Learning Curve (17 page)

D
an poked his head into the office doorway of his COO, Bert Hamlin. “How did she do?” he asked. “I had a conference call.”

Bert looked up from his computer screen. He had the face of confident raptor. “Not over yet, but I think she's done.”

“And… ?”

“Not bad. Not great. She was visibly nervous at the beginning.” He fluttered his hands in front of his face. “She did a lot of stuff with her hands for the first half of the speech, but she finally got that under control.”

Dan nodded. “Anything else?”

“No verbal gaffes. No big surprises—other than yet another confirmation that their follow-up product is running late.”

“She admitted that?”

“Not exactly. It was more of a case of omission. She stopped talking about delivery dates a month ago—and if she was going to set a new date, this would have been the moment to do so.”

“Did she take questions?”

“No. The crowd was too big for that kind of thing. But they would have softballed it anyway. By all the applause and cheering, it was obvious that everybody was on her side. If someone had even tried a tough question, they probably would have gotten lynched right there on the spot.”

“Must be nice,” Dan said. “Any sign of Tony D.?”

“Yep. He was the same as always—which was kind of weird with that crowd. Kind of like your rich, white-shoed uncle trying to be hip in a room full of twenty-somethings. Which is basically what it was. That's probably why they only gave him a couple minutes and got him off the stage fast.”

“Poor Tony.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Bert said. “He's got the best sales job in tech. He's going to be richer than he already is. And he gave the impression of being in charge—and a grown-up—which may not have worked with the crowd, but you can damn well bet it comforted all those institutional investors out there.”

“So, in summary,” Dan said, “Prue
survived.
But she doesn't look like a confident corporate chief executive yet. The shareholders are still wildly enthusiastic. Sales look healthy and the salesforce is under experienced management, but that department's style is nearly antithetical to the rest of the company. And the big follow-up product may be slipping. Does that about cover it?”

“You got it.”

“I think we can work with that,” said Dan. “Don't you?”

Bert smiled. “Yes, I do. I don't think we can beat them yet. But if that product slips by more than three months, I think we might catch them.”

A
lison groaned, kicked off her shoes, and lay back on her office couch. Thank God that's over, she thought. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, and the three Advils she'd taken were only beginning to dampen her splitting headache.

It hadn't gone too badly. She'd lapsed into her usual nervous hands thing, but caught it early and stopped. And she'd very nearly lost it when the demonstration program had failed to boot up on the first try. Luckily, she'd kept her composure, vamped, even told a lame joke—and, just in time, the file successfully opened.

It must have worked, she told herself, because the crowd was still chanting and cheering as much at the end of her speech as they had been at the beginning. Better yet, the stock had held steady all day, even closing up a dollar per share…

“Ms. Prue?”

She opened her eyes to see James, her new secretary, standing over her. The light in the room had changed since she closed her eyes. “Ma'am. It's six o'clock. I believe you have an engagement this evening.”

Alison sat up slowly. Her back throbbed, and now her neck was stiff. “I must have dozed off.”

“You looked very tired, ma'am. So I'm sure you needed it.”

“Anybody try to contact me?”

“Quite a few people, but mostly to offer congratulations. Same with the emails. You got a very nice one from Mr. Bellflower, which I've tagged for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Otherwise, I basically told everybody you were doing media interviews.”

“Well done, James,” she said. His face brightened. “Now go home. You've had a long day.”

“Thank you, Ma'am. I've put the name of the gentleman and the address of the restaurant on a post-it note on your desk.”

An hour later, she had refreshed her make-up and lipstick and brushed her hair, but was still wearing her work clothes. She was sitting across from “Fredrick, but please call me Fred”—a stockbroker with a loud voice and a receding hairline—at a table in Alfred's. It was an old steakhouse with white tablecloths and red walls, old paintings, and tuck-and-rolled booth backs.

“… Yeah, one of the perquisites of being a Yalie is that I get to stay at the various Harvard-Yale clubs around the world—or, if not that, in one of the other university clubs that have a reciprocal relationship with mine. It's the only way to go. You went to Stanford, right? I think I read that on your Wikipedia page.”

“Yes.”

“Well, the Farm is sort of like an Ivy League school, now, isn't it? I bet they've got clubs too. You ought to look into it.”

“I will,” she said.

“So I saw that you had your annual meeting today. Sounds like it went really well.”

“I think so.”

“And I read the transcripts from your analyst phone call.”

“Did you? I thought you specialized in semiconductors.”

“Oh, I do. But you know. I knew we were going to meet tonight, and so I thought I'd do a little
client research
, if you know what I mean.”

“Ah.”

Fred leaned forward and lowered his voice. “So as long as we're having a private dinner together, I was wondering if you had any idea yet when you're going to get that new product out the door?”

I
t was a long drive from the Denver airport north to Loveland, then up the Big Thompson canyon into the Rockies towards Estes Park. Dan and Annabelle checked into the Inn at Glen Haven, took a short nap, and then drove out Devils Gulch Road to the Center. It had been crisp and windy in Loveland, but at this higher altitude, it was cold. Occasional snowflakes melted on the windshield as the car hissed down the wet road.

A high fence topped with barbed wire encircled the compound, which was itself little more than a half-dozen prefab buildings, a couple trailers, and a large pole barn. There were already more than twenty cars, almost all of them obvious rentals, parked in front of the headquarters building, which sported a flagpole and a carved wooden sign that read “Wilderness Rehabilitation.”

Annabelle pulled her fur collar tighter around her neck. Her face looked pale and drawn and her eyes blurred with tears. “It looks like a prison,” she said.

“It is. In a way,” said Dan. “But there are a lot of cars. At least we're not the only people in this mess.”

“I just want to see her,” said Annabelle. “I need to see her face and hear her voice.”

From the headquarters, they joined a knot of several dozen middle aged people, all bundled against the cold, all looking both hopeful and fearful, and all trying to evade eye contact with the others. Together, they were led to a second, even larger building that wore a hand-painted welcome sign over its entrance. Few of the visitors even noticed the sign; they simply trudged forward, resolutely looking at the soggy ground, several couples huddling against each other.

The double doors opened to a brightly lit cafeteria. Streamers and hand-made paper snowflakes hung from the ceiling lights. The two long lines of tables had been draped in red and green wrapping paper and decorated with candles, pine cones, and sprigs of holly and cedar. From a table along a side wall, an iPod pumped out Christmas music through a beat-up pair of speakers.

At the far end of the room stood a group of young people, all wearing Santa Claus stocking caps and intently watching the new arrivals. As soon as the parents entered the room, this group quickly made its way down the long aisle between the tables, smiling and picking up the pace as they went.

Aidan stopped in front of her parents and gave a small wave. ‘Hi, guys.”

“Oh honey,” Annabelle whispered and wrapped her daughter in a hug. Dan, feeling his own burning tears threatening to spill, wrapped his arms around the pair.

Aidan escorted her parents to a pair of chairs with their names on the placemats, then left to get them coffee (“We drink gallons of the stuff around here—standard druggies, looking for any high”) and cookies (“No rum balls, of course”). As she left, Annabelle turned to Dan. “What do you think? She sure looks a lot better.”

“She does,” he agreed. “She seems a whole lot tougher, too.”

“She probably has to be to make it in a place like this.”

“Where did she get the nose ring?”

“I'm not even going to ask. Let's just win this big battle first.”

The director of the program offered a brief welcome over a tinny loudspeaker. He was careful to remind both the ‘students' and the parents that this was only the first step of many months of additional treatment before the families could be reunited permanently. He introduced the staff (“She's my Counselor,” said Aidan when one heavyset woman with the face of a Sunday School teacher was introduced) and then, understanding the real reason for the day, quickly ended the program. The sound level of the room instantly rose as seated figures huddled into separate knots, everyone rushing to bring each other up to date.

The room grew even louder and stuffier, and Aidan suggested that she take her parents on a tour of the facility. Snow began falling more heavily as she pointed out her dorm building, the equipment house, and the nurse's office. “It's no big deal,” she told them, “because most of the last two months we've been up there.” She pointed towards the peaks that towered above them.

“That's a relief,” said Annabelle, “because this place reminds me too much of a prison.”

“Oh,” said Aidan, gesturing for them to sit beside her on painted wooden bench. “You mean the fences? Actually, they're there as much to keep people out as to keep us in.”

“Why would anybody want in?” Dan asked her.

“Oh, you know: horny boyfriends, junkie girlfriends needing money, dealers looking for squealers, that kind of thing. Frankly, there's some people who'd like to find me, too. Luckily, I'm in Colorado, not California.”

Annabelle began to cry again. “Oh honey. I'm so sorry for everything.”

“It wasn't your fault, mom,” Aidan said, taking her mother's hand. “If there's one lesson they teach you here it's that it's your own damn fault. Nobody else's.”

“I don't understand,” said Dan. “
How did you get in this deep without us catching you? We knew you were having some problems, but until you got… arrested… we had no idea it was so bad.”

“Oh,” Aidan replied, “that's more common than you think, dad. I'll bet you most of the parents here today had no idea until everything blew up in their faces. They teach us about that here, too: you don't see what you don't believe.” She squeezed her mother's hand and snuggled closer to her. “Mom knew something was wrong. But I knew that she would always believe the best about me.”

“And me?” asked Dan.

Aidan looked into her father's eyes with a fearlessness he had never seen in her before. “You were easy, because you weren't there.”

As she watched her parents' heads bow, Aidan sensed that she had gone too far. “Come on, guys, it's all okay now. I made my own choices and now I'm dealing with them. I'm just lucky you could afford to pay for all this good treatment. And that I have a nice house to come home to.”