Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“I’m sorry, Nick. I hate to do this to you.”

“Jerry,” Nick said, leaning forward in his chair. For a moment, he lost his train of thought. Suddenly he wasn’t a prominent parent, the president and chief executive officer of the biggest company in town. He was a high school kid pleading with the principal. “I’m as angry about this as you are. More so, probably. And we’ve got to let him know it’s totally unacceptable. But it’s his first time.”

“Somehow I doubt it’s his first time using marijuana,” Sundquist said with a sidelong glance. “But in any case, we have a zero-tolerance policy. Our options are severely limited here.”

“It’s not a gun, and he’s not exactly a dealer. We’re talking about one marijuana cigarette, right?”

Sundquist nodded. “That’s all it takes these days.”

“Jerry, you’ve got to consider what the kid has been going through in the last year, with Laura’s death.” There was a note of pleading in his voice that embarrassed Nick.

The principal looked unmoved. In fact, he looked almost pleased. Nick felt the anger in him rise, but he knew anger would be the worst response in this situation.

Nick took a deep breath. “Jerry, I’m asking for your mercy. If there’s anything I can do for the high school, the school system. Anything Stratton can do.”

“Are you offering a payoff? ” Sundquist said, biting off the words.

“Of course not,” Nick said, although both men knew that was exactly what he was talking about. An extra deep discount on furniture could save the high school hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Sundquist closed his eyes, shook his head sadly. “That’s beneath you, Nick. What kind of lesson do you think it’s going to teach your son if he gets special treatment because of who his dad is?”

“What we talk about stays between us,” Nick said. He couldn’t believe that he’d just offered the high school principal a bribe. Was anything lower? Bribes — that was the coin of Scott McNally’s realm, Todd Muldaur’s realm. Not his.

Jerome Sundquist was looking at him with a new expression now, one of disappointment and maybe even contempt. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear it, Nick. But I’m willing to show some leniency on the grounds of his mother’s death. I do have to notify the police that we’re willing to handle the incident ourselves, and generally they leave it to our discretion. I’m giving Lucas a five-day suspension and assigning him to crisis counseling during that time and for the rest of the school year. But the next time, I go right to the police.”

Nick stood up, walked up to Sundquist’s desk and put out his hand to shake. “Thanks, Jerry,” he said. “I think it’s the right decision, and I appreciate it.”

But Sundquist wouldn’t shake his hand.

Ten minutes later Nick and Lucas walked out together through the glass doors of the high school. The rain was really coming down now — it was monsoon season, had to be — and Nick held up his umbrella for Lucas, who shunned it, striding ahead through the rain, head up as if he wanted to get soaked.

Lucas seemed to hesitate before getting into the front seat, as if contemplating making a run for it. As the car nosed through the parking lot and onto Grandview Avenue, the silence was electric with tension.

Lucas wasn’t high anymore. He was low, and he was silent, but it wasn’t a neutral silence. It was a defiant silence, like that of a prisoner of war determined to reveal nothing more than his name, rank, and serial number.

Nick’s own silence was the silence of someone who had plenty to say but was afraid of what would happen if he began to speak.

Lucas’s hand snaked around to the radio dial and turned on some alternative rock station, blasting it.

Nick immediately switched it off. “You proud of yourself?”

Lucas said nothing, just stared fixedly ahead as the windshield wipers flipped back and forth in a lulling rhythm.

“You know something? This would have broken your mother’s heart. You should be relieved she isn’t around to see this.”

More silence. This time Nick waited for a reply. He was about to go on when Lucas said, in a hollow voice, “I guess you made sure of that.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucas didn’t respond.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Nick realized he was shouting. He could see a spray of his own spittle on the windshield. He pulled the car over, braked to an abrupt stop, and turned to face Lucas.

“What do you think?” Lucas said in a low, wobbly voice, not meeting his eyes.

Nick stared, disbelieving. “What are you trying to say?” he whispered, summoning all the calm he could muster.

“Forget it,” Lucas said, making a little buzz-off gesture with his left hand.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I wouldn’t know, Dad. I wasn’t there.”

“What’s gotten into you, Lucas?” The windshield wipers ticked back and forth, back and forth, and he could hear the regular clicking of the turn signal that hadn’t gone off. He reached over, switched off the signal. The rain sheeted the car’s windows, making it feel like the two of them were inside a cabin in a terrible storm, but it wasn’t a safe place. “Look, Luke, you don’t have Mom anymore. You just have me. You wish it were otherwise. So do I. But we’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.”

“It wasn’t me who made that situation.”

“No one ‘made’ that situation,” Nick said.

“You killed Mom,” he said, so quietly that for a moment Nick wasn’t sure Lucas had actually spoken the words.

Nick felt like someone had grabbed his heart and squeezed. “I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with you .”

You Conover men. Better defended than a medieval castle .

“Fine with me.”

“No,” Nick said. “No. Scratch that.” He was breathing hard, as if he had just done an eight-hundred-meter sprint. “Okay, listen to me. What happened to your mother that night — God knows we’ve talked about it...”

“No, Dad.” Lucas’s voice was shaky but resolute. “We’ve never talked about it. You refer to it. You don’t talk about it. That’s the house rule. We don’t talk about it. You don’t. You talk about what a fuck-up I am. That’s what you talk about.”

The windows had begun to fog up. Nick closed his eyes. “About your mother. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wonder whether there was anything I could have done — anything at all — that might have made a difference.”

“You never said...” Lucas’s eyes were wet and his voice was thick, muffled.

“The truck came out of nowhere,” Nick began, but then he stopped. It was too painful. “Luke, what happened happened. And it wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about you.”

Lucas was quiet for a moment. “Fucking swim meet.”

“Lucas, don’t try to make sense of it. Don’t try to connect the dots, as if there was some kind of logic to it all. It just happened .”

“I didn’t visit her.” Lucas’s words were slurred, whether from the pot or from emotion, Nick couldn’t tell, and didn’t care. “In the hospital. Afterward.”

“She was in a coma. She was already gone, Luke.”

“Maybe she could have heard me.” His voice had gotten thin and reedy.

“She knew you loved her, Luke. She didn’t need reminding. I don’t think she wanted you to remember her like that, anyway. She wouldn’t have been sore that you weren’t there. She would have been glad. I really believe that. You were always attuned to her feelings. Like there was some radio frequency only the two of you could hear. You know something, Luke? I think maybe you were the only one of us who did what she would have wanted.”