Learning Curve (13 page)

A
nnabelle was stirring bolognaise sauce in a pot on the stove. Dan stood in the kitchen doorway, bottle in one hand and corkscrew in the other. “Shall I uncork the wine?”

She didn't look up. “Fine.”

He nodded, forced a smile in case his wife noticed, then turned and headed into the dining room. He pulled the cork, then took a quick swig out of the bottle. Not knowing what else to do, he sat down on the couch and stared hungrily at the
hors d'oeuvres
waiting in a tray before him on the coffee table. He thought about making a drink, but the bar was in the kitchen… and the last thing he wanted to do was go back in there.

No, he'd keep with the established program and wait for Annabelle to bring in his usual Bombay Sapphire martini with an olive in a frosty glass. The prospect of having her take this extra effort for his benefit—something he'd never noticed in the past—made him uneasy. He sensed that everything happening tonight was being tallied in a permanent emotional account somewhere.

Dan felt very alone—even abandoned. There was the strained relationship with his wife and the growing troubles with his daughter… and even Cosmo had sent him a message saying that he would not be attending the annual meeting tomorrow, and for Dan to host the meeting himself.

Has it really been a year already?
he asked himself. Most of the annual meetings before it ran together in his mind, but he remembered last year's as vividly as if it had taken place a week ago. A year ago tonight he'd flown to Validator's ranch—and had missed this annual private dinner with Annabelle. Now he wished he could have swapped that night with this one.

He knew his wife felt that way, too. It wasn't just her anger; it was also her distrust of their daughter. Annabelle had kept Aidan under lock and key ever since she'd had been picked up by police in a public park near her high school in the company of a suspected drug dealer. There was no evidence she'd done anything illegal, but the cop had recognized the family name and drove Aiden home, rather than to the station. Aidan had denied everything, of course, and accused her mother of not trusting her, being a terrible mother, wishing her father was home because
he'd
believe her, etc.

To her credit, Annabelle hadn't bought any of it. She grounded Aidan indefinitely, even driving her to school in the morning, picking her up in the afternoon, and calling her at break-time and lunch. Aidan was furious and did her best to make life in the house a living hell. But Annabelle refused to break.

As relentless and steely calm as she was with her daughter, Annabelle conversely made no attempt to restrain her anger and resentment with Dan. The days when he was home from the road, the Crowen house was like an armed camp: Aidan slamming doors, screaming at her mother, and threatening all manner of self-destruction once she was set free; Annabelle answering her daughter through gritted teeth, then retreating to the kitchen or bedroom to bang dishes or cry; and Dan caught in the cross-fire, blamed by both sides, and plotting his escape with yet another business trip.

And now it was time again for the Validator annual meeting. There was no question that Dan would be home for it. There would obviously be no sales meeting this year. And as the event approached and he hadn't heard from Cosmo, Dan assumed he wouldn't be fired, either. But most of all, there was Annabelle's insistence that their annual dinner go on as planned, if only to maintain some continuity in their home life—despite Aidan's attempt to sabotage it.

But Annabelle seemed to realize too late that to have this dinner, she would have to let Aidan out of the house to spend the night with a friend… and Aidan made no secret that she planned to take full advantage of her temporary freedom. From the moment Aidan had left the house with a triumphant smirk on her face, Annabelle had been on edge… and obviously fighting to resist a desire to call every ten minutes to check up on her.

“Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” she said flatly as she appeared in the doorway, still in her apron, with a martini glass in each hand. “I'll have to go in a few minutes to put in the pasta. And I'll have to turn the meat then, too.” She handed Dan his glass and pointedly took her own place on the far end of the couch.

He smiled wanly and reached out with his glass. “Another year, another annual meeting.”

Reluctantly, she tapped her glass against his. “Let's hope it's your last… unless you've found you prefer life on the road with your young assistant.” Taking a long sip, she sat back and stared at the far wall.

Dan looked at the same spot. “I don't think that kind of talk is called for, do you?”

“Only if I'm wrong,” she replied. She turned to stare at him. Her eyes were puffy and her face drawn. “Am I wrong, Dan?”

“Of course you are,” he said, still avoiding her eyes. He already hated himself for what he was about to say. “I can't believe you'd even make such an accusation. Especially tonight. I think you've been stuck alone with Aidan for so long that your imagination has run away with you.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let's pretend that's the real problem. Just exactly whose fault is it that I've been left here alone with our troubled daughter?”

Dan finally turned to look into her eyes. “Do you really want to go over this again?” he asked. “Do you think I don't understand my responsibility in all of this? Christ, Annabelle, you've reminded me of it every day I've been gone, in emails, texts, phone calls, and any other way you can think of to reach out and kick my ass. I haven't heard a friendly word from you in two months. Do you really think I haven't got the message?”

“Given your behavior, apparently not. I told you I needed you to be here. That I needed your help with this. And instead, you've betrayed me.”

“I've done nothing of the sort,” he said, stalling. “I warned you not to let Aidan get to you like this. It's affected your thinking. You're not yourself.”

“And you
are
?” she demanded. “I told you Aidan was heading for trouble, and that we needed you here. And you didn't believe me.”

“And I still say that you've over-reacted. I stood by you, of course. That's my job. But there's no proof that Aidan's been anything but a typical teenager testing her limits.”

“Do you really believe that, Dan? Or is this how you rationalize the selfish decisions you've been making lately?”

He put down his drink and leaned back on the couch, folding his arms. “Okay, fine. Do you really want to spend our special evening making accusations and fighting?”

Annabelle downed her martini and stood up. “All right.
We'll just make believe that nothing has changed. I'll get dinner on.”

D
an awoke, still dressed, in Aidan's bed. He didn't know how he'd gotten there—only that he had stopped counting after the third martini and that Annabelle had gone to bed crying. Having found their bedroom locked, he had managed to navigate his way to the nearest bedroom and fallen into the bed.

Now it was late morning, and his head was throbbing. He rolled over on his back and looked up at the posters and magazine clippings taped to the wall. The teen idols were slowly and inexorably being replaced by brooding actors, alternative rockers, and, most disturbingly, images of inked, pierced, and branded men and women from pages of tattoo and biker magazines. The images were so ugly at this time of the morning that he threw his right arm over his eyes and snoozed.

Eventually, the door opened and Annabelle shook him awake. “The office called,” she said. “They need you in by eleven to do the walk-through of the meeting. That only gives you ninety minutes. I went ahead and cooked you breakfast. It's waiting on the kitchen counter, so you probably better eat it first before it gets cold. There's coffee too.”

When Dan flung back his arm and squinted open his eyes, she added in a voice without emotion, “I'm leaving. I've got errands and a luncheon. Good luck today.” And she was gone.

His hair was still damp when he passed Donna's desk, where she was talking on the phone. She said “Hang on a sec” to the receiver, punched the Hold button, and looked up at him. “Good morning. The latest draft of your speech is on your desk for your approval.”

“Changes?”

“A few. There are some new estimates of market size. And they changed the earnings per share by two cents.”

“Up or down?”

“'That's all they said.”

“Then it's down. Tell them I'll be down in fifteen minutes.”

He closed the office door and sat heavily at his desk. After rubbing his face for a few moments, he dug the bottle of ibuprofen out of the side drawer and tossed down two more to join the three he'd taken at the house. As the pain behind his eyeballs began to recede, he picked up the speech text and thumbed through it for the changes, all printed in red. The financial predictions had once again been downgraded—the third time in so many drafts.

It's never going to end, he told himself. This must be what it's like to slowly bleed to death. You keep assuming it'll stop eventually. But it doesn't. And though you try to stay on your feet, eventually you're on your knees. And then everything goes dark and you fall flat on your face.

He stood, pulled on his suit jacket, and
folded the speech, putting it into his inside breast pocket.
But not yet,
he told himself.
For now, we're still standing.

I
t wasn't until one of her new marketing directors stopped her in the hallway and asked if she'd watched the Validator annual meeting that Alison realized she'd forgotten all about it. She'd already read the analysts' predictions a few days before, and when the news came that Cosmo wouldn't be attending, she figured nothing important would be announced—and let the date drop from her mind.

It was only on rare occasions now that she even thought about her old competitor. Validator Software just didn't seem to matter that much anymore. Six months before, when eTernity was still trying to catch its giant competitor, tracking Validator's every move had been an obsession for both her and her team. But now that eTernity had stolen the industry momentum from Validator, Alison rarely felt the need to look back. All that mattered now was to consolidate those gains and keep moving.

“So, did you hear about the meeting?” asked the marketing exec. He was wearing a triumphant grin.

“No,” she said. “Any important announcements?”

“None. In fact, the big story is that there were no important announcements. By the sounds of it, the shareholders were expecting something,
anything
, to restore their faith in the company. When Dan Crowen didn't give it to them, all hell broke loose.” The marketing exec laughed. “I mean, seriously, there was almost a mutiny.”

“Really?” Alison would have once shared the
schadenfreude
of hearing about one more piece of misfortune to fall on her competitor. But with her own first shareholder meeting just a few months away, she felt a twinge of sympathy for her counterpart. “How so?”

“Well,” said Marketing Man, “people were audibly groaning during Crowen's presentation, watching him put up one revised downward revised number after another—and especially when he got to the end without offering a single solution other than what the company was doing already.”

“That's because he doesn't know what to do. Cosmo put him in a box and there's no way out. All he can do is hold on and try to get the new system going before the company falls apart or he gets fired. He can't go back. All he can do is crawl forward.”

“Yeah, well it sounds like the shareholders have begun to figure that out. Listen to this: You know he didn't want to do it, but Crowen threw the meeting open to questions from the audience, and this one woman gets up—a well-dressed, middle-aged lady; hell, she may have been an employee—well, she gets up and she asks Crowen what he's going to do about the falling Validator stock price. And get this: she's got a Blackberry in her hand, and she tells Crowen that since the stockholders' meeting started, Validator stock had fallen from 83 bucks to 81.25—and then she looks at her Blackberry and says, “And just since I started asking this question, the stock has fallen another 75 cents!'”

“Oh my God,” said Alison. “That's like a nightmare. What happened then?”

“Oh, the audience went nuts. They're like applauding this gal and cheering—and one guy started this chant, ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!' until a bunch of other people joined in. Somebody caught the whole thing on his iPhone and now it's all over the Web.”

Alison felt a shudder go down her back. “What happened then?”

“Oh, they got things under control pretty quick. But they forced Crowen to make some promises about the next couple quarters that are going to be almost impossible for him to keep. And if he doesn't, you gotta figure either Cosmo is going to cut his head off, or there's going to be some people camped outside Validator headquarters with torches, pitchforks, and a long length of rope.”

The man chuckled at his image, and waited for Alison
to do the same. But her face was set. “Then we better make sure we hit our own numbers, or one day they'll be waiting outside our place too.” She turned on her heel and continued down the hall. The stunned man watched her go, then hurried on to tell his counterparts about the unexpected turn in his conversation with Alison Prue.