Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“Okay,” I said. “Out the door, ready to go, just press play, what does it cost to get this all in today?”

“Today? A rush job will run you more. As will a weekend install.”

“By nightfall,” I said. “Today.”

He looked at me as if trying to guess the number that was five dollars below as high as I was willing to go. He must have read me right, too, because a few seconds later we were shaking hands and he was telling me I wouldn’t regret it.

Later that afternoon my cell phone rang while I lay on the couch in the great room, watching a college football game. The screen of my little Nokia flashed Unknown Caller. I muted the television and answered it.

“David!” the voice on the other end said. “Joseph Willingham!”

I answered with silence.

“Of Better Health and Flavorings?” he went on. “We spoke the night of the Society meeting. In the bathroom?”

“Oh yes!” I was excited, if only to learn it wasn’t a Mexican or an Albanian.

“Hope you don’t mind my calling on a Saturday, but I’m off to Shanghai tomorrow and I wanted to see if I could have a word with you before I left. Is this a bad time?”

“No, no.” I walked out of the great room and turned in to my bedroom. “I’m just curious how you got this number.”

“The Society roster,” he said. I’d been obligated to provide my contact information when I’d served as the chair of the Bylaws Committee. “Hope you don’t mind my not being shy about using it?”

I walked into the closet and shut the door behind me, then reached into the pocket of the jacket I’d worn that morning for the Ziploc bag that Beekley had given me. It held that day’s envelope inside it, still unopened. “It’s just funny timing, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear that. You’re breaking up.”

I moved out toward the window. “Is this better?”

“There you go, yes. Well here’s the thing. I sensed from our initial conversation that you weren’t too excited about selling FlavAmerica. But I’ve been in this game long enough to know everything is subject to change, so I thought I’d call and see how life in upper management is treating you. Do you enjoy having the buck stop on your desk?”

Our neighbor was doing tai chi again. I turned away from him toward the door when I heard Betty coming in, wearing her tracksuit from the gym.

Mr. Willingham laughed, mistaking my silence for something it was not. “A tough negotiator, I like that. Never say more than you need to. Well, listen, as a goodwill gesture, let me open up to you a little bit. I think FlavAmerica’s got something very special there in NoNilla®, and with China opening up, a company could make a fortune if it positioned itself right. It’s a very tricky market over there, though. Entirely based on who you know and, let’s be honest, how much you’ll pay. We’re almost set up in Beijing now, and we could use a good man to be our Director of East Asian Affairs. How’d you like me to tee that up for you? A little exotica in late middle age? Hmm? Do a man some good, I’d think. Provide more than a little money, too. Well, I’ve said enough. But if any of this interests you, you contact my secretary and have her set up a time for us to sit down and push some numbers back and forth. Sound good? Or you still not ready to change your mind?”

I’m not sure I said more than five words between hello and good-bye. But as Betty stepped out of the walk-in closet, dressed now in her house clothes, it became clear to me what they were doing. “Those bastards!” I said. It was a negotiating tactic!

Betty followed me down to the computer in the study, hearing me whisper of the day’s events. By the time I’d told her about the security system I’d purchased for FlavAmerica, she was standing at my back and watching as I moved my cursor to the search bar on our Yahoo home page. Charles Hithenbottom, I typed, and sure enough, there he was, referenced in an article in the Journal of the American Association of Laboratory Animal Science. “Testing and Efficacy Analyst at Better Health and Flavorings,” it read. “Jupiter Park, New Jersey.”

“Just as I suspected.” I leaned back in my chair, smiling like a detective at the conclusion of a case. “Don’t you see? The Cosa Nostra or the KGB would come at you with all the power of the fist and the boot, but Better Health and Flavorings — they’re more sophisticated than that. They want to intimidate me without my even realizing that’s what they’re doing. First Hickey plants that packet in my pocket at the Society meeting, and now I get another in the mail just before this Willingham character calls. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Betty stood there, looking down at the Ziploc bag in her hand.

“They think if they scare me, I’ll open up and be more willing to make a deal.”

“Maybe we should go to the police,” Betty said.

I shook my head, reaching for the phone book. “No crime’s been done yet, unless you consider this tampering with the mail. And what’s the postmaster general going to do? Nothing. Here we are.” I’d flipped open to the white pages and found Hickey’s address listed alongside his telephone number. I wrote it down on the face of an envelope, affixed a US flag stamp to it, then led the way into the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” Betty said.

I reached into the cupboard for the box of Sweetness #9. “Two can play at this game,” I said. I sealed the packet of sweetener inside the envelope, gave it a lick to seal it, then wrote across its back: You can stop now. We’re onto you. And it’s not working.

Priscilla came in from the garage then, holding a big black Glad bag. As I stuck the envelope into my back pocket, she reached between us for the box of Sweetness #9 and dropped it into her garbage bag.

“What are you doing?”

Just as quickly, she moved on to the refrigerator.

“Cleaning up,” she said. She grabbed a squeeze bottle of barbecue sauce, glanced at its list of ingredients, then dropped it into her bag and reached for the sweet and sour.

“That’s still half-full,” Betty said.

Priscilla worked in silence now, grabbing tubs of yogurt and jars of jam, bottles of salad dressing and tubes of crescent rolls. When she moved on to the freezer, grabbing first the tri-colored popsicles and then all of our frozen entrées, Betty asked the question again:

“What are you doing?”

Priscilla closed the freezer and gave a firm look while passing between us to the rear of the house. “Someone has to be the parent,” she said.

We followed. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not going to let him do it anymore. Have anything with Red Dye No. 40 or Sweetness #9.”

Betty and I looked at each other as our daughter turned in to the bathroom.

“You can ground me,” she said, “you can lock me in my room, but if you do, the historical record will show that you first had to rip this bag out of my hands.”

Maybe it was imagining her failings that did it, or the threat of what I’d received in the mail these last two days, I don’t know, but without another word Betty moved away from me and joined our daughter in the bathroom. And what could I do then? A family is nothing if not a grand coalition, an entity that cannot survive if fractious.

“Here, let me hold the bag,” I said.

And so I stood there as they reached for the expired decongestants and a medley of flavored cough syrups, stood there pointing out the vitamins modeled on the characters of a Stone Age cartoon and the soaps and shampoos that were every color of the rainbow. It didn’t matter if I believed this would help or not; it felt good to be doing something, to be united in action. So we continued into the bathroom upstairs, then doubled back down through the pantry and out to the stand-alone freezer in the garage. By then our bag was bulging, and we were sated like cavemen after the kill.