Fire in the Firefly (33 page)

Even now he knows he'd like to … “Listen,” he says, “Daniel's the Creative
Director
. That's almost top of the heap. It may well be a partnership arrangement. He'll be pulling down a very substantial salary.”

Yasmin strokes her thighs and consults her counsel. “Can you garnishee wages there, too?”

“That would be a start,” Roebuck says.

That odd, unsettling gaze shifts back now to him. Yasmin's eyes are probing, studying. T
he nagging doubt that he has all this while been fending off comes back and settles like a cooing bird on Roebuck's shoulder. “… Daniel
Greenwoo
d
?” he mutters, shaking his head. “I always pegged him for the quiet type.” Could there have been a shade of admiration, there, he let creep into his voice?

Yasmin's hands have come to rest. He notices in passing the shadowed, dimpled skin around each fingertip, the unctuous swelter of thigh. Otherwise she's silent, breasts rising and falling in a cadence that feels almost like music. “I take it back,” she says. “You're not a prick. You're an idiot.”

And suddenly, Yasmin has dropped into the couch, throwing out her arms, splaying her legs, kicking her feet.

She is laughing.

Roebuck ducks as a shoe sails past his head.

“You didn't know!” The second shoe clatters against the bottom of the desk. Yasmin is banging her heels on the floor. He has never seen her like this. “You really didn't
know
?”

Roebuck's tongue comes to rest at the bottom of his throat. The lawyer is studying him with a look he can't bring himself to interpret. Yasmin is by now so caught up in the moment she's physically shaking the couch, bouncing—hands on her belly, heaving. This he
has
seen. The lawyer is staring.

“Your Daniel had his fingers in all kinds of pies,” Yasmin says, gasping. “And you didn't
know
?”

Roebuck sits quietly in his chair in the centre of the room.

“But it wasn't just Daniel! That's the best part! She wasn't joking!”

“
Who
wasn't joking?” It's the lawyer who has put the question, but Roebuck is grateful.

“
Anne
.” Yasmin is smacking her thighs; he can see the outline of her palms against both legs.

“Anne?”

“Anne! Oh Anne, I always thought
Anne
was the idiot …”

“Yasmin, what are you
talking
about?” Again it's the lawyer. Roebuck is incapable.

“But she really
wasn't
joking. I always thought she was joking. His wife outsmarted all of us.”

“What? Joking about
what
?”

“Don't you get it? He really
is
shooting blanks. That's what Anne knows, and we didn't.
Always was
. Always. It wasn't just Daniel. It was before! All those little hints. I never put them all together.
That's
why she let it happen. It didn't matter anyway!”

Yasmin sighs and slowly rises to her feet, rebuttoning her blouse, smoothing her skirt, collecting herself. “And then you … then me … Oh, Julius! It's all so perfect!” Yasmin is glistening, giggling. “The joke's on us!”

She straightens her shoulders and draws a long, slow breath, the kind they teach at yoga. Yasmin teeters unsteadily, groggily collecting shoes. When she has found them both, she puts a hand on Roebuck's shoulder, steadying herself. “Don't worry,” she tells the lawyer, sighing. “He'll honour them. The cheques I mean. He's reliable that way.” Yasmin touches Roebuck's face.

“
All's well that ends well,” she says, fingers hot against his cheek.

December 2010

I
t's snowing, and Roebuck is tired. It has been coming down like

this for days. Cursing drivers rock their chassis deeper into drifts; spinning tires drone like brumal cicadas even through the walls of this café. There seems to be a business meeting underway two tables over—young men in goatees and
horn-rims
who rammed to the door a few minutes ago in a tangerine Hummer. The management has strung up decorations, strings of winking bulbs, which only reinforce that jolly, festive atmosphere that happens every time the snow dumps down like this. The guys with the show truck might as well have swapped their lattés for shots of tequila. One of them looks vaguely like a junior copywriter he interviewed back when. They could be quieter.

Roebuck is not festive. His feet are soaked and frozen. He should have worn boots. He is an idiot for not having worn boots. But standing at the podium in snow boots would have looked even more ridiculous, apparently, than he sounded. Though no fault of his, half the audience stayed home. He should be grateful, realistically, that as many as did showed up. Even baby
biz-heads
love a snow day.

He's wondering if he should have hailed a cab. But of course the taxis today are buried like everyone else. Roebuck wipes the condensation from his watch; he has plenty of time to relax and get himself another cup with double sugar. The subways are still running; he'll make it in under an hour.

Lily doesn't qualify for mat leave. Roebuck has persuaded her to let him help, but she says she wants to keep working. She says she needs to get out. The truth is, though, that when she gets tired, she gets a bit
bad-tempered
. Roebuck
double-checks
the time. He is happy for this little break, however numb his toes. He will put his shoes against the radiator once he gets to her place.

On the way back from the counter, one of the young bucks leans back in his chair, the better to display whatever's dancing on his tablet, and nearly upends Roebuck's cup. They have not even registered his passing.

It's always a pleasure spending time with Maya, but her mother is definitely a challenge. He was expecting this. Fully.

It happened with Anne. It happens universally, as far as he can tell. They should teach this in grade school, load it into the curriculum—that when a baby comes, the man involved should expect to go from being someone important to someone not at all important, except in his capacity to render aid, which in itself is a minefield of misplaced best intentions. But even so the change has rocked him. Mostly Lily naps now, when he comes over; hands him Maya and shuts the bedroom door.

Maybe she's in there composing. He really wouldn't know.

Of course he wonders if there's someone else.

But it's absolutely to her credit that Maya is such a lovely child; content to ride in the carrier strapped to his chest while he tidies up. He has discovered that the sound of the vacuum puts her straight to sleep. Her mother, too, evidently. Roebuck stirs his coffee.

Gabriella, regrettably, is not so placid. They haven't come out and admitted it, not yet, that it's colic, but she is definitely a fussy child. On the plus side, Anne has racked up quite a lot of motherhood experience by this stage—him, too, naturally—so the two of them are well equipped to deal with it. It was tough there for a while, right after Yasmin's decampment when the workload so abruptly spiked, but now that Anne has wound down the business, all the stress has wonderfully diminished. She and the baby have moved into his room. When Gabby cries, they're both at hand to answer.

Roebuck yawns and mainlines his caffeine. Monday night he nodded off again. No. Tuesday. Tuesday is Katie's taekwondo, so it had to be Tuesday. Story time, that much he remembers. Diapers needed changing. Thus the reprimands. But by and large, they each know their roles and responsibilities and execute them according to a system laid down years ago, tried and true.

He still lives in dread of calling one of the babies by the other's name, but so far that hasn't happened.

Lily, he is certain, is convinced that he is Maya's father. It's as if Greenwood had never been. Anne's a little harder to interpret. They haven't talked about it, naturally—any of it—and in the way of married people he is fairly sure they never will. It works. It works for him and it works for them and with a little luck it all will keep on working: babies get older, workloads grow lighter. Snow falls and smoothes away irregularities.

Everything balances out.

There's a fresh commotion two tables over. Much snorting and chortling. Something big, apparently, is in the offing. All of them with their tablets and iPhones. Roebuck glances at his laptop, still asleep inside its case. In the subway he thought of something that might work okay for Chapter Two, but right at this moment his feet are too wet. When he looks up, he sees Goatee is staring back. Roebuck begins a noncommittal wave, but the guy has turned away, now, laughing.

He opens his phone and checks for messages.

Management was happy, delighted, to have him out this morning, elevating their profile at a prestigious institution like The Ferrer
/Léche School of Business. Doubtless the webmaster will post his lecture on the site; at the very least an item on the newsboard. Possibly a podcast.
The new president is all of
thirty-three
.
Roebuck wouldn't be the least surprised to see her posing with these barely whiskered
tech-heads
and their
tricked-out
orange tank. She wants him out the door, of course. New broom.

Two items in his inbox: a reminder from Anne to pick up overripe bananas and a formal notice from HR regarding the handover of files prior to the expiration of his contract. That one he's been trying not to think about.

He has no idea what he's going to say to Anne.

Roebuck's feet are still numb, but his coffee is down to the dregs. He is thinking about buttoning his coat, winding his scarf, and gearing up to face the elements, when he becomes aware of a compression in the atmosphere. The room has gone silent. The bucks two tables over are staring, bodies stiffened, tendons straining. And now he hears it too, the sound.

It's the boots that take him first.
Knee-high
leather with tall, tall heels that strike that rhythm on the tiles. Snow swirls into the room as the door sighs closed behind her. Her long black coat has brushed the drifts and trails a fringe of ice. It falls open in the heat like gift wrap yielding up the skirt beneath, short and sultry, and a tanned and golden span of thigh. She's been somewhere in the sun, this girl. The men at the table stamp and paw.

“Julius Roebuck!” she says kicking off the snow. “Fuck me a mountain, is that really you?”

He can hear her heels against the floor, the drag and then the clop as Zhanna Lamb approaches like forgotten fate. Roebuck feels a wave of strength, his nostrils flare, then a tide of fatigue—he gropes the table and steadies himself—then a new gush of vitality. Tiny lights sparkle and dance in the room.

Zhanna flutters a wave and blows him a kiss as she passes. Two tables over they've pull out her chair. “Gentlemen” she says arching her back as she peels off her coat. “You know how I've be
en counting on you …”

I
must first thank my wonderful agent, Hilary McMahon, for her infinite patience and boundless support. The transformation from manuscript to printed book would not have been possible without her. The same goes for its editor, Diane Young, whose firm opinions and firmer defence of them made for many interesting discussions and a much better novel.

Many thanks also to Jim McElgunn and Stan Sutter, for their acumen and insight into the world of advertising. Any instances of hyperbole impute to me, not them.

It's lonely work, novel writing; readers of early, ugly drafts provide not only sound advice but a form of companionship whose solace to the writer is impossible to overstate. To Nancy Kramarich, Lance McDayter,
Eva-Lynn
Jagoe, Liz Beatty, Christopher Mastropietro, and of course my old, old friend Paul Harper: immense gratitude.

Finally, thanks to my wife Rennie Renelt and my children Dayton and William Gardiner; my family and the point of everything.