of that, too,” Phil said, and started to get up on his elbows.
“It’s all yours,” Tracie replied, and doused him with it. Just in case he was a liar. He yelped, but she paid no attention. She had no time to find out—and maybe she didn’t want to know. She’d be hellishly late for Jon. She pulled on her clothes, slipped into her shoes, and crossed the floor. “I’m outta here,” she called from the door, laughing. Her last look at Phil was of him untangling the wet gray sheet from his lanky body.
Jon’s office was impressive in size and location, occupying the corner of a building on the low-rise Micro/Con campus, with a view of the topiary garden. But instead of the usual corporate chairs and sofa he had been offered, Jon had used his decorating budget to buy vintage beanbag chairs upholstered in leatherlike Naugahyde. A lot of Naugas must have died, ’cause there were at least half a dozen shapeless mounds of chairs spread around the room. In the center of them, there was a coffee table actually made of coffee beans suspended in a clear acrylic. Jon particularly liked the coffee table. Narrow shelves lined one wall—not for books, or even software CDs, but for the vast collection of action figures he had acquired for work (he had a huge annual budget for them). They shared space with his numerous Pez dispensers (his own private collection). Jon had more than four hundred, including the rare Betsy Ross, the only Pez dispenser ever created based on a real person.
He more than liked the nonsense of his office. There was a method to his madness. It put people at ease, and encouraged playfulness, hence creativity. But there was no nonsense on his desk. Only three photographs were set at the corner of the shining (renewable) teak surface: a picture of his mother, a picture of Tracie and him at college graduation, and a picture of a much younger Jon standing with his mom next to his father, just after they’d planted the wisteria around the doorway of their house and just before Chuck had split.
Now he pulled out the Polaroid his mother had taken earlier in the day and inserted it into the corner of that frame. He stared at the picture: Jon Delano, twenty-eight years old, embracing his mother, and for a moment, it changed before his eyes. It turned black and white and suddenly there was no mature blooming wisteria nor a mature Jon. Instead, a very young Jon and his young mom were embracing while Mr. Delano walked past them, struggling with two suitcases. Jon blinked and the actual Polaroid returned. Spooked, he got up and walked away from the desk.
Well, he was really tired. Not to mention stuffed. Thank God Toni, his last stepmom but one, had canceled at the last minute, or his stomach would probably have burst. He looked out the window to the lit garden and the darkness beyond. It was almost 10:00 P.M., but that didn’t stop people from working on Sunday at Micro/Con. All the staff prided themselves on the incredibly long hours they put in. Sunday was just another workday, and even now the parking lot was almost half-full. Jon patted his belly and sank into a beanbag, wiggling his butt until it assumed the position. There was something about Mother’s Day that depressed him, and it wasn’t merely surveying the trail of human wreckage his father had left behind.
Jon had grown up listening to the women’s complaints. It wasn’t only his father’s various wives, though; it was also the women who gathered for coffee at his mother’s house. Other women had even worse stories about their exes, stories that he’d listened to, hiding behind the couch, when he was seven, nine, and fourteen. His mother’s friends seemed incapable of ditching their husbands or finding ones who treated them well. Why’d they stay? he still wondered. He thought of Barbara and her baking. After the biscuits had come the inevitable question: “Hear from your father?” He thought of Janet’s skinny shoulders when she turned her back on him, pretending to arrange the flowers, and asked, “Have you heard from your father?”
It wasn’t Mother’s Day, Jon decided. Not for him. For him, it had been Heard from Your Father Day and Have You Got Anyone Special Day. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and, with his right hand, removed his glasses so that he could massage the reddened flesh under the nosepiece. Jon had almost two hours before his customary midnight date with Tracie and, although he had piles and piles of work to do, if he just kept his eyes closed and napped for just a minute, ten minutes at the most …
Jon was eleven and sitting in a leatherette booth across from his father. A plate of untouched eggs, their whites runny, the yolk congealing, sat undisturbed in front of him, while his father was busy tearing pieces of the running egg albumen with a side of his fork, then pushing the nasty stuff onto a burned corner of toast and popping it into his mouth. Jon was aware that he was asleep, yet the man in front of him was so real, so perfectly reconstructed in his dream, that it was impossible to believe the guy was not there. Jon could have counted each bristle of his father’s five o’clock shadow. Chuck finished the last bit of egg, wiped the plate with some of Jon’s toast, and began to chew it up. He leaned forward. “Just remember this, son,” he said. “There’s not a woman in the world who won’t buy a lie she wants to believe.”
Jon jerked his eyes open. He was losing it. Weeks of endless toil on the Cliffhanger project and a lousy Friday and Saturday night, topped off by this Sunday, bloody Sunday had given him the willies. He looked at his watch: 10:31. If he could just get out of the beanbag chair, he could get in at least a solid hour of work before meeting Tracie and reviewing what a lousy weekend they’d both had. Jon might have a surfeit of mothers to entertain, but on this weekend, he was careful to be extra attentive to Tracie. Without a mother, the day hit her hard. Not to mention her holiday article. God! He’d forgotten the article! She had E-mailed the draft to him and it was really good, but you never knew what it would look like when it was published in the Times. He’d been so busy today, he hadn’t had a chance to get the paper or even to look at a copy. He’d better do it on his way over to Java, The Hut.
Actually, work was the only part of his life he had under control. Unlike Tracie, he had a successful career, liked and respected his boss, a wild woman who’d been in on the start-up of UniKorn. Bella was great, his staff was great, his job was great, and the money was great. Now he’d been given control of the Parsifal project, and if he made it happen, well, the sky was the limit. And he could make it happen. Parsifal was the code name for the project Jon had fought for since he’d joined Micro/Con almost six years ago. He was trying to bring together convergent wireless technology for a laptop/TV/phone product so advanced, he wasn’t allowed to let his right department know what his left department was doing. It would make him or break him, and it was certainly taking up every minute of his time. But if Parsifal worked, no one would ever buy a TV or phone from Panasonic again.
It was just that in the last three or four years, there’d been no time for a social life, and when there was … well, it was safe to say it was very definitely less than great. He thought again of his bad Friday night, followed by a worse Saturday evening, and winced. Maybe his reasoning was faulty. He rationalized his lousy social life because of his demanding career. But perhaps one of the reasons he worked all the time was because it was easier than going out. When he tried, as he had this weekend, look what happened.
Jon groaned aloud and sank deeper into the chair—such as it was. The beanbag cupped him at just the right tilt. He didn’t feel like thinking anymore, nor did he want to sign on and see how many urgent E-mails he’d gotten in the last twenty-four hours while he bombed out with women and took care of his mothers—both step and natural. There would be mounds of work. Jon took a deep sigh. Every one of his employees thought that their problems were the most difficult and impossible for them to solve without either his help or his praise. He sighed again. He loved his work and he’d do the E-mail now, for half an hour. One less thing to do tomorrow morning. But he’d be sure to leave by eleven-thirty. Seeing Tracie was the high point of his whole week.
Java, The Hut was just one of the 647 coffee shops in Seattle, but to Jon it seemed different from all the others. It was suffused