Any Minute
Authors: Meyer Joyce Bedford Deborah
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Religious, #FIC000000
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Joyce Meyer and Deborah Bedford
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scriptures are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
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First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55211-0
Contents
“In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
—
ACTS
20:35
Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
—
JOHN BARRYMORE
A woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.
—
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
To the ones who yearn to be happy;
to those who live with hidden shame.
To those who keep trying to find a way home.
E
ach morning as Sarah maneuvered her crème brûlée Lincoln MKX up the ramp into Smart Park Tower, the experienced drivers knew they’d best keep out of her way. She scanned her monthly access card and waited, her fingers tapping the steering wheel, for the robotic arm to lift. She made a tire-squealing beeline for the C-level spaces, which gave her direct access to the elevator and the walkway to her office building.
The experienced drivers had learned to practice the list of AAA defensive-driving tips whenever they encountered Sarah Harper. When she was behind the wheel, they put their pride in the backseat and didn’t provoke her. They didn’t speed up to try to pass or try to hold their own in the climbing lane. Above all else, they fastened their seat belts. Because they all knew Sarah believed life was there for the taking. To say that Sarah was aggressive would have been an understatement.
Sarah wanted the best of everything in life, including the best parking spot.
Newcomers would find themselves whipping around pylons, darting around blind corners, trying to find a way to cut through; it was impossible to get ahead of her. No matter how hard anyone tried, Sarah would take you in that new crossover SUV. She’d downshift the Lincoln going uphill, zip into the spot she wanted, and switch off the engine without even glancing in your direction. She’d check her lipstick in the sun-visor mirror without giving a second glance. If she found a smudge on her lips, she’d touch it up with something called Garnet Burst, blot in a ladylike manner, and tuck the tube inside her purse.
Most annoying of all, the whole time you tested your driving skill against her, she’d be talking nineteen to the dozen, conferring with clients on her cell phone. She’d be setting up the schedule for her day, conversing with colleagues, instructing her assistant, Leo, to send out price memos to everyone on her e-mail list. She’d be mentally comparing currency rates and futures prices and trading strategies, trying to predict a market that had run amok, prices shooting up or tumbling down, terrifying clients who depended on her.
She liked to arrive early.
She liked to stay until the bitter end of the day. You could bet money she’d be the last to turn off the lights in her office at night. She’d be the last to leave the parking lot. She wouldn’t depart her office until she had dotted every
i
and crossed every
t
, no matter how late it made her assistant.
This morning, ready to leave the comfort of her vehicle and stroll inside, she would speak one simple command to the SYNC feature in her Lincoln and, just like that, the music would shut off.
She’d tuck her cell phone away, keeping it close enough to hear in case it rang, and remove the keys from the ignition, depositing them inside her Gucci purse. She’d step from the SUV, adjust her blazer, fling her computer case over her shoulder, and lock the doors. That’s when you could see for the first time that she’d done all that perilous driving, all that squealing around concrete pillars and speeding up the multistory ramps, in a pair of pretty Prada heels. Name brands and labels were very important to Sarah, and she displayed them any time she had a chance.
Each time Sarah entered her offices in the financial district, you could see someone teasing her about her performance in the Smart Park; they loved to laugh about it on the trading floor. They joked about it as she entered the pit; they pestered her as she hooked up her nest of cables and wires and speakerphones and screens. How did she manage to snag the space with her name engraved on the gold plaque on the curb? Did she ever think of signing up to drive for NASCAR? Who did she think she was, Mario Andretti? And Sarah would shrug all this attention off with a puzzled smile, not understanding exactly why everyone made it such a big deal. She lived life in overdrive, but to her it was normal.
Sarah liked to have everything in her life just so, from the progression of the music selection in her iPod (from the latest pop on the charts to light jazz) to the lineup of roller-ball pens, three black ink and three blue, in the little trough built into her desk drawer. From the baby-soap samples and finger snacks she stored inside the diaper bag (so Kate could be dropped off at the babysitter’s at a moment’s notice) to the entryway of her house, where she kept Mitchell’s shoes, knapsack, galoshes, jacket, and Cubs cap all within easy reach for a little boy darting out the door. From the color-coded Tupperware suppers in the refrigerator (a few of which she prepared ahead on the weekends, others she bought from the grocery or the caterers) to Joe’s shirts, ironed and arranged where he could find them by sleeve length in the closet.
Sarah felt that having everything organized was a matter of survival for her, a necessary habit. She felt driven to be a super-mom, as efficient in her home as she was successful at her job. She needed to squeeze everything she could out of her days.
Life was there for the taking, and Sarah Harper was focused on taking all of it she could.
And when you were as busy as Sarah and you had all those plans, things must never be taken out of order. Sarah liked to keep her to-do list as finely tuned as the engine in the Lincoln she drove. This, she had decided, was the way to happiness. Sarah had similar expectations of other people. As a matter of fact, she strongly believed that to live any other way would equate to a wasted life.
This morning as Sarah tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and entered the Roscoe Futures Group offices, an alarm sounded on her personal data assistant, reminding her of an upcoming meeting with one of the firm’s senior brokers. At the same time, she was exchanging shoptalk with a client, her cell-phone ear-piece barely jutting from her head: “If you want to do this, we’ll have to do it later in the week. You’ll have to set up an appointment with Leo.” Anyone who didn’t realize she had a phone in her ear would have thought she was talking to herself. Added to that, she was thumbing through a report, searching the latest market forecast for any commodity prices that looked like they might rise.
“You get your parking spot again?” a guy from human resources teased her. “Wouldn’t want you to start things off wrong. Sort of like getting up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“How’s it going, Andretti?” someone added. “Ready for another day at the races?”
Sarah ignored the parking-space comments and dropped a box of folders on her assistant’s desk. She backed halfway through her own office door and eyed the intern, a small anxious-looking youth named Leo McCall. Leo took care of office duties; he’d gone through at least eleven different interviews to get the internship. Taking him on as an intern meant she could get away with asking him to do anything because he was in training. If luck held out and the market ever came back, he’d also become a commodities trader one day.
Call me in a minute.
She pointed to her earpiece and cocked her thumb like the hammer of a gun.
I’ve got to get off this thing,
she mouthed. “No,” she told the earpiece as she disappeared inside her office. “I can’t. This evening is out of the question.” And for a moment she considered explaining why, that she was meeting the two gentlemen in her life at the Cubs game, that something always got in the way when they tried to have time together, that even though Joe insisted they sit in the bleachers at Wrigley she was really looking forward to it this time.
She swapped her navy blazer for her trading jacket and, still talking on the phone, attached the rat’s nest of wires to a microphone that curved under her jaw and referred to the small mirror on her shelf while she twisted her dark curls into some semblance of a bun.
With bobby pins aligned in her teeth, she examined her pale hazel eyes, her narrow oval face, with pessimism. Trading-floor rules required a smooth, contained hairstyle that wouldn’t provide a safety hazard around all those miles of cable. She hated to admit how much hair she’d yanked out trying to get untangled at the end of a session.
What is taking Leo so long?
She gestured through the glass door, trying to get his attention, but he was busy distributing to-go coffee and didn’t see her waving.
Oh well
. If she couldn’t get off the phone, at least she could check on the baby. Sarah situated herself in her leather chair and briefly noted the photograph of Joe with his heavy brows and his Italian good looks smiling at her. On the other side of the computer sat a snapshot of the kids taken last month, Mitchell, with his new glasses perched atop his nose, grinning at the lens while Kate (with her wisps of hair so much like Sarah’s) looked desperate to wriggle from her brother’s knee.
