I ask what happened to the rest of your family?'
Elmo thought that he would never see this woman again. He liked the look of intelligence in her eyes. So for once he relented to tell the ghastly truth about his family. He said in a subdued tone of voice,
"When I was twenty one I went on a short holiday to an interstate resort facility. When I got back to my home city airport I expected my father to be there to pick me up. But only my uncle, the one who just died, was there instead. He was a widower! They never had any children. He was what we Catholics call my godfather. I knew something was wrong by the look on his face. He took me to an airport bar. We sat at a closed booth where he told me that there had been a bad fire at my home. I asked if anyone was hurt. He said that everyone was hurt that was in the house. Trembling I asked how badly they were hurt. He looked away but then said softly that they were all dead. My head swam with the news. At first I refused to believe that my lovely Mother, my great Dad and my brothers and sisters were no longer alive."
Fran could not resist extending her arm in sympathy. She tried to find some words of consolation. All she could come up with was,
"You Catholics believe in heaven. Perhaps they are all safely in heaven."
Elmo shook his head before saying,
"I am no longer a Catholic. I have not been inside any church for ten years. After the funeral I just lost my faith in organised religion."
All further questions were forestalled by the re-entry of Barnard Cromwell. He sat down brusquely before saying in a professional tone of voice,
"What exactly do you want us to tell your uncle's lawyer Mr. Eveings?'
Elmo looked him dead in the eye to say in a firm tone of voice,
"Tell him that I will never return to my homeland so he may as well seek another heir."
The lawyer in Mr. Cromwell took over. He shook his head violently before saying in a harried tone of voice,
"Your uncle's will is clear. Only a blood relative can inherit. You are the last blood relative. If you refuse this inheritance then your uncle effectively dies intestate. Good grief, that means the Canadian government gets the lot."
Unmoved by this revelation, Elmo said in a tone of voice that allowed no come back,
"So be it. I will not care nor will I do anything to claim that inheritance."
There was no more to say so Elmo signed a statement outlining his wishes which was witnessed by Fran Upjohn. Then he left the offices of Cromwell Cromwell and Cromwell. Fran Upjohn escorted him to the weekend security lift. She got him down to the lobby. Then she said in a sad tone of voice,
"Goodbye Mr. Eveings. I suppose that we will never meet again."
Elmo could see that look in her eyes but hardened his heart. He said in a tone of voice that spoke of final partings,
"Thank you for the kind ear back there. Sorry to bore you with my past. You must get that a lot. But I wanted you to at least know why I could never go home. I hope you understand."
Fran nodded her head and smiled weakly. Then she shook Elmo's extended hand. Elmo left the building to walk to the nearest train station.
Chapter 2
Ever workplace has someone like Elmo! They are publicly lauded as being 'indispensable to the team' or 'trustworthy' or even 'generous to a fault'. But this only allows work mates to overburden them with favors. When someone in the clerical department had a difficult problem, they got Elmo to solve it for them. This meant that he often had to work back late to finish his own work. When it was convenient to do so, these same work mates would ignore Elmo's own pleas for some assistance. Finally, they would think nothing of making a joke about Elmo to amuse their own friends.
Elmo was not unaware of this parasitic behavior. He was a highly intelligent man. The fact that he had no high level tertiary degree allowed others to act superior in his presence. But Elmo did not care. Since arriving in this new country he now called home, Elmo had suppressed his own ego. Never voicing an opinion about anything, Elmo was mistaking labelled as introverted. In fact, he had withdrawn to avoid detection. Elmo did not want his past to catch up with him. So he kept his recent 'lawyer experience' to himself. When one work mate on Monday morning asked him,
"Hey Elmo what did you do on Saturday? Someone said they saw you in the city around near the Park."
Elmo came up with a white lie in a flash of inspirational thinking and said in a light tone,
"Yeah I went in to see the floral exhibition. It was amazing."
This silenced Elmo's work mate as he knew it would. This particular clerk was a sports crazed obsessive compulsive who thought floral meant something unmanly. So he stammered in reply,
"Right, well, each to their own I always say."
Then walked away quickly. The staff room gossip was that Elmo did not go on dates. He was their token weekend 'recluse'.
In this they were hopelessly off track. Elmo did date women every weekend. But he made sure that those dates were never the same woman as the previous weekend. Elmo was still a young man but he had no intention of being a 'modern' young man. Women who dated Elmo knew as much about him before their dates as they did after these dates. Reflecting back on their dates with Elmo, they all realized that they had done most of the talking.
Assiduously avoiding all forms of intimacy, Elmo was able to avoid relationships.
Some clerks on the staff prided themselves on knowing everything about everybody. They tried to get the low down on Elmo. So they would ask him,
"Where were you born Elmo?"
He would pretend to be jesting with them when he replied,
"Hopefully in a hospital but I can't be certain about that as I was a baby at the time."
Then if he got asked,
"Where did you go to college Elmo?"
He would invent yet another white lie by responding somberly with the following joke at his own expense
"I was home tutored."
As for others who tried to get details on Elmo's past, they were often hampered by Elmo's strange surname. Almost always they got it wrong or assumed that Elmo was short for Elmer. The common mistake people made about his surname was the spelling. So he saw name tags at sales seminars with mistakes like
"ELMO EVENINGS"
or
"ELMER EVINGS"
or even
"ELMER EVENS"
None of these mistakes worried Elmo in the slightest. In fact, he never corrected them, so they appeared in lists of attendees at conferences he was forced to attend. To avoid any chance of someone recognizing