Until (5 page)

As he waited, he looked back and noticed Peggy, who sat in the waiting area. “Listen,” he said after he walked over to her. “I appreciate you coming with me. But I think I better handle this alone.”

With relief in her tone, she asked, “Are you sure? I don't mind.”

“I know. And that's sweet. But I need to do this myself.”

From her place on the imported leather sofa, she looked up at him. “You're gonna do good, Drew, I just know it.”

“Thanks,” he said, and reached for the business section
of the newspaper that was sitting on a lamp stand. Someone had drawn a circle around a picture of a ravishing young lady and an older gentleman. As he noticed the name in the caption, he realized that this Betty Anne Robinson person was the young lady he'd seen earlier. She had dark sultry eyes and beautiful white teeth, with an attractive mole over her lips. The body in the photo looked just as attractive as the one he'd noticed moments earlier, and she looked much too young and attractive to be an attorney in this conservative firm. Drew laid down the newspaper and looked again at his watch as his thoughts went back to Felicia, who looked similar to the attorney in stature, and her onetime dream of being a corporate litigator.

Both Drew and Peggy had built a warm relationship with Lisa since they had tried to get on Franklin Renfro's calendar. Lisa was a graceful, albeit overweight, well-dressed woman in her early fifties. Renfro, who handled the employee pension and benefits programs personally, had put him off for several months, but Drew had locked in on his goal and had never given up. In late November Renfro's secretary had called and said the absolute best she could do was to schedule him two hours the first week of February, to which Drew said, “I'll take it.”

Now Lisa walked toward Drew, and it was obvious her mascara had run. As he looked at the other ladies, he noticed one of them holding a box of tissues, and said, “Umm, hello, Lisa?”

“I guess you haven't heard yet,” she replied.

“Heard what?”

“Mr. Murphy had a heart attack last night and he's in intensive care. It's not looking good for him,” Lisa blurted out.

“Oh my goodness. No, I hadn't heard. I'm so sorry.”

“We—we've been in tears all morning. That man is the salt of the earth and, and I just . . .” Lisa stopped speaking, unable to finish her sentence. She placed a damp tissue to her round face and gingerly rubbed her nose. “You have an appointment today, don't you?” she half asked, as she gathered herself and cleared her throat.

“Ah, yes, at eleven forty-five. Is Mr. Renfro available today?”

“Hon, he might have forgotten about you. He just walked in from the hospital, and none of us have even looked at the schedules all day. Let me buzz Kathy to see if he's up there and whether he can meet with you,” Lisa said, and blew her nose.

While Lisa turned her back and picked up the phone, a man who fit the description of Renfro given to Peggy walked toward the water cooler. As he did, she stood, cleared her throat, and half pointed in his direction after she got Drew's attention.

“Ah, Lisa,” Drew said, and tapped the desk so as not to be heard by the gentleman. She turned to Drew and then noticed Renfro.

“Oh, Frank; this is your eleven forty-five, Andrew Staley. He's here to discuss our company benefits.”

“This is Andrew Patrick Staley?” Renfro asked in surprise as he wiped water droplets from his chin.

“Yes, sir,” Drew said as he produced his business card like a six-shooter after he shook the partner's hand, just as he was taught in college.

With breath that came from the pit of his belly, Renfro replied, dragging out every syllable of the name, “Mr. Staaaley, you have caught us at a very bad time.” He then gazed at Lisa as if to say,
Why did you schedule me for this?
Lisa turned around with grace and walked back to the other women.

Franklin Clay Renfro was a man of middle age with a receding M-shaped hairline who lived in the shadow of Jack Murphy. Drew was surprised by his informal appearance in the prestigious firm. He wore a short-sleeve shirt which displayed blue veins in his arms, and wrinkled black pants. He had a rangy frame, moved with a slight limp, and wore his blond hair in a crew cut. The collar of his light blue shirt was loosened, and Drew noticed the stitches from a tracheotomy above the large knot in his polyester tie.

“I understand, sir, and under the circumstances, I would be happy to reschedule a more convenient time with your secretary to meet with you.”

After he noticed Peggy, who stood in the background watching him as well, Renfro studied the business card thoroughly. He took an irate breath and exhaled. “No. No, come on up,” he muttered.

Four years of college. Two years working for other firms. Eight years building his own business. Sweating to make payroll. Working vampirelike hours deep into the night. Being at his desk before dawn, out the door well past dusk. It had all come down to show time for Andrew Patrick Staley and Associates, and he winked at Peggy before he headed into the elevator shaft with Renfro.

“I love the decor in the lobby,” Drew said to break the tension.” It seems you've redecorated since I was last here.”

“No, it's the same. Been the same for years.”

“Umm. So do you follow Gator football? I heard that top recruit from Ohio has committed. I think he's going to—”

“I don't watch sports.” And then the silence in the elevator became oppressive as both men watched the number ascend to the next floor.

Drew knew he had to find common ground with Renfro and was not willing to give up. This was obviously not going to be what was known as a “lay down” sale. It would be tough, but the tough ones always brought out the best in him. “I just heard about Mr. Murphy,” Drew said in yet another attempt to engage Renfro in conversation. “He and I played in a charity golf function a couple of years ago. We were not paired together, but I did get a chance to meet him. I've always heard nothing but good things about him.”

“Umm.”

After an inflated pause, Drew cut the silence once again. “When did you find out about it?”

After the elevator door slid open, Renfro made a Pattonlike march down the hallway and said in an irritated tone, “This morning.” Without taking a breath, he walked toward his secretary. “Kathy what time is that appointment with Donna Geekler and her son Edward?”

“It's at two, sir.”

“See if you can move them up to twelve-thirty, because I'm gonna have to get out of here early today.”

“But,” Kathy said with fear in her tone, “it's—eleven-fifty now, sir.”

“Just call them.”

Renfro's comments were a way of saying,
Kid, you better do what you got to do, because the meter is running.
After a glance at a few pieces of unopened mail on Kathy's desk, Renfro looked over his glasses at Drew. Just like a college professor, with a grunt he motioned for him to have a seat in his office. He then went into a tirade with his administrative assistant about a motion that had not been filed by an associate earlier that morning and a file he could not locate for a meeting with Burt Collins.

Drew entered Renfro's office and said to himself,
I'm in trouble now.
He was aware of Renfro's racist views, but nothing he had heard had prepared him for this. The first thing he saw was a print that read, “I Have a Dream,” and underneath it were the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. Drew glanced around the room at the collection of rebel flags and the signed photograph taken with David Duke, and smiled confidently.
Wait'll he gets a load of me.

An hour and a half later, Drew emerged from the mirrored elevator and entered the reception area of the law firm. As he walked through the thick sliding doors, he felt numb. He walked mummylike as he looked at Peggy, who had dropped her
Cosmopolitan
magazine on the floor in her haste to meet him in the lobby. When she approached with a
Well, what happened?
look on her brow, he reached inside the manila folder cinched under his arm and pulled out a six-figure draft. As he looked at Peggy, he mouthed the words without a smile, “Mission accomplished.”

“Oh my God,” she said in a faint voice, and allowed her emotion to show only in her eyes as she waved good-bye to Lisa and the rest of the ladies behind the reception desk.

As they got outside, Peggy exclaimed, “Drew, you pulled it off! We did it! I knew you could do it. He went for the entire plan? Even the ancillary coverage we added? Hook, line, and sinker?”

Feeling empty, Drew still could not enjoy the moment as he clicked the alarm to the car and opened the doors while Peggy stared at the draft. He wanted to share her joy, but inside he knew what he had done to get the signature, and the more he thought about it, the more he was not sure who had just won and just lost on the eighteenth floor of the Olsen Building.

After treating his
staff to a celebratory lunch earlier that day, Drew passed the country club he was a member of but rarely used. Since it was Friday, he considered stopping for a round of golf, but changed his mind as he slowed for a red light. And then he noticed a navy convertible BMW driven by the attorney he had seen earlier in Murphy, Renfro and Collins, headed in the opposite direction. As he watched her taillights diminish in his rearview mirror, his fingers found the radio's volume knob and turned up the sound to block out the memory of Felicia. And then he looked across the street and noticed Harper and Sons Appliances. The spot held a special place for him because it was his first sale after opening his firm.

Drew had started his company with little cash. In college he hadn't known what he wanted to do when he graduated, but he'd always known it would not entail employment by someone else. So after he'd graduated, he'd worked for E.F. Hutton and then Prudential for a brief period of time to learn as much as he could about the investment and insurance arena. After he'd put together a program for a wealthy photographer in Boca Raton, he'd taken his profits and invested them in his dream. Andrew Patrick Staley and Associates. When he'd done so, there had been no Associates. Just him, a 386 computer, a coffeemaker, and a dream. His
dark, dank studio office had had a single desk and a bad echo, and he'd done everything from vacuuming the carpet to designing the pension programs for his clients. But since he met most of his prospects in their offices, it had never posed a problem.

Feeling drained after the Renfro debacle, Drew did not feel up to returning to the office. So as the light turned green, he turned in to the mall parking lot, went inside the cinemaplex, and watched a matinee for the first time in years, alone.

Arriving home with his dinner in a Boston Market bag, Drew turned on the television and, after surfing the channels, called Peggy.

“Hello?”

“Hey, what are you up to?”

“Sweet pea, how you doing!” Peggy asked. “Thanks for lunch. That was nice of you.”

“Is Walt there?”

“Yes, sweetie my husband is here. You hying to flirt, Mr. Staaaley?” she asked with a laugh.

“You better let him know it wasn't just me and you.”

“Ah, I don't know if we can do that, Mr. Staley. I do happen to be married, you know.”

“Listen at you. Always instigating something.”

“You know me,” she said. “He knows I'm crazy about him. So are you feeling better about the deal?”

Drew relaxed on his couch with his head on the armrest and toes buried between the thick cushions. “What do you mean?”

“I know something went down in there today. I just haven't figured out what happened. I mean that was the biggest sale you ever made. By far. And you would hardly talk to us during lunch.”

Drew clicked off the TV and laid the remote on the oak table, never taking his eyes off a graduation portrait of Felicia on his mantel. Since he could not imagine another woman entering his home or his life at this juncture, it looked perfectly in place. Their love was tender and sweet. He would never forget the day or the time she first told him
that she loved him. Because after she uttered the words, she added softly, “Drew, I must admit that I am a little selfish. You see, I know in my heart that I would like to die before you. Because I could never imagine being in a world without you here.” After her death the irony of those words settled over his mind like a dark cloud that would not blow away and would always produce a tear.

He and Peggy had known each other for more than ten years, and since she was a few years older than he, she was the big sister he'd never had.

“Hello? Drew, are you there?”

As he cleared his throat Drew said, “I had to sell out to make the damn deal.”

“What do you mean?”

With a deep breath Drew replied, “Renfro is the most racist person I have ever met, and I wanted to set him straight a couple of times, but I didn't. I should have . . . but I didn't.”

“What do you mean, racist? Did he call you a name or something?”

“No. Of course not. But the man has these rebel flags displayed all over his office and even has, get this, a letter framed on his wall from Jerry Falwell. I'm not kidding.”

“Well, actually, Drew, a letter from Falwell does not
exactly
make one a racist.”

“Yeah, and neither does wearing a white sheet. What I mean is this. Things like that show no respect for black people. What if he was Jewish and walked into my office and I had German swastikas all over the place.”

“Tell me something, Drew. Did you get the check?”

“Yeah, I know where you're going with—”

“Then you did a good job. Sleep well tonight. It's none of your business what he has in his office or his heart. There are people like him out there. They are nasty, crazy, stupid, dumb, whatever you wanna call them. But they are out there and we know it. Now that we know it, what do we do? Is it your job to educate him? Do we pitch our tents, give up, and not do business with them? Hell no! We deal with it. We get over it. We move on.”

“I know, but I think I should have said something. You
didn't see his office. I should have shown a little backbone in there.”

“Yeah, losing the sale would have taught him a lot. Don't get me wrong Andrew, I understand where you are coming from. But I—”

“Exactly! I mean, there are hardly any blacks employed in that place. I looked at the portraits of the partners and there's not one black face. Outside of the sister I saw who is an attorney there and a couple of custodians, I bet there aren't any blacks at all. I should have let him know he was talking to his worst nightmare. A black man with an education.”

“No,” Peggy replied. “See, you already did that because he bought the program. What you should have done was to ask that redneck for ten references and sold plans to ten of his Klan friends. That's what you
should
have done. Listen to me. Don't get mad Drew; get everything. See, you're talking to a child of the sixties. I graduated from old Lincoln High. I remember when they made us leave our school and sent the troops in and everything. I even remember my cousin Pam being brought home with her eyes swollen shut from the tear gas. But what a lot of us misunderstand in business today is that it's not our job to be martyrs. Okay? Your job was accomplished today and we got the draft to prove it. Murphy, Renfro and Collins, done deal, case dosed. Next.”

After finishing his conversation with Peggy, Drew noticed the time and put on his Topsiders and Knicks cap to do something he had done the previous weekend. He decided that he would do this on Friday nights because that was their date night. Each week they would alternate doing something special for each other. One time it had been as simple as when she'd made up words to “Song Bird,” by Kenny G; another time, as elaborate as the surprise trip Drew had arranged to Paradise Island for the weekend.

As he got closer to his destination, rain started to fall, and Drew remembered he did not have a jacket or umbrella.
Damn, I wonder if Momma's okay tonight,
he thought as he drove down the highway. Drew's father had died four years
earlier from plain old age. He'd been a good-natured gentleman who'd spent what little free time he'd had helping in his community with political campaigns. Drew could remember him pulling his red Chevy truck off the road and spending as much as an hour assisting a stranded driver. To Drew, his father was the definition of a man. His mother was in her late seventies and continued to chain-smoke, play cards every week, drink hard, and cry loudly about the death of her husband. They had been married more than fifty years and had lived in the same area in Gainesville for most of that time.

Drew, who was an only child, thought back to when he would come home from school and see his mother in the yard with their next-door neighbor, Mr. Douglass. His father had been an auto parts salesman and would at times be on the road for over a month. Drew had never noticed Mr. Douglass at the house when his dad was home, only when he was away. Far away. Mr. Douglass never came over for cookouts, to watch baseball, or anything else. But as soon as the coast was clear, he would appear.

One night after his father's retirement party, Drew had asked his mom point-blank for the real story in regards to her neighbor. Her answer was, “Oscar Douglass and I are just friends. And even if that was not true, I would tell you that anyway.” Drew had never felt the need to ask her again.

One day shortly after his father passed, Drew, who was at this point a well-respected businessman in the community, drove up to the house and noticed Mr. Douglass sitting on their front step alone. He looked at Drew with fear in his eyes since he knew Drew's mother had in essence told her son of their bond. Drew glared at the slender dark man and wondered why he sat outside.

“She's inside, son. She does this every day almost, nowadays. At lease three, fo' times a week.”

“Does what?”

“Starts talking foolishness. Listen at her.”

Drew walked closer, turned the knob, and noticed she had locked the bottom and likely the top lock as well. But he could hear her grievous rants inside.

“Oh my God, Jerry. Why did you have to leave me like this? Why did you have to go? You know I can't raise that boy on my own. How am I gonna send him to college, Jerry? How am I gonna pay for this big ole house? Jerry, you know I don't know how to work. You shouldn'a did me like this, Jerry. Jerry, I'm sorry for what I did to you all those years. I'm so sorry, Jerry,” she wailed with a voice full of remorse and pain. “Just please come back.”

Drew glanced at Mr. Douglass as he rubbed his trembling callused hands together like a raccoon and looked at the ground.

“How long has she been doing this?”

“Almost every day since your dad died. I always come by here to see if she needs me to run by the store or anything, and sometimes she'll let me in and everything is fine. And then other times . . . well, she is like this,” he whispered, and looked up at Drew.

Time and a bimonthly visit with a counselor had dampened the loss of Jerry Staley. Time and the bimonthly visit had made it bearable for Judith to learn to live without him and get over the guilt. She had not married for love. She had married for security. Once, as a teenager, Drew had walked in and heard her say on the phone, “How do you leave a good man? If a man is sorry, it's easy. But what do you do when he's good?” Drew had never fully understood what she was talking about until as an adult he saw how she looked at Mr. Douglass.

At her advanced age, Judith Staley took a driving course to learn how to drive her husband's emerald Buick Electra and also put together a card-playing group, which rotated houses each Thursday and Saturday night. And every afternoon, after she watched “General Hospital” and “All My Children” back to back she and Mr. Douglass would drive, sing old Motown hits, and talk about yesterday. While she felt guilty because she had never been true to Jerry Staley, the pain lessened when she learned for the first time in her life it was all right to be true to herself.

Drew parked in front of the fresh-cut headstone with Felicia's name as the rain blew sideways. He turned off his motor and thought back to the first time he saw her. There
was no magic. Not even a spark. He had walked downstairs from an appointment with an accountant on Valentine's Day. It was a few minutes before five, and as he'd walked through the secretarial pool toward the door, he'd noticed that every woman had a bouquet of flowers or a box of candy from her lover—except for the lady in the thigh-high yellow skirt. She'd had a picture of her man, but no gifts. “Child, you all know how Zack is. I bet you anything he sent them to my old department. He's so absentminded.” Drew could hear her from across the room, and as he passed her desk he could see the hurt in her eyes as he and the accountant headed out the door.

Shaking his head to dust away the memory, Drew noticed the rain was falling in thick splats and he reached in the backseat to pull out the weekly gift to his beloved. Gazing at it, he was again pulled back to that fateful Valentine's Day. He'd decided that night that he would not spend the evening alone, so he'd gone out and by chance he'd seen Felicia again. That night had proven to be their first date. After they'd left the club, Drew had parked in front of her home and they had talked about everything imaginable deep into the night. And then the topic of the conversation had switched to eternal love and she'd mentioned how Paul and Linda McCartney had never slept in separate beds in over twenty years of marriage. She also mentioned how Joe Di Maggio had continued to have flowers sent to the tomb of Marilyn Monroe years after her death.

“Can you imagine loving someone that much? So much you want to give them flowers every day . . . forever?” And then she'd looked at him and said, “Drew, that's how much I want to be in love with someone one day. For just once, I'd like to be in love so much it hurt. Until it didn't make any sense. Know what I mean?”