CABERNET ZIN (Cabernet Zin Wine Country) (22 page)

“Makes me curious. I don’t even have movie star money making me even more handsome.” He stepped back, “Now don’t get any ideas that I don’t like it. I really enjoy my time with you.” He tried changing this dangerous discussion, “This is great lemonade.”

“True, you’ve got a voice for radio.” Claire winked and sipped her drink. She realized that the tone of his voice held her too, somehow. “You undersell yourself. You’re hot handsome.” She touched his chest and slipped her fingers down to his washboard stomach. “And a great body. You’re also passionate about your projects, and ambitious.”

“I’m not president ambitious.”

“There are different shades. The crazy driven are a mess in their personal lives. You have some sort of balance about you.”

“My home life is a mess –”

“– That’s not your fault. You’re not like a lot of people I know that work for money because it’s a job. They try to hang on until the weekend and then get grumpy Sunday afternoon dreading work the next day. You mold a job as
part of
your life. You also have a plan and you push toward it. I know many guys that treated college as an extension of high school. They had no idea what they wanted to do with their life and assumed a muse would tap them after they graduated. They wanted to travel the world and dreaded entering the world of work.”

“It’s an attitude. You’re going to have to do something, why not find things you are good at and can have fun with?”

“You see work and life and family together. It’s all one. I like that.”

“You have a much better opinion of me than my wife does.”

“I think everyone has a better opinion of anyone than Lydia.”

“Yeah, she thinks everyone is shit and her everything is the tops. Drives me crazy. She equates intelligence and skill by what job someone has. Some get lucky with their jobs and it has nothing to do with skill or smarts. While others are insanely smart and don’t get the good breaks.” Zack drained the last sip of his drink, “How are things going with you?”

Claire’s eyes fluttered, chasing sudden tears, and she looked away. “Doing fine.”

“You know you can tell me if you want to talk. I don’t want us to be all one way about my troubles.”

“I know.” She bit her lip, “I’m just not ready to talk about any of it.”

“You have your sister and family to talk to, right?”

“Yes.” Claire nodded. “They are part of it too.”

“And your other friends? Leiko and Alfanjo? They know?”

“Leiko does, but it’s not important. Leiko and Alfanjo broke up.”

“What happened?”

“Alfanjo’s selfish pride. He lost his job when the lure company he worked for went out of business.”

“That’s too bad.”

“He couldn’t afford a wedding and Leiko said he’s too proud to ask for help. He left her and went to the gulf side of Texas looking for work in the commercial fishing industry. He was really mean about it and Leiko is devastated and bitter.”

“That’s hard,” Zack said. Claire gave him the pitcher to fill his glass.

Claire picked away strands of hair brushing her face, “My sister came out for a few days to see my father. Her husband teaches too but he runs summer courses. He’s between summer sessions so he’s at home watching their kids while she’s here for a few days.”

“Then I feel extra fortunate. Your sister traveled out here and you came to see me. I think you better pinch me.”

Claire leaned toward him, a smile spreading on her face, “Why do you think I just gave you the pitcher?”

“You forget I had a great career before we had kids,” Zack leaned forward, his fists clenching and releasing in spasms.

Lydia pounded her palm on the plastic counter, “And you threw it all away!”

“We made the decision that one of us was going to stay home with the kids. We tried doing the day care pickups and drop offs and that didn’t fit with either of our work schedules. I remember you complaining about dropping off the kid and then dragging into work late. You worried that everyone would think you were a slacker. It was hard for me to get out in time, get across town with traffic, to pick the kids up. Everyone in the office seemed to collect all their problems for the end of the day and then dump them on me to solve in the ten minutes before I had to leave.”

“You could never get the kid ready fast enough in the morning or you didn’t get the clothes put out or his snack made. I couldn’t excel at my work when I started late.”

“– and I couldn’t do required travel because I had to pick up the kids. So we made the decision one of us would stay home.”

“If I knew you would quit everything and wouldn’t be doing anything at home then I would have stayed.”

“The only reason I had a bumpy career since then –”

“– You quit and got fired –”

“The reason I had bumps was I looked at your promotion and it put your earnings above mine. The economic logic was for me to stay home which meant an end to my career –”

“A lot of mothers quit and then go back.”

“But the statistics are not there, I checked. Only a minority get back to their prior trajectory. I saw I had to bow out then or I risked my chips and pushed them all in the pot. If the gamble paid off –”

“It didn’t.”

“But if it did I’d be running that division. Did you see the projects I ran then? You didn’t care because I was traveling all the time and you had to drop off and pick up Noah. And you wanted to have a second.”

“It wasn’t like that. I couldn’t rely on you getting back from your trips or finishing the presentation deck meetings you were always pecking at in the evenings.”

“So I had to quit.”

“And then you started up some consulting thing that didn’t take off for years.”

“I picked up that one client from Europe.”

“Then they fired you.”

“No. Their customer resourced their products to a place in South Carolina. They didn’t need any program managers if they didn’t have a customer with new products to produce. I still get calls from their guys on fill-in work.”

“And then you got fired from that machining company.”

“Did I? They hired me, full-time, but I remember that being a problem for you and your career when Grace was born. Half my compensation package was tied to their earnings performance. When I saw how deeply they cooked their books so they reported zero earnings to me or to the Internal Revenue System? What did you think I should do?”

“You could have gone on, that half pay was pretty good. Then I could have quit and stayed at home – to take care of our children.”

Zack gripped his head with both hands, “I held an executive position with financial responsibility and I –  we – didn’t need the IRS dragging me into some legal wrangle the company owners caused and refused to fix. Their CPA jumped when I pointed out a couple of blatant subterfuges they had going on.”

“You were just an employee doing what they told you.”

“I just couldn’t be involved. Besides, I was pissed about the bonus arrangement they agreed to and remained inflexible to rectify. Then you complained about the house we lived in and the cars we drove compared to the career level you had. So we bought that fancy house and got you a shiny car –”

“That’s because it’s expected at my level. An executive of a major corporation needs to have those things just as much as getting a good haircut and wearing nice clothes.”

“Your outfits for a week cost more than I bought for the five years I worked at my first job at Chatwell Communications.”

“And that is why your career stalled and mine took off.”

“No. Again, I took more risk that would either propel me to the top or black-ball me into zombie middle management for the remainder of my days until they forced me to take an early retirement.”

“And what is bad about that? You’d have a salary, health care –”

“And no soul.”

“Which is your problem that caused everything.”

“That I’d either fly to the sun –”

“– or get burnt and crash to the ground.” Her eyes flared, “I see you chose to crash.”

“You see the logic in what I did and why.”

“No, I see you just wanted to stay at home and still not do anything that needs to be done around here.”

“Laundry? Dishes? Starting up a business is hard. Infinitely hard –”

“And uncertain. You’ve not done much in, how many years?”

“I’ve constantly worked on this business. I have six guys that I’m feeding work.”

“Work that you could do?”

“Work that they can do better than I. Sure I could learn to use the computer drawing systems, but they’ve been doing it for years. That engineer I work with is brilliant with his designs. The engineer and the graphics person are amazing together. I can pass them work that is more efficient and in the end more profitable for all of us. It’s called outsourcing by the way.”

“I know what outsourcing is. You could do more of it and keep it in house.”

“I don’t have an engineering degree necessary for that work. And then I’m in that little office of mine longer through the evenings and weekends.”

“Your kids miss you. They want more of your time. And you don’t do their homework with them.”

“I’m in that office trying to make this part-time business flourish. Have you ever started up a business from scratch?”

“I do it all the time. I added a graphics department to our shipping business. Now all the product coming in through China has an American sounding logo with graphics and fancy packaging and our business makes a lot more money. It paid for itself in a couple of months.”

“Fine, you convinced customers you already had to pick up additional services and then you hired some people and tossed some chairs in a room and you have a business. That’s not a startup business. That’s an extension. You’re not investing any of your own money nor are you taking any risk. You have more than enough money to float the project along if any issues come up.”

“But there weren’t. Making money three days after our first hire.”

“That sounds a little like outsourcing.”

“No. We hired them in-house.”

“If you in-sourced it you would be doing the graphics work on the kitchen table.”

“The pay for that whole department is less than I make in a year. I can’t be spending my time sketching logos.” She pushed at the stack of mail, “But then who is taking care of this mail? Who is taking care of the kids? I don’t see you doing that.”

“Nothing like success to give you hubris about every other business out there. How many entrepreneurs fail when they switch industries? They exploited a lucky niche the first time and then blow up later with their second.”

“Like you have after quitting those jobs.”

“Jobs that wouldn’t pay for the rent on this house or your car that you desperately had to have. I remember all those fights that lasted for months.”

“We couldn’t have kept living in the crap hole house we started in.”

“Sure, completely functional plastic instead of granite kitchen counters. We had a very low house payment, nearly paid off by the time we moved, and no car payments. Our bank account really swelled then. The money I made from my part-time business could have paid the rest of that house off but instead we poured that into the down payment on the next big mansion.”

“But I was making more money and we could afford nice things.”

“Now we are in a house and have other bills that my current business cannot afford.”

Lydia said, “Which brings us back to: I’m forced to keep working.”

“You wanted that festering house –”

Noah and Grace ran out of the bedroom hallway, Grace was red faced and crying, “He hit me!”

Zack asked, “Noah, why did you hit Grace?”

“She was pushing me and sitting on my head!”

“How did she sit on your head? Was it on the ground?” Lydia asked.

“I looked under the dresser for my wood race car.” Noah waved his arms, “And then she sat on my head!”

Zack said, “I want both of you to sit on the living room chairs until you can quiet down.”

“But, but –”

“No butting. I want both of you sitting and being quiet.”

The kids stomped to the two chairs and sat down for their time out.

Lydia glared at Zack, only broken by the knocking at the front door.

Lydia answered the door, “Hi Mom.”

“Hi Lydia, Hi Zack.” She pushed her hat back and stepped into the narrow hallway. “Are you ready to go?” She looked from Lydia to Zack and felt the crawling tenseness in the room wiggling like maggots under the skin.

“Yes. Let me get my purse and sandals.”

The children ran over and hugged their grandmother. “Oh aren’t you two as cute as ever!” she hugged them and said, “Lydia, I can watch the kids for a few days while Zack is away.”

“Thanks, Mom.”