Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Good.” Julia never said anything else. She was always good. School was always good. Everything was good.

“Where’s your brother?”

She shrugged. “Probably in his room? Do you know Marta just left a couple of hours ago for Barbados? She said she’s going to visit her family.”

“I know. I thought she needed some time off. Her trip to Barbados is a present from all of us. Where’s Cassie?” Cassie had happily agreed to come over to watch the kids.

“She’s here. She was just teaching me yoga.”

“Where is she?”

“In your study, maybe?”

Nick hesitated a moment. That again. But there was nothing to find there. He had to stop being so suspicious.

“She has a surprise for you,” Julia said with a mischievous smile, her big brown eyes wide. “But I can’t tell you what it is.”

“Can I guess?”

“No.”

“Not even one guess?”

“No!” she scolded. “It’s a surprise! ”

“Okay. Don’t tell me. But I have a surprise for you .”

“What is it?”

“How would you like to go to Hawaii?”

“ What? No way! ”

“Way. We’re leaving tomorrow night.”

“But what about school?”

“I’m taking you and Luke out of school for a few days, that’s all.”

“Hawaii! I don’t believe it! Maui?”

“Maui.”

“The same place as last time?”

“Same place. I even got us the exact same villa on the beach.”

Julia threw her arms around him, squeezing hard. “I want to do snorkeling again,” she said, “and take those hula lessons, and I want to make a lei, and this time I want to learn how to windsurf. Aren’t I old enough?”

“You’re old enough, sure.” Laura had been afraid to let her try, last time.

“Luke said he’d show me how. Are you going to scuba dive again?”

“I think I might have forgotten how.”

“What about surfing? Can I learn how to surf too?”

Nick laughed. “Are you going to have time for all these lessons?”

“Remember when I found that gecko in our room, and its tail broke off? Oh, wow, this is so awesome .”

Nick went to the kitchen to take the shortcut to his study, but he stopped at the threshold.

In place of the usual plastic draft sheets hanging down was some kind of paper barrier. He looked closer. Wrapping paper had been taped across the entrance, floor to ceiling and jamb to jamb. A wide blue ribbon crisscrossed it like a gift. The paper, he noticed, had little pictures of Superman all over it, cape flying.

“Even though you look more like Clark Kent right now.” Cassie’s voice. Her arms slid around his waist; she kissed the back of his neck.

“What’s this?”

He turned, gave her a hug and planted a big kiss on her mouth.

“You’ll see. How was Boston?”

“Let’s just say your instincts were right.”

Cassie nodded. The dark smudges were visible beneath her eyes again. She looked drawn, exhausted. “Well, you’ll get things back on track. You’ll see. It’s not too late.”

“We’ll see. Can I open my gift?”

She bowed her head, turned up an “After you” palm.

Nick punched a fist through the gift wrap. The kitchen was all lit up, every light on, dazzling. The granite-topped kitchen island was perfect, just as Laura had once sketched it for him.

“Jesus,” Nick said. He went in slowly, taking it all in, awed. He ran a hand over the island top. There was an overhang, enabling the whole family to sit around it. Exactly what Laura had wanted.

He felt its edge. “Bullnose?”

“Half bullnose.”

He turned to look at Cassie, saw the little pleased smile. “How the hell did you do this?”

“I didn’t do it myself, Nick. I mean, I may have inherited my dad’s mechanical ability, but I’m not that good. What I’m good at is getting what I want.” She shrugged modestly. “It really only took them one full day of work. But it took me a lot of begging and pleading to get them here to do it and finish it by the end of the day.”

“My God, you’re a miracle worker,” Nick said.

“Just like to finish what I start, that’s all. Or what your wife started.” She paused and then said in a small voice, “Nick, are you ever going to be able to talk about her death?”

He closed his eyes for a while before he spoke. He opened his eyes, took a breath. “I can try. Lucas had a swim meet. It was half past seven, but dark, you know? First week of December. It gets dark early. We were driving to Stratford, because the meet was in the high school there. We’re on Stratford-Hillsdale Road, which is what truckers sometimes use to connect to the interstate.”

Nick closed his eyes again. He was back in the car on that dark night, a nightmare he had relived only in dreams, and then in shards and fragments of time. He spoke in a low, expressionless monotone. “So there’s a tractor trailer heading the opposite way, and the guy driving it had had a couple of beers, and the road surface was icy. Laura was driving — she hated to drive at night, but I asked her to, because I had some calls to make on the cell phone. That was me — company man, always working. We were bickering over something, and Laura was upset, and she wasn’t paying attention to the road, see. She didn’t see the truck drifting into our lane, across those double yellow lines, until it was too late. She — she tried to turn the wheel, but she didn’t do it in time. The truck rammed into us.”

He opened his eyes. “Funny thing is, it didn’t seem like we were hit all that hard,” Nick went on. “It wasn’t like some horrible collision in the movies where everything goes black. It was a hard bump, like you might feel if you were playing bumper cars. Kind of a hollow crunch. I didn’t get whiplash. Never blacked out. Nothing like that. I turn to Laura and I’m yelling, ‘Can you believe that guy?’ And she doesn’t say anything. And I notice how the windshield is all spiderwebbed on her side. And there’s some pebbles of glass on her forehead. Something glistening in her hair. But there’s no blood, or hardly any. A fleck or two, maybe. She looked fine. Like she’d nodded off.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” Cassie breathed.

Nick only knew that his eyes were wet because his vision was blurred. “Except there were hundreds of things I could have done. Any one of them, and Laura would still be alive. You know, when we were leaving the house that night, Laura was about to make a phone call, and I made her hang up. I told her she was making us late. I told her it was ridiculous that she’d spent fifteen minutes putting on makeup and perfume for a goddamn swim meet . I told her that, for once, we weren’t going to be late. I told her I wanted to get a good seat in the stands so I could see what the hell was going on. Now, thing is, if she had made that phone call, we wouldn’t have been in an accident. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry, we would actually have arrived. And I didn’t have to make those goddamned phone calls in the car that night, for Christ’s sake. Like they couldn’t wait till the morning. I could have driven the car — I mean, look, I was the better driver, we both knew that, she hated driving. I shouldn’t have been arguing with her while she was behind the wheel. Oh, and here’s a sweet one. She wanted to take the Suburban. I said it would just be a pain to park. I insisted that we take the sedan. If we’d taken the Suburban, she might have survived the impact. And I’m just starting a long, long list. All kinds of things I could have done differently. The weeks after she died, I became the world’s leading expert on this subject. Had ’em all cross-tabulated in my mind. Should have been on Jeopardy! Thanks, Alex, I’ll take Vehicular Fatalities for a hundred.”