A Promise to Cherish (6 page)

She didn’t feel in the least like smiling but couldn’t help it. Damn the man, making her laugh when he’d been the initial cause of the altercation she’d just had with Thorpe!

“Oh, you did, huh? I took an earlier flight. I’ve been back since ten o’clock.”

A brief pause, then, “How did Thorpe take the news?”

She laughed, a single mirthless huff. “Need you ask?”

“Well, you win a few and you lose a few. He should know that by now.”

“That isn’t even remotely funny, Brown. Not after what you did to me! He came down on me like a tent when the circus is over, and what really irritates me is that Fat Thorpe actually seems to admire you for your duplicity. His exact words were, ‘The kid’s got more brains than his old man.’ It appears you’re two peas in a pod, you and my boss.”

His unconcerned laughter came over the wire. “We’re both a couple of degenerates, is that it?”

“That’s it,” she agreed.

“Well, how would you like a chance to try your hand at reforming me . . . say over dinner Friday night?”

Lee came close to sputtering, the dressing down she’d just taken from F.A. still burning beneath her collar. “Dinner! What, again? And ruin my reputation around this town by being seen with a known pervert? I told you, Brown, I don’t know why I ate with you the first time!”

“I’ll take you to the American Restaurant,” he bribed.

The American! Lee was suddenly crestfallen and undeniably tempted. The American Restaurant at the Crown Center was the
crème de la crème
of eateries in the Kansas City area.

“Brown, that’s a dirty, rotten low blow, and you know it.”

“I know,” he agreed mirthfully, a smile in his voice.

“I told you, not until
I’m
the low bidder, and right now I’m not, as you well know.”
The American Restaurant,
she thought woefully, kissing the chance good-bye.

“Okay, Cherokee, but I’ll hold you to it . . . when you’re low bidder.”

“Ch . . .” Now Lee did sputter! “Ch . . . Cherokee! Brown, don’t you ever call me that ag . . . Brown?” She clicked the disconnect button. “Brown!”

But he’d hung up. Then she did too, slamming the receiver down so hard it jumped back off the cradle. “Cherokee!” she spit out crossing her arms and glaring at the instrument guilty of carrying his damn sexy, teasing voice to her when she was in no mood to be manipulated by a smooth talker like him.

How dare he call her Cherokee when . . . when . . .

But a moment later her lips betrayed her and she found herself grinning at the phone. It was the last time she grinned that day.

Things went from bad to worse. Fat Thorpe pounded in and out, cussing like a marine and demanding test borings on jobs Lee knew were too wet to even consider bidding; ordering installation of inferior quality pipe they’d had trouble with before; demanding last minute changes in a bid she’d all but finished. He became more overbearing and demanding as the day passed. Lee required all her teeth-gritting strength to maintain her composure.

By the time she left the office, her nerves were at the breaking point. She arrived at her townhouse tired, angry, and depressed. In the front foyer she stripped off her shoes and pantyhose and left them lying in a heap. There was something about bare feet that seemed to take the stress off her head.

In the rear-facing kitchen she reached unseeingly into the refrigerator for a peach, and sank her teeth into it while roaming over to the sliding glass door and staring at her tiny private patio, fantasizing about calling the Human Rights Commission to complain that she was being discriminated against. But what could the complaint be? That Old Fat wanted to make her vice-president and give her a raise but she was declining the offer? There was nothing illegal about Thorpe’s ploy to make his firm eligible as a minority contractor. It was only unethical! And Lee adamantly refused to be his patsy in the scheme.

She prowled the living room, heaping curses on Old Fat’s fat head! Spying the newspaper, she checked the
Kansas City Star,
but as she’d suspected, no one wanted estimators.
The Construction Bulletin
turned up nothing more, and Lee’s depression grew.

Sitting on the floor, her back to the sofa, she crossed her arms over upraised knees and rested her forehead there. The peach pit grew warm and slippery in her hand. She raised her head wearily and propped her chin on an arm, studying the precision pleats of the off-white custom-made draperies she was still paying off in monthly installments.

She’d worked so hard to get this place. She brushed a hand over the thick nap of the rich, rust carpet. She’d bought the townhouse only six months ago, and though she had a long way to go before it was completely decorated, she loved the furniture she’d managed to buy so far. She had modest dreams of adding decorator items piece by piece, of completing the finishing touches as she could afford them.

She sighed, slunk low onto her tailbone, and caught the nape of her neck on the cushion of the tuxedo sofa, which was covered with an arresting Mayan design of rich, deep earth tones, its soft depths strewn with plump matching cushions. Lee’s eyes moved to the spots where she wanted side chairs.

But the room made her suddenly feel lonelier than ever. She studied the plants in the baskets, willing them to grow faster and fill up the extra space. Her eyes moved next to the only other item the room possessed—a loosely strung God’s-eye on the wall behind the sofa, its rust, brown and ecru yarns so inexpertly stretched around the crossed dowels, that there could be no question it had been done by a child’s hand.

Yes, the room was decidedly bare and lonely, but it was a beginning, and if she lost her job, she would lose this too.

Dejected, she wandered back to the kitchen, threw out the peach pit, rinsed off her hands and opened the refrigerator again only to find herself, some two minutes later, still staring into its almost empty space, remembering a day when she had shuffled and rearranged, trying to make room for family leftovers.

She closed the door on her memories, wishing the judge could see now what she’d made of herself since she’d faced him in court. Carrying a quart of milk onto the patio, she sank into a webbed lounge chair and drank the remainder of her supper right out of the red and white carton, too dispirited to care if it was in a glass or not.

It was much later when she finally plodded upstairs. The second floor of the townhouse had two bedrooms and a bath. As she neared the door of the smaller room, she slowed. Stopping, she reached inside and switched on the light. A pair of twin beds with heavy pine headboards took up the far wall. Between them stood a matching chest of drawers whose rich, dark wood looked richer against the bright scarlet carpet, but whose top was bare—nothing there but a lamp and an unopened box of paper tissues. Still, the room was completely decorated. The bedspreads and draperies were crisp and new, with an all-over design of NFL insignias in a blaze of basic colors. On the wall beside one bed hung two Kansas City Chiefs pennants.

Lee studied the room sullenly, biting back tears that stung her eyes, feeling again the frustrating sense of unfairness that she could never shake at the thought of the boys.

She counted the days.

A brown and white cat padded silently into the room and preened his fur against Lee’s ankle.

“Oh, P. Ewing, you’ve been on the bed again, haven’t you?”

Lee looked down, watched the cat move sinuously against her, then crossed to one of the beds to plump its pillow and smooth the spread. On her way out she scooped up the cat, buried her face in his fur, and reached for the light switch. But she paused in the doorway and turned, assessing the silent room once more. “Oh, P. Ewing, what if I lose my job?” she lamented. “I’ll have to give up this place.”

O
N Friday morning Lee was working on a bid for a simple sewer and water installation in Overland Park, which would service an area where a shopping mall was to be built. The bid letting was scheduled for two that afternoon. These last few hours were always the worst. The phone constantly jangled with calls from salesmen giving last minute quotes on materials, from reinforced concrete pipe to catch basin castings. She’d just received a price quote on sod replacement which was several cents under the previous low bidder and was recomputing the labor subcontract cost when the phone rang. Preoccupied, fingers still flying over the calculator buttons, Lee reached unconsciously for the receiver, cradling it between shoulder and ear as her eyes continued scanning a column of numbers.

A moment later she realized she’d picked up a call meant for F.A. A smooth, masculine voice was saying, “. . . can come to terms on that twelve-inch reinforced concrete pipe we’ve had laying around the yard. The flaws are in the reinforcing, not in the concrete itself, so it’d be mighty tough to detect.”

F.A. chuckled, then returned in a silky tone, “And we’ll split the difference right up the middle?”

Horrified, Lee jerked the receiver away from her ear, clutching it in white knuckles, realizing she should have hung up the moment she’d identified the call as someone else’s. But it had happened so fast! She rested the receiver on her job sheets and stared at the lighted button on the face of the phone, waiting, digesting what she’d heard. With each passing second her disgust grew. She’d heard it said many times that F.A. knew every dishonest trick in the book and wasn’t afraid to use them. But she’d never had proof before. Using substandard materials, price fixing, collusion, buying off the competition before bids—there were countless deceits it was possible to practice. Some were illegal, some merely dishonest. But either way, until now it had been no more than hearsay.

The light blinked off, and Lee slipped the receiver silently back in place.

She was still sitting there in a turmoil when F.A. rounded the doorway into her office. This morning the gnawed stub of an unlit cigar was clenched in his teeth.

“Whoever you got to supply the twelve-inch reinforced concrete pipe on that Overland Park job, we won’t be goin’ with them. Gonna get that pipe from Jacobi.”

“Oh?” Lee retorted coldly.

“Yeah, you can figure it at twelve-fifty a foot, materials only.”

“And what margin of profit are you working on at twelve dollars and fifty cents a foot?”

His beady little eyes narrowed on her like laser beams. The cigar stub shifted to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Never mind, just figure it at twelve-fifty a foot.”

Lee erupted from her chair. “No,
you
figure it at twelve-fifty a foot!”

“Me! That bid’s due at two o’clock this afternoon and—”

“And it won’t be turned in by me, not with flawed pipe from Jacobi figured into it!”

His sausagelike fingers slowly extracted the wet cigar from his lips. “So, Little Miss Big Ears has been listening in on somebody else’s phone conversations, huh?”

“Yes, I heard you and Jacobi on the phone just now, but it was entirely unintentional. As a matter of fact, I only heard about ten seconds worth of the conversation.”

“But it was enough to give you a sudden case of
morality,
is that it?” He managed to make the word sound quite dirty.

Lee’s insides quivered. She pressed a thigh against the edge of her desk to steady the nerves that wanted to fly in six directions. “It’s dishonest!”

Thorpe shifted till his shoulder leaned toward her like a baseball pitcher studying signals from a catcher. He jabbed the cigar butt before her nose. “It’s profit. And don’t you forget it!”

“Profit earned at the expense of the taxpayer . . .
and
the environment, I might add!”

“Well, bye-dee-ho!” F.A. ran his eyes around the walls of her office as if searching for something. “Too bad we ain’t got a stake around here so you can tie yourself to it and strike a match,” he sneered.

Lee was already jerking her desk drawers open, setting her briefcase on the chair, snapping it open, separating personal items from company items.

“I refuse to be a party to your . . . your flawed materials or your scheme to qualify as a minority contractor. Why, I wouldn’t be an officer of this company if Geronimo himself were president!” She piled up address book, legal pads, and portfolios in the center of her desk, each sharp slap like an exclamation point in the room.

“Geronimo wouldn’t have the smarts it takes to run a business like this and turn a profit during a year as tough as this’s been! In one phone call I clear a smooth ten thousand. Now what the hell kind of fool would turn down money like that?”

Lee stopped packing, rested her knuckles on the desktop, and skewered him with a feral glare. “And nobody’s the wiser when five years from now the pipe breaks and untreated sewage infiltrates somebody’s water supply, or . . . or runs into the Missouri River or—”

“A regular Albert Schweitzer, ain’t you? Well, supposing I was to cut you in on a share of my take on this little deal, and you make me a minority contractor after all. Would a few thousand ease your conscience any?”