Until (4 page)

Years later she could pinpoint the moment she shed her last tear. It was at the burial when her uncle, thinking it would bring her closure, made her sit and watch as they lowered and put dirt on her mother's pink casket. As an adult, Betty realized that some wounds are never meant to heal. She rubbed the scar on her forehead as she thought about the conversation with Mrs. Lopez. Slouched in her dinette chair, she murmured, “No twelve-year-old should ever have to bury her mom.” With a look up at the ceiling, her eyes closed as the memories continued to play. After winning the case, buying the home, and having Evander in her life, she still could not sleep. And on this morning, unlike at the graveside, there would be no tears.

“Hello,” he said.
And then he changed the tone of his voice. “Hello,” he said again, this time with a softer smile than before. “Hi, Mr. Renfro,” he repeated with a courteous southern pitch. He tried it with a gentle, confident arch to his brow, while he gazed at his reflection in the mirror.

“My name is Andrew. No. Andrew Patrick Staley of Andrew Staley and Associates.” He rehearsed the lines as he had done for what felt like a million times before. His credo was simple. Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect, and he could ill afford to leave anything to chance. Again and again he repeated the introduction until it was perfect, or at least it felt as such.

“Andrew, will you ever come out of that bathroom?” Grace, fire office secretary, asked as she stood in front of the open door. “You're going to do just fine.”

“I know, I just need to make sure everything is right,” he replied, never breaking eye contact with his reflection.

Grace smiled and shook her head. “Is that a new suit you're wearing?”

“Yeah,” he said as he brushed invisible lint off fire forearm of the jacket with the back of his hand. “I bought it . . .” And then his smile blew away like a candle in fire wind. “I bought it for the funeral.”

Grace looked away and said, “Oh,” then walked back to
her desk in the reception area. As she left, Drew shot the cuffs of his navy suit and adjusted the silver cuff links as he held up his chin, but it soon gave way to a quiet lean against the wall. It had been two weeks since the funeral, and the pain still throbbed like salt on an exposed wound.

After standing in the hallway momentarily, Peggy walked into the tiny unisex rest room, rubbed between Drew's shoulders, and said in a soothing tone, “Are you okay, baby?”

With his eyes still closed, he attempted to relax the thump of the heart he could hear in his ear and said, “Yeah, I'm fine.”

Peggy Randal was the only member of the firm over forty and the wife of a prosperous advertising executive twenty-two years her senior. Although she had been in the firm less than a year, she had a take-charge attitude that Drew admired.

“Look at me,” she said, forcing him to open his eyes. “We can always cancel the appointment. I mean Lisa is easy to work with and she'll get you back on the schedule to see him. I'm not worried about that”

After he opened his eyes, he looked at Peggy and shook his head. “No. No, I need to do this one way or the other.”

“Are you sure?”

Drew stood to attention, nodded his head yes, and checked himself one last time in the mirror as Peggy nodded her head, too, and walked back into the reception area.

“Drew,” he whispered to himself. “We have got to do this. We've got too much riding on this one. We have to pull this off,” he said, looking at his clean-shaven face from both angles in the mirror. As he did, he asked aloud, “Hey, does anyone have any—”

“Visine?” Grace said, and stood in the doorway with the small clear bottle.

As he took the solution, his smile thanked her. “I need everything I can to knock this good old boy off his feet today.”

“And you will. He's gonna love that proposal. I saw one of the ladies who works there in the secretarial pool at
church, and she said they have not had a decent employee benefits plan in years.”

“I know. I've been trying to get in the door about a year now,” Drew said as he rubbed the tension lines in his forehead. “Peggy and I worked on the proposal until midnight last night.”

“And don't forget those three nights last week,” Peggy said as she walked rapidly past the door of the rest room.

“You're gonna do fine, Drew,” Grace repeated. “But you better hurry up, it's almost time.”

Handing her back the bottle, he gave a faint smile and asked, “Better?”

“Yeah, you look great,” she said as she looked in his weary bloodshot eyes.

Grabbing her briefcase and the folder for the appointment off Grace's desk, Peggy said, “You wanna take my car or yours?”

“Ah, where are you going?” Drew asked as his eyes followed her to the door.

“Where else? You wanna take my car or yours?”

“But you got an appointment in an hour.”

“Canceled,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner as she folded her arms over her thick waist. “I asked you to cancel yours, but you were too stubborn, so I canceled mine. Now, let me try this again. You wanna—”

With an appreciative smile Drew said, “I'll drive. Come on.”

As he drove down the highway just above the speed limit so as not to get a ticket from most police officers, Drew asked, “Now, how you wanna do this today?”

“Simple. When you walk into his office, just tell Renfro I'm your assistant who worked with you on the deal. And if you need any help, I will be there for you.”

Drew did not say a word. He didn't smile or blink, just looked straight ahead as he drove. The last couple of weeks had been tough on the entire staff as everyone walked on eggshells not knowing what to say. For the first time since establishing his consulting firm, Drew had taken several
days off, and they'd had no idea where he'd gone. When he'd returned from his unexpected mini vacation, he'd said he felt better, but his dazed expression told another story.

“I never got a chance to say good-bye, you know,” he said suddenly.

Peggy was shocked he would mention Felicia. He had not spoken of her since the funeral, and the unwritten code in the office was never to mention the subject until he was ready. For some reason, that time was now. “Really?” she said, and gazed ahead, not wanting to interrupt his flow while she checked for patrol cars.

Before responding, it occurred to Drew that he was no longer awakened in the morning by his alarm clock or the ray of sunlight through the curtains he always left open at night. Since her death, he was awakened each morning by the remembrance of the scent of her hair and the brush of her cheek on his chest. “Yeah,” he whispered, and looked in his rearview mirror and then blindly ahead. “When we met, for the first three years we never ever said good-bye. We just always said I love you.” Drew looked at the road ahead of him as he was taken to the painful space in his past. “But then for some reason, somehow we changed. Maybe it was the illness. Maybe it was the . . .” And then he massaged his temple with his thumb and said, “I don't know.”

Peggy was hanging on every word he spoke, when she saw a police car ahead. “Ah, Drew?”

He continued to speak as they passed the officer, who chatted with his partner and did not see them. “I've never been able to accept death, I guess. When I was seven, this man got shot on our carport, and I saw it. I saw him running down the road. I saw the woman take aim and I saw the look in his eyes when he died. Trust me when I say it's nothing like it looks on television. I've watched thousands of people die in the movies, but no actor I've noticed has made the sound a person makes after they take their last breath. I saw when they covered his face with the sheet. My daddy went out and scrubbed down the concrete while my mom tried to explain to me the concept of death. I remember her asking me to close my eyes and hold my breath. And
then she said, when people do that and fall asleep, that was how it felt to be dead. She told me that so I could understand that the man was not really in pain. But for weeks I was afraid to go to sleep at night.”

And then Drew's voice and eyes lowered together. “You know, it's nothing like getting that call. When the phone rang three weeks ago, it was 4:17 in the morning. I looked right at the clock. If I live to be a hundred, I'll never forget the time I got that call, because I knew. I knew she was gone. The nurse, or whoever, said, ‘Is this Mr. Staley,' and that's the last thing I heard.”

“Well, Drew, if it's any consolation, Felicia is—”

“Yeah, I know. I know, but you still hate losing someone you love. I mean we knew she had cancer, and we knew she was going to leave, but I never expected—” And then Drew looked in the rearview mirror, and for a moment at Peggy. “Listen to me,” he said, relaxing his shoulders, and his foot on the gas pedal. “We got work to do.” Drew sat straight and said, “We've got business to handle.”

Peggy gazed ahead and nodded her head yes.

As they drove into the parking lot of the Olsen Building, a tall dark sister with a long flowing ponytail walked by with a smaller lady in a sweat suit. As they opened the door to the building, the smaller woman looked back at Drew, but noticing he had company in the passenger seat, she continued inside the building.

Such looks from women were not uncommon since Drew was well over six feet and had a body that screamed linebacker. The thick arms and thighs and broad shoulders were a throwback to his days on the gridiron. His face featured distinctive cheekbones, deep-set oval eyes, and a distinguished chin. Drew had a shy blush when his real smile appeared, and his teeth were toothpaste-commercial straight. He also had a melodic baritone voice made for soft midnight conversations over candlelight or private whispers in the ear. Unlike many men his age, he wore no facial hair, and his Denzel brown complexion was void of razor bumps. Drew's wavy, sable black hair had a conservative part on the side, and although he was in his midthirties, he did
not have the over-thirty midsection paunch. Even under the tailored wool pants, his thighs looked massive and muscular, and his legs were bowed just enough to get attention when he wore shorts.

Drew had worked for the past eight years for this hour, when he could swim with the big boys. He tried to block out all that had happened and thought,
It's all come down to this. Everything we've worked for has come down to the next two hours.
He looked over at Peggy as his confidence bloomed like a flower kissing the sun, and said with his first true smile of the day, “This man is in trouble.”

Peggy noticed the change in his demeanor. He walked through the doors of the building as if he were ten feet tall and bulletproof, and the only reason Murphy, Renfro and Collins had decided to start a firm was to one day do business with Staley and Associates.

Murphy, Renfro and Collins was one of the top law firms in the Southeast. They specialized in medical malpractice cases and had won three of the fifty largest verdicts awarded in the United States. Since bringing in a former state senator as a partner, they were venturing into other types of litigation as well.

As they stepped inside the Olsen Building, Drew was focused as the lobby receptionist asked, “May I help you?”

Peggy, who walked in behind him, replied, “We're headed up to Murphy, Renfro and Collins on seventeen.” Drew pushed the up button and waited at the elevator door, clearly in his zone. “I've never been in here before,” Peggy said. “This is nice. Really nice.”

Drew smiled as the doors opened and allowed Peggy to enter first. “I've been here a couple of times. I had an appointment,” he said as the door whispered closed, “with an accounting firm here back in November. There's also a great restaurant in the basement called The Sovereign.” And then as the elevator began its ascent, their eyes focused on the number above the doors as they listened to The Police's “Every Breath You Take” on the Muzak.

When the doors opened, Drew stood face-to-face with the young lady who had just entered the building with the woman wearing the ponytail. Their eyes met as Drew
allowed her and her friend, who was talking about a date the previous night, to get on the elevator before he and Peggy made an exit. And then, wanting to be polite, he turned to smile and made eye contact with her as the doors closed.

Turning back around, he paused with Peggy to take in the opulent environment. The stairwells in the reception area of the firm were dark gray marble and higlighted with imported ivory. The foyer and atrium featured a forty-foot ceiling and deep mahogany borders which accented its arched windows and doors. The jasmine potpourri scented the air so heavily, one could almost taste it.

The firm occupied the top two floors of the tallest building in the north central Florida town of Gainesville. Murphy, Renfro and Collins looked over the city as the figurative big fish in a small pond. Most firms would rather settle than face the firm's litigators, who had a reputation for being ruthless and extremely effective in the courtroom. Jack Murphy led the firm, and his litigation skills were nothing short of folklore.

As he walked toward the reception desk, Drew noticed Lisa. She was the office manager and had been an employee of the firm longer than anyone else. By virtue of this, everyone knew she carried a tremendous amount of weight and influence with Jack Murphy.

Drew looked at the dock, which indicated he was two minutes early, and cleared his throat to get Lisa's attention. She turned toward him and motioned with a finger, saying she would be there momentarily, then returned to the other female employees who had gathered around her.