Rules of the Road (14 page)

I drove on, yielding to hordes of speeding drivers.

Alice said she’d read an article that said men were three times as likely to be in an accident than women, which didn’t surprise any of us. A male-driven convertible appeared out of nowhere and cut in front of me without signaling. I gave him acres of room. Have your accident somewhere else, sir.

Finally, I pulled onto the tree-lined streets of Highland Park, a rich Dallas suburb with big-time houses. Minutes later I turned into Mrs. Gladstone’s long, curling driveway.

Her huge white ranch house hugged the driveway with an attached greenhouse that my mother would have loved. A wide porch wrapped around the front with hanging plants and rocking chairs. All the windows were tall and glistening. The house stretched before us like it had been there forever, like nothing could ever knock it down. A gardener was watering cascading roses that hung over a trestle. He smiled and waved; his gold front tooth gleamed in the sun. I pulled to a stop. Alice was saying, “Oh, Madeline, you’ve done so much with the garden.”

That’s when Elden drove up behind us in his green Mercedes.

“Well,” said Mrs. Gladstone. “Looks like things are going to get interesting.”

Elden stood at his mother’s side of the car. She pressed a button. Her window rolled down.

“Mother, we have to talk.” He eyed me coldly.

He was a real ace at killing a mood. The gardener stopped smiling. I wondered what it was like to never have anyone happy to see you.

“I’d like to take a look around the house first, Elden. Then we can talk.”

“I’m sick of these games, Mother.” He opened the car door.

“What a coincidence,” she said, pushing him aside with her cane. “So am I.”

He watched her get out of the car. “What happened to the wheelchair?”

“Oh, that old thing,” said Mrs. Gladstone, walking off with her cane.

I said, “Hello, sir,” and got the luggage from the trunk. I’d driven 1,532 miles and didn’t feel like being greeted in the Promised Land by a retail turncoat. Alice got out, too, said, “Well . . .Elden,” and caught up with Mrs. Gladstone who was talking to the gardener, telling him what a fine job he had done with the flowers. The gardener was so proud and was pointing out the new plantings as she and Alice walked around the grounds. Elden was ready to pop, but Mrs. Gladstone took her time hobbling, admiring nature’s blessings. Elden’s blood pressure hit full boil. I grinned happily.

A woman in a maid’s uniform opened the front door. I carried the luggage inside the house and gasped. Floor-to-ceiling windows, big overstuffed beige sofas, cream-colored walls, huge paintings of flowers, horse sculptures.

Elden and Mrs. Gladstone followed me inside. He said, “Mother, sit down.”

She did and motioned me to sit next to her.

“Mother, this is a confidential business discussion. I hardly think that your
driver
can add anything noteworthy.”

I could kick you in the stomach, I thought, moving toward the couch. I could drag you across Texas by your pointy ears.

Mrs. Gladstone smiled at me. “She’s my
assistant,
Elden.”

I sucked in my stomach proudly. Jenna Boller, assistant to the president. Had a nice ring to it. Maybe more money.

Mrs. Gladstone folded her arms. “Now what did you want to say?”

“Mother, I insist on this being a private conversation.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your son.”

She leaned forward and raised an angry hand. “You have gone behind my back, you have gone to my board of directors to try to overthrow me, you have sought to make deals with this company you had no right to negotiate, you have been dishonest, disreputable, and devious. You have not earned the right,
my son,
to speak with me privately.”

The color drained from Elden’s face until he perfectly matched the sofa. He clenched his jaw until I thought blood would drip out.

“
Everything
I have done, Mother, was for the financial good of this company.”

“That’s manure!”

Elden stood up fast. “We see things differently, you and I. You see some grand moral plan that sells shoes like they’re the cure for cancer. They’re shoes, Mother.
Just shoes.
Maybe you and Dad needed to think of them as something more. And that’s fine. But in the real world, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling shoes, or widgets, or Lear jets. What matters is the bottom
line. How much you make. What the company’s worth. How to get the stock up. And you’re kidding yourself if you think business is anything more than that!”

“I would not be in business if I thought that was all it was about!”

Elden slammed his hands to his side. “That’s why it’s time for you to retire. That’s why the board will accept your resignation, hands down. It’s over. The stockholders want the takeover, we will make a great deal of money. Our profits this quarter have been terrific. Take your millions and have a ball!”

“How do you account for those fourth quarter profits?”

“Smart merchandising, Mother. Just taking the company to the next level.”

Mrs. Gladstone looked at him hard. “What about quality?”

He picked at his manicured nail. “Not many people can tell a well-made shoe these days. Decent sells well enough.”

“
I can tell!
” Her eyes blasted through him. Elden looked away. “If your father was alive—”

“He’d thank me! Dad was a salesman. He understood the bottom line. There are no guarantees out there anywhere, and I’ll tell you, that scares me. So when I can turn a fat profit, I’m going to do it to protect my future and—”

“Get out,” Mrs. Gladstone whispered.

“Now look, Mother, I know you’re upset, but—”

“
Get out.
” She said the next part quietly. “Jenna will see you to the door.”

I stood super tall and looked down at Elden like he was fertilizer. I wished I was wearing one of those Kung Fu robes and
could stand by the couch and do high kicks like a bodyguard.

He reared up. “I will not be pushed out by some
giant
—”

Mrs. Gladstone rammed her old hand hard on the thick wood coffee table. “
Be very careful of your words!
”

Elden stormed toward the door, saying he could find his own way out. I followed him, in case he was as stupid as he looked. He opened the door, glared up at me.

“I don’t like your game,” he hissed, his pasty face getting pink. “And just in case you haven’t heard,
no one
pushes me around.”

Harry Bender, the world’s greatest shoe salesman, bent over the Bass shoe display at the downtown Dallas Gladstone’s, which was, without question, the biggest shoe store I had ever seen. It had three floors—men’s, women’s, and children’s—and a huge white spiral staircase that wrapped around the largest plastic foot in the universe, with toes that started by the Johnston and Murphy display and a leg that reached to the sky past the women’s squared-toe flats. Everything is bigger in Texas.

Harry was about my size. He was wearing handstitched Tony Lama snakeskin cowboy boots and a very large Stetson hat. His starched white shirt was open at the neck—no tie. He had the kind of face you could picture laying in the sewer someplace after getting beat up.

“Now this one here,” he held up a leather walker to the man he was waiting on, “this one’s got everything you need. Good traction, hugs the road.”

“Sounds like a tire,” the man said, amused.

“Better than a tire. This old shoe’ll take you places a tire only dreamed of.”

“Eleven D,” the man said, smiling.

Harry Bender tipped his hat to me and Mrs. Gladstone and hustled into the back and came out moments later with a box.

“See,” Harry was saying, putting the shoe on the man, lacing it up. “Most folks don’t treat their feet right. They just take shoes for granted. I tell you shoes can turn a life around. Twenty-three years ago I was drunk and out of work and so broke I was wearing bedroom slippers. But a priest took pity on me and got me a pair of soft leather tie-ons. I figured then and there that God was telling me to straighten up and sell shoes or join the priesthood.”

“I see the shoes won,” the man said, chuckling.

“Well, the Lord knew I’d given my wife enough guff. The priesthood would of blown her cork clear to Amarillo.”

The man was laughing, standing up in the Basses. “They feel good,” he said, wiggling his toes.

“Yeah, those’ll do you a good turn. You want to wear ’em or carry ’em?”

“I’ll keep them on.”

“
Mr. Rodriguez,
” Harry Bender bellowed happily at a mustached man behind the counter, “get this fine gentleman checked out so he can go back to celebrating the good life God gave him.”

Everyone in the store was grinning. Some people just naturally make you glad to be alive.

Harry Bender raced up to Mrs. Gladstone and grabbed her two bony hands in his big hairy ones. “Blast, Maddy, it’s good to see you.”

Mrs. Gladstone looked at him beaming. “You making me rich, Harry?”

He patted her hands. “Every day, old girl.” Harry Bender grinned at me. He had the most genuine smile I’d ever seen, not a scrap of fakeness in it. “You must be Jenna.” He put his hand out to me. “Welcome to Texas.”

We ate lunch with Harry Bender and he was putting away as much Texas barbecue as a human being could and still be conscious: brisket, pinto beans, sausage, Texas toast. He was wearing a lapel pin, “Live each day as though it’s your last,” but I didn’t think it was referring to food consumption. The restaurant had long tables covered with paper, and the man carving the brisket shouted “Señor Bender!” when we walked in and sliced us the best pieces of meat, using that knife of his like a sculptor. It was the best barbecue I’d ever tasted, which reminded me of the B minus I got last year on a history paper that should have been an A-minus easy. The topic was, What are the things America will be remembered for? I wrote baseball, jazz, barbecue, and the Constitution. Mr. Hellritter wrote “Limited” across the top of my essay in red pen, which I guess I should have expected, him being a vegetarian. Opal is a vegetarian except when barbecue is around. She says barbecue is a food group unto itself. That’s one of the
things I like about her. She doesn’t fight it when the lines blur.

Harry Bender and Mrs. Gladstone had moved from talking about Elden to talking about the good old days.

“This man,” Mrs. Gladstone was laughing, “came to our Dallas store twenty-three years ago insisting we hire him even though he had no experience.”

“You were the biggest thing in town, Maddy. I figured why waste my talent in some joint?”

“What were you doing before, sir?”

“I was a ranch hand in Fort Worth; went from place to place pretty much.”

I could see him wrestling cows to the ground.

“Yeah, I stormed right in, told Floyd it was his lucky day, God had sent me. He hired me on the spot. Haven’t had a drink since.”

I smiled. “You make it sound easy.”

“Staying sober is the hardest thing I do. Sometimes I’m with someone who’s drinking and feeling happy and I start thinking I can handle it now. I can have one. Then I remember what a fat lie that is. I can’t handle a drop.”

Mr. Bender’s cell phone started ringing. He flipped it open. “You got Harry,” he said into the receiver.

He listened, covered the phone with his hand. “One of the fellas I sponsor in AA,” he whispered to me and Mrs. Gladstone. “He’s new at being sober. Gets the jitters sometimes.”

Mrs. Gladstone patted my hand and excused herself to go
to the bathroom. Harry Bender rammed his toothpick on the table. “No, no, no,” he said into the phone. “You know if you take a drink you’re not going to be able to stop.”

He listened some more.

“I know how hard it is, but you can’t get near that stuff. It’s poison in your life and the Lord couldn’t have made that more clear if he’d hung you by your toes over a manure pile. You listen to me, old boy, and throw it out now . . .I know it . . .I know it . . .all right . . .call back if you need to.”

Harry closed his phone, stuck it back on his belt.

“That’s great you sponsor people, Mr. Bender.”