out. We gave them a chance to suck us back in.” She glanced up to see Dar nodding at her. “So we’ve got to turn that around.”
Dar’s pale eyes twinkled a little. “You really want out.”
“I do.”
“I do too. I just feel bad about it. I’ve been there a long time, and even though I fought with a lot of those people like cats and dogs it’s still...” She paused. “I don’t know.”
“They were your family when you didn’t have one,” Kerry said, quietly.
Dar stopped eating and lowered her fork, gazing at Kerry in silence for a long moment.
“Weren’t they?” Kerry asked, into all that quiet. “I mean, not Jose or Eleanor, but Maria, and Mark, and Duks and Mari?” She stopped eating as well, and waited. Wincing a little as she reviewed her words and wondered if she’d insulted Dar without meaning to.
“As much as I’d let them, yeah,” Dar finally said. “Boy that hit a spot.”
“Sorry.” Kerry reached over and touched her arm. “I didn’t mean to bum you out, sweetheart. Maybe I should have just brought you back something.”
Dar smiled, after a brief pause. “No, you didn’t. I was just thinking about the year before you came into my life. I remember going to the office over Christmas for some stupid broken thing and walking in and finding a bunch of little presents on my desk.”
“Mm?”
“Just little stuff. Candies and whatever,” Dar said. “With no name on them. Just a random kindness and when you said that I remembered it. I still don’t know who put them there.”
“Could have been the cleaning staff.” Kerry felt the tension in her guts relax. “Could have been ops.”
“Could have.”
“Could have been the security guards.”
“That’s
true too, so maybe you’ve got a point,” Dar said. “I’ve been there a lot longer than you have.”
“Yeah.” Kerry sighed. “I’m just being a jerk today. Maybe I should go home.”
“Let’s both go home,” Dar suggested readily. “Screw it. You got anything on your schedule for this afternoon?”
“Nope.” Kerry felt a grin forming again. “Too much beginning of the year to be stuffed with crap yet.”
Dar took out her phone and dialed. “Maria? It’s Dar. Listen, Kerry’s not feeling well. I’m going to take her home. Just clear my outbox and I’ll pick up again tomorrow.” She smiled. “I will, thanks. I know she’ll appreciate the thought. Thanks, Maria.”
She closed the phone and picked up her fork. “I’m going to see if I can get her an early retirement package.”
“I’m going to see if Mayte wants to watch our place while we’re traveling and start the process of setting up our new company,” Kerry said. “Do you mind if I hire her as our first employee?”
“Nope.” Dar smoothly handed her credit card to the waitress. “Tell you what. Let’s go out to South Beach for dinner. Have some stone crabs.”
“Walk out on the beach?” Kerry leaned back and spread her arms out on the seat back. “How about we go out to Crandon and relive our first kiss?”
Dar’s grin morphed from just amused to criminally adolescent. “Let’s do that.”
Kerry grinned back. “At this rate, I could get to like Mondays.”
“WE NEED TO stop by this place on the beach on the way.” Dar relaxed in Kerry’s passenger seat, extending her long legs out. “They’ve got this new phone thing they want me to look at.”
Kerry had unzipped her leather jacket, and paused to let traffic go by as she waited to turn onto the causeway. “What kind of phone thing?”
“Company called Handspring.” Dar stretched her body out contentedly. “Some new phone and mail gizmo. I said I’d give it a try. Their distributor’s got a small place down on Washington.”
“Can I get one too?” Kerry turned right and proceeded down the road. “You get all the cool toys.”
Dar chuckled. “Absolutely.” She folded her hands over her sweatshirt covered stomach. “Nice to use the gym while everyone else is at work.”
“It was.” Kerry felt a little sore, her legs had that slightly heavy feeling of hard use and she suspected her night might end in the hot tub. “I think I overdid the presses a little though...where on Washington?”
“Second Ave.” Dar flexed her hands and then laid them down on her denim-covered knees. She had leather boots on, and her sweatshirt had a hood on it, and she was looking out the window with a contented expression.
Kerry’s cell phone rang, and before she could get it out of her pocket, Dar had. “Thanks, hon.”
Dar glanced at the caller ID. “Ops.” She opened the phone. “Yes?”
Dead silence. Then a male voice. “Uh...ah, sorry...ah, is that Ms. Roberts?”
“Yes,” Dar said. “You got it in one try. Congratulations.”
“Um...sorry, ma’am, I meant to call Ms. Stuart. I must have dialed the wrong number...uh, let me try again.”
“Relax.” Dar watched the palm trees flash by. “You got the right number, I just happen to be answering her phone because she’s driving and I love her too much to have her risk her life answering a phone.”
Kerry’s nostrils flared. “Dar, for cripes sake!”
“Uh.” The ops tech stuttered.
“So what is it you need?” Dar continued without missing a beat. “I assume you called her for a reason?”
“Ah, yes, ma’am,” he recovered bravely. “Sorry about the call but we’re seeing some latency in the network here and we’ve gotten some calls from people still working.”
Dar considered the phone. The urge to stop, pull out her laptop, and find the issue tickled her. Then she recalled that she hadn’t put the laptop in the car and stifled a smile. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s have a little troubleshooting lesson. If there’s latency in the office network there are only a couple things that can cause it. Know what they are?”
There was a period of silence, then the tech cleared his throat. “I asked the guys who called what was slow. They said everything.”
“Uh huh.”
“But...usually that’s not really true so I tried some stuff myself,” he said. “It’s files, ma’am, and my mail store. I checked the DNS with Nslookup, and it’s answering snappy, so I know it’s not that.”
“Good man,” Dar said. “So what does that mean?”
“Well, usually that would be the file servers, ma’am, but we asked the MIS guys to check and they said they didn’t see a problem.”
“Good.” Dar nodded approvingly. “Who did you talk to in the MIS team?”
“Johan.”
“Call Johan, and tell him I said there’s a problem with the file servers, and he’d better find it.”
Kerry turned down Alton Road and glanced at the street signs looking for 2nd Ave. “You’re such a maestro.”
The ops tech sounded much happier. “Thank you, ma’am, I’ll do that. Is it okay if I send Ms. Stuart a text when it’s fixed?”
“That’s fine,” Dar said. “Goodnight.” She closed the phone and dropped it back in Kerry’s pocket. “You know what else occurred to me?”
“That you do most of the thinking for a company of two hundred and fifty thousand employees?”
Dar chuckled. “Something like that. It’s easier to call someone than think for yourself, but we don’t get that option.”
Kerry remembered having to face that when Dar was in New York and she’d been faced with solving a complex technical issue. “It is easier. I had to teach myself not to just call you and ask.” She pulled into a parking lot of a small strip mall and parked. “Not easy.”
Dar turned her head and regarded Kerry with a bemused expression. “I should have forced everyone to do that.”
Kerry opened her door. “Let’s go get your toy, maestro. At least they call me first now.” She hopped out of the car and closed the door, zipping up her leather jacket as the wind off the water chilled her skin. It wasn’t the cold of Michigan, but she had a short-sleeved shirt on under her coat.
She followed Dar to the sidewalk and then around the side of the building to a small shop in the front of it, with a window full of screens and gadgets, and a radio controlled dog outside patiently barking at all passersby.
The sun was going down, and as they entered the shop its outside lights flickered on, and a gust of air puffed into their faces full of the smell of electrons and plastic. Dar went to the counter and put her hands on it. “I’m looking for Douglas.”
The man behind the counter nodded and turned, sticking his head inside a back room. “Doug? Some women here to see ya.”
Kerry wandered around the store as Dar waited for the owner, peering into the counters and finding her attention caught by the myriads of cell phones and accessories, and the cameras.
Hm. She was due a new camera. She leaned on the counter and studied the offerings, debating in her head if she wanted to move from film to digital this time.
“Hey, Ms. Roberts,” a low, gravelly voice boomed out. “Thanks for coming over. I thought you’d really like this thing here, maybe you want to try it out.”
“Ker?”
Kerry left the counter and returned to Dar’s side. “Hm?” She inspected the device in Dar’s hands. It wasn’t unlike her palm pilot, but it had a keyboard, and the screen was color. “Oh. Hey.” She took it and touched the keys. “You type with your thumbs?”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “Not my thumbs, yeah? That’s why I was looking for a lady to try it. I can’t type on them tiny keys.”
Kerry tried a few. “Hm.” She took out the stylus and touched the screen, watching the applications appear. “Cool.”
Dar grinned. “She’s sold. Got two of them? I don’t know if I can type on it with these mitts, but I’l
l give it a try.”
Beaming, Doug disappeared again, popping back out a moment later with another box. “There ya go. These are like, beat units? Won’t be commercial for a couple months. They run on Tmo.”
“Beta units.” Dar took hers. “We’ll give them a workout and let you know, Doug.”
“Great. Thanks!” He gave them a wave as they made their way back out into the crisp air. “Nice ladies.”
His assistant looked up at him, and shook his head. “Give up them phones? You’re crazy.”
Doug gave him a clout on the back as he went back into the storeroom. “Crazy like a fox, bro. That tall lady likes that thing, we can sell a truckload to her. Big shot in that high tech stuff.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Chapter Four
KERRY WAS GLAD of the cool air, and the cloudless dark night sky that presented a perfect, full moon as they strolled out onto the boardwalk.
Dar paused after a few minutes and leaned on the railing, eying Kerry with a slight grin. “Here we are.”
“You remember?” Kerry chuckled, leaning next to her. “I can tell you I was far too slathered with my own hormones to figure out where on this walk we ended up at.”
“Mm.” Dar looked out over the silver lit sands. “I do remember, because I was figuring out how far it was to that lifeguard station so I’d know how long to run before I could dive into the water and soak my embarrassment if you ended up that kiss with a—yuk!”
“Oh, Dar.” Kerry chuckled. “You knew I wasn’t going to do that,” she said. “I knew we were probably going to end up kissing each other when we left that restaurant.”
“Did you?”
Kerry nodded. “Uh huh. At least, I knew I was going to end up kissing you. I wasn’t entirely sure what you were going to end up doing.”
“Oh, Kerry, please,” Dar drawled in response. “You’re lucky I didn’t start licking that butter sauce off you at that restaurant.” She bumped Kerry with her shoulder. “Give me a break.”
