Janice Johnson - With Child

His mouth twisted into a sour smile. He must have looked good in comparison with her charming mother.

Quinn grabbed his gym bag and went to the health club. After changing into his usual gray T-shirt and old sweatpants, he snagged a basketball and went into the gym. Late afternoon on a Saturday, it was completely empty. He dribbled the ball, each bounce echoing sharply. Instead of the sound annoying him, he liked it. It seemed to accentuate his solitude.

He warmed up with a few easy layups, then free throws, finally challenging himself with tougher and tougher shots, driving to the basket, spinning, shooting backward, shooting from damn near halfway down the court, from the corners. When he’d worked up a sweat, he dropped the basketball back in the bin and went to the weight room. He wasn’t quite alone here, but the few men who’d claimed a machine or a bench were preoccupied with their own rhythms.

When Quinn’s muscles began to groan, he moved on to a treadmill, setting the timer for half an hour. By fifteen minutes, he was wearing down. He’d been too inactive this week, spent too much time holding the pitiful widow’s hand, figuratively rather than literally, of course.

His shirt was soaked by the time he finished, his legs as shaky as a newborn colt’s. He wiped his face on a towel and went back to the gym to shoot some more baskets anyway, testing his control, his discipline, satisfied only when the ball dropped neatly through the hoop without ruffling the net.

Finally, he showered, changed into swim trunks and dived into the pool. The cool water closed over him, sliding across his skin, insulating him for a few brief moments from the world. By the time he showered again, got dressed and slung his gym bag over his shoulder, he felt almost like himself.

FOR THE ONE DAY, Mindy had actually liked Quinn. He’d been her rock. A silent chauffeur, a hand when she needed one, a steady gaze to help her ground herself. For all his composure, she’d felt the magma beneath, the hot, unsettling grief that matched her own, and she was grateful for that as well. Dean had been liked by many, but loved, she suspected, by only a few. The Howies, Quinn and her.

Her gratitude and warmth of feeling didn’t last through the next day, never mind the next week.

He wanted her to call people, to do whatever it was the attorney needed to start probate. He wanted her to make decisions.

“What are you going to do about the business? Mindy, Mulligan says he’s left several messages and you haven’t called him back.”

She’d spent the morning puking her guts up and had barely had time to force down a piece of dry toast and some juice. “I’ll call him.”

“When?”

“What are you, my conscience?” Didn’t he ever go to work anymore?

“When people start coming to me because they can’t get answers from you, I figure a little prodding is due.”

Anger flared, along with renewed nausea. “I said I’ll call!”

He didn’t budge, just stood in front of her with his arms crossed and his expression unyielding. “And what will you say?”

“I don’t know!” she all but shouted. “Why do I have to decide now?”

“Because Fenton Security employs fourteen people and has a couple of hundred clients. The employees are waiting to find out whether they still have jobs. Without Dean, the clients are going to start dropping away. A business doesn’t run itself.”

“Mick…”

“Is a fine dispatcher. He can’t charm businessmen or handle billing. He might hire, but he’ll never fire anyone. Besides,” Quinn continued inexorably, “Dean didn’t work sixty-, seventy-hour weeks for fun. He did it because shit happened if he wasn’t around, because there are things he couldn’t delegate. And,” he paused, waiting until she defiantly met his eyes, “the business can’t afford to pay someone to do what Dean did. Mindy, you’ve got to look at the books. If you hire someone to replace Dean, you’re not going to be making a damn thing. And you’ll be trusting a stranger.”

She felt as if he were trying to stuff her into a small closet. Dark, claustrophobic, the air thick and musty. She was grabbing for the door to prevent him closing it those last inches.

“So what are you suggesting?” She heard the rasp of her breathing, as if she were asthmatic. “That I run it?”

Worse than that idea was the slight curl of his lip and the pity in his eyes. Don’t be ridiculous, he might as well have said.

“No. I’m suggesting you sell it.”

She moved restlessly. “I don’t even know how…”

“So you’re going to take another nap and refuse to think about it?” he asked with raw contempt.

“No!” Her eyes filled with tears. Yes. He was stripping her bare, finding out how utterly incapable she was and holding up a mirror so she could be sure not to miss her own inadequacies. Clasping her arms around herself, she said, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Because I owe it to Dean to make sure you don’t lose everything he worked so hard for. He’d expect me to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’m not all right!”

His voice softened. “I know. But you still have to make decisions. That’s the way it is.”

So, despite her nausea and the tears that kept flooding her eyes, Mindy sat down and pored over computer printouts. What salaries and taxes and benefits cost, the expense of keeping a fleet of Fenton Security pickups prowling dark corners of the city at night. She looked at income and outgo and Labor and Industry statistics, discovered how much Dean had been involuntarily contributing to build Safeco Field and the Seahawks Stadium. She saw personnel records and realized with dismay that the average security guard didn’t stay with the company more than eight or ten months. Dean had been hiring constantly, wasting money on training, then regularly having to let shirkers go.

“How,” she whispered at last, “did he make any money?”

“By cultivating clients and by making damn sure his guards were doing their job, not spending the night sipping coffee at a diner.”

“Oh.” Exhausted, she sat back. “Will anybody want to buy the business?”

“Sure. He’s in the black. Not many small businesses are.”

“Do I advertise it?”

Quinn frowned. “No. You might scare the clients.” He paused. Hesitated, she might have said, if it had been anyone but him. “Do you want me to ask around? There are plenty of cops with the same dream Dean had.”

“Please,” she said, but without the gratitude she would have felt two hours ago. Why couldn’t he just have made this offer then?

“All right.” He squared the pile of papers. “Now, the bills—”

“No!” Despite her tiredness, Mindy shot to her feet. “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”

With scant sympathy, he said, “They’re piling up.”

The attorney had left half a dozen messages, too, and she didn’t want to talk to him, either.

“I did what you wanted. Now, will you just go?”

“All right.” He nodded. “We’ve made a start.”

A start, she thought hysterically.

After he left, she took a nap. Then she made herself listen to phone messages. Mick had questions, the attorney had questions, several people had left condolences. A reporter from the P.I. was still hoping for comments. After deleting them all, she carried to the table the basket into which she’d been throwing correspondence. Quinn was right; the bills were piling up.

The attorney had said she could continue to write checks to pay bills and daily expenses. Okay, she thought, she could do this. She’d paid her own until she’d married Dean, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write out a check for the phone bill. And it would give her enormous pleasure the next time Quinn showed up to say, Oh, I’ve already done that.