Any Minute (27 page)

And when Sarah realized how wrong she had been, although it grieved her, she suddenly felt that the sun had risen on what had been a very long dark night, and she no longer felt afraid.

Chapter Eighteen

W
hen she and Annie and Wingtip ended up on the fifth level of the Smart Park Tower, Sarah knew exactly what was happening. It didn’t surprise her to find them flipping a coin for her parking space.

As Sarah moved closer, she saw the crowd gathered, the guys from the ninth floor standing somberly with their suit coats buttoned and their hands clasped as if they were groomsmen in a wedding. She glanced around the run of faces, Roscoe’s entire staff, as well as people wearing trading jackets from rival companies, the whole gang from human resources, all staring at one rectangle of pavement, marked by a curbstone at one end and two stripes painted along the sides, as if this were the most important piece of real estate in all of downtown.

“I don’t understand,” Rona said. “What’s the big deal about a parking place?”

“It’s right next to the elevator,” someone explained.

“She would have done anything to get it,” said someone else.

“She always made that last corner fast to make sure no one took it from her.”

“She would have swerved and sent you into a tailspin if you’d tried to steal it away,” added another.

“This is what I have to say about Sarah Harper,” said one of the ninth-floor guys who sounded ready to launch into a lengthy memorial speech. “She was determined to get what she wanted out of life and that included her special parking place here in the parking tower.”

A long pause. At a time like this, perhaps it was best not to correct anyone. But finally a gentleman wearing a jacket from the Reyson and Minor Commodities Firm said, “Not only in the parking tower.” They exchanged glances, perhaps remembering that the reason they were having this impromptu memorial was because of something she’d done in her car. “She drove that way
everywhere
, and that’s why she isn’t here today.”

Just when Sarah thought someone would get brave enough to pipe up and say, “You guys are all crazy. Something like a parking space could never have been that important to her,” they bowed their heads in silence, staring at the four-sided slab of asphalt, paying homage to it as if it were some holy relic.

It’s just a parking place!
Sarah wanted to remind them. When she glanced over at Annie, her grandmother’s eyes held a tinge of sad amusement.

These people had gone all out. Someone had affixed a wreath of plastic flowers to the concrete curb. An assortment of teddy bears had begun to trickle in, and now they had grown to a pile that would rival the stuffed animals Kate had amassed during her first Christmas. Someone had brought colored ribbon and tied purple, yellow, and pink bows in the chain-link fence lining the upper floors of the parking tower. Someone had laid a Cubs baseball cap right in the center.

“Well, she liked the Cubs, didn’t she?” the guy from personnel asked when they all looked askance at him. “She was always trying to get to a game. I wanted to put something she liked up here.”

“Yes.” Leo said it as snappishly as if he were a bear defending his young. “She liked the Cubs.”

A ninth-floor guy tugged a quarter out of his pocket and rubbed it between two fingers. “This is the best way I know to honor her,” he said. “She would like the competition. Now who wants to vie for this spot?”

“She would
not
like it done this way,” someone else said. “She would like all of us to wait in our vehicles at the ticket booth with our engines revving and then, on your mark, get set,
go
.”

“Well, of course she would like that best. But that would be dangerous and we don’t need to lose anyone else today, do we?”

“This is the way we’re going to have to do it, then,” Leo suggested. And it seemed that because he’d been her intern, even though he’d never been paid a penny for his work, they respected him and looked to him for guidance. “No racing. Just a coin flip.”

They murmured and nodded their heads in approval.

“But does it have to be a quarter? Can’t it be something a little more distinctive? Doesn’t anyone have a silver dollar or something?”

Sarah had never seen so many people digging in their pockets and sifting through their coins all at once. Heads shook. Pennies fell to the ground. Finally someone came up with a Kennedy half-dollar—that’s the best they could do—and Rose, a woman from bookkeeping, did the honors.

“Call it,” she said.

“Heads, I get the space.” Ninth-Floor Guy pretended to wave the checkered flag once again.

Rona asked, “If it’s tails, who gets it?”

They glanced at each other to see who would be most appropriate. Leo asked, “You want it, Rona? You’re Roscoe’s assistant. You’re the one who should park here.”

Rona dabbed at first one eye, then the other, with a tissue. “I’ve got my own space reserved on the street.” Which made everyone peer down their noses at her with suspicion. “Leo should have it. We shouldn’t even be flipping.”

Leo just stood there, looking a little lost and a lot pitiful.

“Why, Leo did so much to help Sarah, he would have climbed up and carried down the Ceres statue from the top of the Board of Trade if she’d asked him to.”

Leo didn’t know why everyone had to make such a big deal.

Ninth-Floor Guy, who began to feel the tide of popular opinion turning, said, “Just get it over with, will you? This whole thing seems a bit ridiculous, if you ask me.”

So Rose flipped. With her thumb, she tossed the half-dollar high into the air. It tumbled heads over tails over heads, somersaulting in the shaft of sunlight.

“Wingtip.” Sarah yanked at his arm. “Can I fix that?”

“We haven’t let you fix anything else, have we? We sure can’t start now.”

Rose caught the half-dollar and slapped it against her wrist. She removed her hand and peered at the coin. “Tails,” she said with a small amount of glee. “Leo gets the space.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Let me see that,” Ninth-Floor complained, teasing. “I think the kid is teacher’s pet. I think you’re yanking my chain.”

Pleasantly, Rose held out her arm so the guy could inspect the results. “I told you so. Take a good look.”

Not until the fellow was lumbering off in the direction of the elevator did Leo say, “You can have the space if you really want it. I don’t care. I ride the ‘L’ most of the time anyway.”

“Oh, I’ve got your permission, do I, kid? Who died and gave you all the authority around here, anyway?”

Which gave them both pause because it hit way too close to home.

Leo said, “I’ll even have a plaque made with your name on it if you want me to. That’s what I was going to do for Mrs. Harper.”

“You can stop standing up for her now, Leo. She’s gone for good. And we’ve all seen how she treated you. She ran you around like a slave.”

“I wanted to do it,” Leo said.

“Why? Because she was giving you your big break? Because you thought she cared about you?” The man pulled a stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint from his pocket, unwrapped it, and folded it inside his jaw. “You got a lot to learn, kid. The only thing Sarah Harper cared about was proving her prowess at everyone else’s expense. It was just a matter of time. You would have been next.”

“You’re wrong about Mrs. Harper,” Leo said as he followed the man to the elevator. The doors slid open. When the whole group of them loaded and turned to Leo, they were certainly a somber-looking bunch. Ladies dabbed their noses with Kleenexes. Men stood with their shoulders squared, their expressions restrained, their hands crossed.

Leo, feeling very scrawny and young and determined, thought nothing of taking on the entire Roscoe professional staff. “You never gave her a chance to show you what a great lady she was.

She was the best person I ever worked for down here.”
She was the
only
person I ever worked for down here
, he thought as the elevator doors began to slide together,
but it will take them a while to figure that out.

Even though most of the group was well aware of Sarah’s determined attitude and didn’t like her methods, some of them, especially the ladies, couldn’t help but be emotional about her being gone. Although nobody talked about it, this incident made them realize how their own lives could change any minute too. Some of them made jokes just to avoid the thoughts that came to the forefront of their minds when they were quiet.

Could this happen to me?

If it did, am I living the way I really should be living?

Am I ready to die?

What will people say about me when I’m gone?

Throughout his journey with Sarah, Wingtip never once complained about overseeing the Chicago Cubs. He never once launched into any detailed discourse about wishing he had been assigned a team like the Red Sox or the Cards, or even those pesky Philadephia Phillies—any team that stood to win a World Series. He told Sarah he’d learned to trust God with everything and that that made his journey easy rather than hard.

When he turned to her with grief in his eyes and said, “It’s time,” she hoped he’d gotten some emergency call from Lou Piniella or he was being paged for some desperate duty with the pitchers in the bull pen. But what if it was something much more serious?

“God’s not going to call me back to heaven, at least not until my job is over.” He spoke as if reassuring himself as Sarah tried to decipher his worried expression.

“What is it, Wingtip? What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly,” he said. “Just a strange sense I’ve got.”

“A sense about what?”

“Just a sense that my job might be almost finished.” He shook his head as he thought about it a while. Then his eyes widened. “You don’t suppose—”

“I don’t suppose… what?”

“That this could be the year the Cubbies win it all? That the Lovable Losers might succeed in postseason? That I’m the one who helps the Chicago Cubs bring the commissioners’ trophy home to the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field?”

“It’s a tall order,” Sarah reminded him, teasing him. Still, she didn’t understand his melancholy expression.
It’s time
. What did that mean? Was it time to tell him good-bye? She pointed toward the sky. “But I guess there’s somebody up there who’s very good at filling tall orders.”