Empty Nests

By
A
DA
M
ARIA
S
OTO

Eden Springs

Empty Nests

Through the Dark Clouds

Published by
D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

Published by

D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886  USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Empty Nests

© 2015 Ada Maria Soto.

Cover Art

© 2015 Paul Richmond.

http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-63216-993-8

Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-994-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905070

First Edition June 2015

Printed in the United States of America

This paper meets the requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents, whom I will never let read this, but who started with nearly nothing and still managed to put two kids through college.

With thanks to Roane, who cleaned up the disaster of a first draft. Thanks to Cooper West, who managed to pry my finger off the big Delete button. And a big thank you to Nick for working hard to give me the space to make this happen.

This book takes place in 2011, when it was still sort of possible to do big international business in Russia.

Several real places and organizations are named or appear in this book. No money or gifts have changed hands. In fact, they would probably be surprised to find themselves here. That said, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should take the time to check out your nearest not-for-profit music venue, if you haven’t already.

January 13, 2011

N 46° 03’ 36.0”, W 150° 55’ 48.0”

G
ABE
J
UAREZ
wanted to die. No, he was sure he was dying. It was impossible to feel the way he did and come out the other end alive. The hum of the Gulfstream engines felt like a dentist’s drill somehow pressed into every tooth simultaneously. He scraped his fingers through his black hair and felt the crunch of day-old hair gel. He wanted to be sick, but he’d already done that; now he was curled up in a ball, praying for death to come quickly. If it wasn’t for the fact that he loved his PA, he’d pray for the plane to drop out of the sky and vanish into the Pacific.

“Frank wants to talk to you,” Tamyra said from across the narrow cabin.

“Tell him to fuck off.” He felt too wretched to put any effort into speaking with his overly perky business partner.

“Not an option.”

He crawled away from the toilet. His company logo, woven in rows across the carpet, swam inches from his face until he squeezed his eyes shut. He found a workstation seat from memory and leveraged himself up into it while Tamyra held out the phone and watched. Some days he quietly hated her in much the same way he’d hated his mother when he was fourteen.

Gabe grabbed the phone. “Frank, fuck off.”

“A little hungover?”

He could hear Frank laughing under the words. “I’m never going to Japan again, I swear. Send anyone else—I don’t care who. I am never going back.”

“It’s a major account.” Frank was still laughing.

“I know exactly how major this account is down to the last yen. I know this entire deal ten times better than you do, and I don’t give a shit.” Gabe didn’t care if he sounded on the verge of tears. “Sake does bad, bad things to me, and you know it.”

“Tell you what, next time we can bring them out here, and you can introduce them all to tequila.”

Gabe’s stomach lurched at the word, but he filed the idea away. He knew he could handle tequila. “I am going to hold you to that.”

“I’ll bet. Now, I’m going to put you on speakerphone with the rest of the gang, and I want to hear the good word straight from your mouth.”

He pressed his cheek to the table in front of him and was thankful for its blessed coolness. “Half the school children of Japan under the age of fifteen will be using the TechPrim 9Plus hardware/software bundle within the next three to five years, with a ten-year support and rolling upgrade accounts.”

Gabe held the phone away from his ear as
whoop
s echoed down the line. It might as well have been gunfire for the way it made his head feel like it was splitting open.

“Frank, I’m going to hang up now before I’m sick again.”

“Not a problem. Try to get some sleep.”

Gabe didn’t even answer that, just hung up.

Tamyra took the phone from his hand and replaced it with a glass of soda water. “Try to keep that down. It’ll settle your stomach.”

He squinted up at her, not raising his head from the table. She looked immaculate, but then she always did, with her tailor-made business suits and subtle red-gold jewelry lying perfectly against her dark honey skin. “Why aren’t you hungover? You went out too.”

“I’m not hungover because I talked the girls into taking me to one of those all-night malls. By the way, you bought me my birthday present last night.”

“Your birthday isn’t until July.”

“And I’ve seen your schedule between now and July. Besides, you got me exactly what I wanted. You have excellent taste in jewelry.”

Gabe gave her a thumbs-up. “Good to know. Now can you please kill me? Please?”

She dropped a couple of shiny white pills onto the table. “Sorry, but you’ve got that presentation as soon as we’re back. We’re landing in Oakland and going straight from the airport.”

He tried to sit up, but his head began to spin. He dropped it back to the table with a
clunk
. “Oakland?” He could think of nothing he needed to do anywhere near Oakland. “What fucking presentation?”

“The UC Berkeley Future Hispanic Business Leaders Group.”

“Oh God, those start today?” He hated giving those talks. They were formulaic—any executive on the planet could give an identical one—and he always felt insincere, even when speaking the absolute truth. The fact that the talks were almost always arranged by the PR Department didn’t help. “You give the talks. You know my job better than I do, and you’ve got a better tan.”

“You know I could sue you for that comment.”

Gabe reached into his pocket and shoved his keys across the table. “If it means I never have to drink sake again, you can have it all.”

“You wish you were that lucky.”

He groaned and redoubled his prayers for death.

“Come on. I’ve got your notes and a clean suit. You can grab a shower before we land.”

He slowly pushed himself upright, taking deep breaths while trying to ignore his twisting stomach. Tamyra was actually looking a little sympathetic. “What am I going to do when you realize you are so amazingly overqualified for this job?”

“I don’t know, but let’s hope you don’t have to find out anytime soon.”

T
HE
FOG
had briefly scrubbed the air clean, and in the late morning sun, San Francisco sparkled, the Bay looked blue, and even the mudflats were hidden under a rolling high tide. Gabe wondered where his sunglasses were. The traffic whizzed by on the I-880. The one time he was praying for a three-hour backup, the traffic gods laughed and removed every possible obstacle. He chugged another bottle of water and tried to look at himself in the little mirror conveniently placed on the back of the driver’s seat. He looked like he’d been in a fight. He might have washed and shaved, but there were still dark circles under his eyes, not helped by the capillaries that had burst while he was being sick.

Tamyra flipped the mirror shut. “You look fine.”

“I look like hell.”

“We’ve seen you look worse,” Jared, his driver, called from the front.

“That’s not the same as looking fine.”

Gabe sipped at another bottle of water.

Jared navigated the surface streets of Berkeley before pulling to a halt in a probably illegal spot, but anything that looked like a parking spot in Berkeley was probably illegal.

Tamyra dragged Gabe out of the backseat and shoved his briefcase into his hand. “Do you need me to walk you to the lecture hall?”

“I am the CFO of a technological giant.”

“Do you need me to walk you to the lecture hall?”

“No. Thank you. I’ll find it.”

“I’ll come find you when you’re done.”

Tamyra got back into the car, which sped off before a ticket could magically appear under a wiper blade. Gabe stretched his legs as he made his way across the campus. Students rushed past him, engrossed in debates on topics they knew nothing about. A few lounged on benches and bits of grass, taking in the sun before the fog crept back in. And as the breeze shifted, he caught a whiff of a controlled substance. Not for the first time in the last week did he wish he was back in college. He wondered if he could steal a hoodie from somewhere and simply vanish into the student population.