The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  That wasn’t really true, either. Our relationship was a good deal more involved than just sex. And Stan never said anything to indicate that that was the major role I played in his life. I was beside him on civic occasions as well as family ones. We took vacations together at Port Aransas. And shared chaperone duties on a Sunday School trip to Six Flags. He showed up at Rachel’s soccer games and patiently sat through her piano recital. And at Doris’s funeral, he was at my arm, quietly, considerately making himself available for whatever I needed. It was more than a lot of women expected from their husbands.

  You should be happy with what you have! I admonished myself. He’s a great guy and he genuinely likes and cares for you. That should be enough.

  It wasn’t.

  I was tired of living with my mother, but I’d put off getting my own place. Every time I thought of moving, I thought of moving into Stan’s house. I’d never bothered to change my name, I was still going by Laney Jerrod. I hated that, but I didn’t want to be Laney Hoffman, I wanted to be Laney Kuhl. I was only thirty-three, I was still young enough to have children. I wanted a brother or a sister for Rachel. Stan was the kind of guy who ought to be married. Why didn’t he ask me? It was a mystery. Could I just wait around indefinitely until he decided to tie the knot? Could I risk having him decide to tie it with some woman other than myself?

  How do you get a man to marry you?

  I thought about the way I got Robert to propose. Just the idea of Stan with another woman made me physically sick to my stomach. I don’t know how I’d forgiven Robert. I don’t know how we lived over that betrayal. But I knew I’d rather stay single than see Stan with someone else.

  After the prayers at the cemetery, Doris’s flower-draped casket was lowered into the ground. Her sons and their wives joined Acee in the black limo, I hung back. Not wanting to leave Stan behind.

  “Let’s walk,” I said to him.

  As nearly a hundred McKinney citizens made their way to cars, Stan and I strolled among the gravestones in silence.

  I didn’t really know my way around the cemetery. I’d never spent much time there. I’d certainly never wandered aimlessly reading headstones as I did now. So I certainly surprised myself at having walked directly to my father’s grave. Thomas Henry Hoffman, 1939–1962

  “This is my dad,” I said to Stan.

  He wrapped an arm around my waist. “You were very young when he died. Do you even remember him?”

  “Yes, a little,” I admitted. “Most of what I remember is when he died.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Stan said. “Really strong emotional moments would make more vivid memories than day to day ones.”

  “I guess that’s why my mother didn’t want Rachel at the service. We had a big fight about it last night.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stan said.

  I shrugged. “I’d wanted her to come with us, because she and Doris had been close,” I explained. “I thought Rachel deserved some closure. I just hated the idea that Doris would just disappear without a trace and she’d not understand why.”

  “Yeah, that does seem very sad,” he said.

  “Babs went ballistic when I mentioned it. She has very strong feelings about kids and funerals. I remembered how she’d fought to keep me away from my father’s. She lost her own parents when she was young, I guess she knew that the image of Doris in that open casket would be the one that stayed with Rachel all her life.”

  “Your mom is a very wise woman,” he said.

  I nodded, accepting that, in some ways, that was very true.

  “You’d better not sing her praises too highly,” I said, turning the conversation. “She doesn’t have your best interests at heart.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, smiling, recognizing the teasing note in my voice.

  “She keeps nagging me to get you to the altar,” I said, smiling a little too broadly and feeling as if I was perched on a high wire without a net.

  His expression changed abruptly to something indecipherable.

  A silence lingered between us.

  “Are these your grandparents?” he asked, indicating the newer Hoffman graves next to my father’s.

  “Yes,” I said. “Grandma died the year Rachel was born and Grandpa only lived a few months after.”

  “And this little grave with the lamb?”

  “That’s my brother,” I said. “He died as a baby.”

  Stan nodded.

  “So, do you need to go back to Acee’s house?” he asked me. “I really need to get back to the office.”

  “Sure, drop me off at my place and I’ll get my own car,” I told him.

  We walked back across the cemetery to where we were parked. I kept smiling, talking, pretending everything was fine. My heart was breaking. He really wasn’t going to marry me. I was just his...whatever I was. And I was never going to be anything more.

  I truly didn’t understand it. Every moment we spent together was a testament to his love for me. But he never spoke the words and he never asked for anything permanent.

  Over the next few days and weeks, I tried not to care.

  I was determined to focus my life on my daughter and my job. Each was, in its own way, perfectly capable of absorbing every moment of my attention. Rachel was the star of her preschool. She had a better vocabulary than most kindergartners. And she’d taught herself to read because Babs kept falling asleep during her bedtime stories.

  At work, things were buzzing. The company was in the forefront of creating software programs to capture and clean code with Y2K errors. Back when computers had been new, the internal operating codes were designed with six-figure date bars. March 12, 1965, was stored as 031265. Storage space for detail was at a premium and this seemed perfectly all right. That is until someone began to ask what would happen when January 2000 rolled around. Would the computer think it was January 1900? And if so, what kind of errors might that generate? Everything was hypothesized from bank systems failing to planes falling out of the sky, even to computers inadvertently launching nuclear missiles.

  A change was easily rectified in the new systems, but there were so many old systems still in use. Pete had us pouring more and more of our time, our energies and our staff into the project.

  It was at this point that he took me aside.

  “Laney, I just need a clear signal from you,” my cousin told me. “You have the talent and the ability to be a major player in this company. But executive levels are never part-time or even full-time. They require a complete life commitment.”

  “Pete, you know I have a daughter,” I pointed out.

  He nodded. “That’s why I’m telling you this,” he said. “I want you to achieve your ambitions. I know you would be good for my company. But you’re important to me as a friend and relative as well as an employee. I don’t want you to make a choice here that you can’t live with.”

  “You’re only saying this because I’m a woman,” I told him. “Men have families and they don’t drag them down.”

  “Don’t they?” he said. “Name me one chief exec in this country who is raising a child on his own. I’m not aware of any, even among the group that could afford an entire platoon of nannies. The ones that are married don’t even spend time raising their children. They have clear division of labor with their wives. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  I’m sure he thought that he did. He and Sadie had been having a rocky time of it the last few years. She was as successful at her practice as he was with his business. Their children were all teenagers now, a difficult time for parents everywhere, but especially so when both are consumed by jobs they love.

  “Think about it, Laney,” he said. “It’s not about the status of women in America, leading the feminist march through the glass ceiling or even having it all. It’s about you and Rachel, your little family. Forget about what you’ve always wanted and try to figure out what it is you want right now. I’ll back you either way.”

&nbs
p; I appreciated his support, though I had little time for life introspection. I was back to working very long hours. I’d put in a full day at the office, come home for family time with Rachel and then after she’d gone to bed, I’d pull out my laptop and work until the wee hours of the morning.

  Maybe all that was on purpose. I had very little time left for a man in my life.

  And the man in my life seemed to have very little time left for me. Stan seemed to be even busier than I was. I did wonder if perhaps he was just seeing someone else, but whenever I’d call him, he was at work. Something was going on with his company, but he never talked about it. At first, I just thought it must be a stressful business cycle. But when it didn’t seem to let up and Stan continued to be silent, stoic and wound very tightly, I finally mentioned it to Pete.

  “I think the only person in the country working longer hours than you and me has got to be Stan,” I told him one evening as we were leaving work after 8:00 p.m.

  “Yeah, he’s in a pickle, all right,” Pete said. “I hope he didn’t give you a piece of the business for Christmas last year.”

  He chuckled and I smiled, but I had no clue what he was talking about.

  I couldn’t help thinking about it, though.

  By the time I got home, Rachel was already in bed, but she’d waited up to kiss me good-night.

  Babs, who’d had a long day herself, headed for the TV in the den.

  “I’m going to watch Sipowicz and go to bed,” she told me, referring to the lead character in NYPD Blue, her favorite nighttime drama.

  “Okay, I’m going to work on a few things,” I said.

  But ultimately, I couldn’t. My mind kept going over and over what Pete had said.

  I got on the Internet and pulled up the Web page for Kuhl Computers. No help there. It was all fancy flash sequences, the only information was about the capabilities of the machines. No financials were listed at all. Since it was a privately held company, there were no stock prices to graph. And even a search of news stories about the company revealed nothing. But something was happening.

  Pete knew about it and assumed that I knew, too.

  He assumed that I knew, because I should know. I was Stan’s whatever and he should share important stuff with me. But he hadn’t. In fact, as I thought about it. He hadn’t said much to me about anything lately. What did that mean?

  I grabbed up my keys and a minute later I was walking to the car. As I drove down the street toward his house, it occurred to me that, like Robert, I might find him with some silicone sister. That thought was terrifying enough to get my foot off the gas pedal. But then I remembered Pete’s words. If big things were happening and I wasn’t in on it, then Stan had already left me. And I might as well find out about it.

  There was no car with a “Perfect 10” license plate in front of his house. The lights were all on, although it was now after eleven o’clock. Not a typical time to drop in for a visit. I rang the doorbell.

  He answered dressed in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. His hair was mussed and he looked tired, but I was sure that he hadn’t been asleep.

  “Laney? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” I told him. “May I come in, or do you just want to have this conversation on the porch.”

  He stepped away from the door and motioned me inside. Once he’d closed it behind me, he sighed heavily.

  “Who told you?” he asked.

  Not your best icebreaker.

  “Nobody has told me, that’s the problem,” I said.

  “I always knew it could happen,” he said. “This didn’t catch me unawares. The potential was always out there and I thought that if it ever did turn out badly, well, I’d just start all over. It wouldn’t matter that much, I’d be none the worse for wear. But then we came together and the stakes got higher. Damn, Laney, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  I could hardly breathe.

  “So there is someone else?” I managed to get out.

  His brow furrowed.

  “Someone else?” He looked at me quizzically for a moment and then shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I resisted all offers. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I might have got out clean with plenty of start-up in my pocket. I knew if they couldn’t buy it they’d kill it.”

  Buy it? Kill it? They who? I was confused.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Just wait a minute. Are you breaking up with me or what?”

  He stood suddenly perfectly still. I watched him swallow. Then he raked a hand through his hair and heaved a sigh. “If that’s what you want, Laney,” he said. “I don’t have the energy for a big, scary blowup. If that’s what you want, then suit yourself.”

  He stalked off into the house. I stood there alone in the foyer for a moment before I followed him. I found him in the dining room. The area had been turned into a giant office. Files and paperwork completely hid the six-foot-long table. On the sideboard, he’d set up a whole line of computers hooked together paralleling.

  “What are you working on?” I asked. “A moon shot?”

  “It’s not a joke,” he said. “I may be going down, but I’m going to make this the foulest, most bitter poison pill those bastards have ever tried to swallow.”

  “Stan, stop, look at me.”

  He did.

  “I still don’t know what is going on? What’s happening here?”

  For an instant I thought that he wasn’t going to tell me. He moved away from me again. But then he returned to face me. “As you’ve undoubtedly suspected I’m losing my company,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The bigs have quietly, unofficially gotten together and conspired to run the little guys out of the industry. You may have been too busy to notice, but the price of new computers has been falling dramatically for months. Businesses are out there spending lavishly, getting new equipment ahead of Y2K. But instead of profits, instead of supply and demand, the big computer makers have slashed prices and are taking losses. They have deep pockets and can afford to do that. It’s a strategy to increase market share. My pockets are not so deep. I never planned for my company to sell computers to every mom or high school kid. These machines weren’t designed to sit on the secretaries’ desks for checking e-mail. These are high-quality, high-function tools, primarily for engineers and scientists. What Vincent was to motorcycles, I wanted to be for computers. But apparently even geeks are not immune to pricing strategies.”

  There was a sigh in his voice and a slump in his shoulders.

  “If I’d gone public, they might have taken me over. The name might have survived, but I’m pretty sure the quality wouldn’t have. So I’m gone. And all this...” He spread his arms indicating all the controlled chaos around him. “Well, I’m making sure that every jiggle I’ve ever done to make my machine better, has my patent on it. It won’t stop them from pilfering what they want, but at least it will make it more complicated.”

  “Why are you doing it here? Why aren’t you at your office and why don’t you have some help?”

  “I’m not the only one who knows we’re going down,” he said. “I have seventy employees that realize they’re going to be looking for work very soon. They are good people, loyal and hardworking. But their families come first. I can’t put them completely in the know and then expect that they wouldn’t use their information to gain favor and employment with another firm.”

  “So you’re doing it all yourself.”

  He nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “I’ll help,” I told him.

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” he said.

  “Why not? I hope you don’t think that I would steal your secrets.”

  Stan shook his head. “I just know you’ve already got your hands full at your own job.”

  I shrugged. “Pete will give me the time if I ask for it. The advantage of working for a family business. In the morning, I’ll ask for it.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.
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  “Never more sure of anything in my life.”

  We worked the rest of that night and most of the morning. We collapsed into bed together just before noon. I got up to pick Rachel up from school. I took her with me back to Stan’s house. And she splashed around in his pool and built a fort of towels and lawn chairs in the backyard until Babs came to get her.

  It took two more days like that before Stan felt comfortable about the patents and was ready to start deconstruction of the company.

  “Instead of flooding the market with the last of my inventory,” he said, “I’m going to hold it back. I think there may be collectors, ultimately, that may be interested in it. And if I’m not relying on last-minute sales to pay off debt, then I can be up-front with the staff.”

  I nodded, sad for him.

  “You’d better go back to your own office,” he said. “Before one of my good employees convinces Pete to let them do your job.”

  I laughed, threw my arms around his neck and stood on my tiptoes to give him a kiss.

  His reaction was a bit less than enthusiastic, but I convinced myself that his mind was still completely engaged with business matters. We’d get our relationship back on track as soon as things began to calm down a little.

  I went back to my own work as he made his official announcement, made financial arrangements to sever his employees, got his equipment and real estate on the market. Another company, down in Round Rock, was positioning itself to take on the bigs. They absorbed much of the Kuhl workforce. So although those people had to leave McKinney, they did, for the most part, find good jobs doing the work they’d been trained for.

  The whole dismantle took less than six months. Kuhl Computers went the way of the Studebaker and the Moped.

  Stan did a lot of traveling. I assumed on business. He didn’t talk much about the future or what his plans were. And he still seemed distant.

  On a Saturday in early October, he returned from a trip. I knew he was home and I just kept pacing the floor.

  Babs couldn’t ignore it. “What are you doing?” she asked me. “Trying to drive me crazy?”