without me,” she heard him say. “Five minutes.” Then to her, “Gotta go.”
“Bye, Carl.”
Rachel hung up the phone and smiled to herself. A one-and-a-half-minute phone call from Carl and the promise of compelling company for lunch. There were worse ways to begin the day.
She left early and checked in at the hospital. Her daughter was no better, no worse. The glass was half empty or half full. But leave a half-full glass sitting around in Utah and it would evaporate soon enough. The expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats stretching out beyond the lake proved that fact well enough.
Rachel didn’t intend to stay long, but she hated leaving so soon. So she rearranged the dragons. The nurses didn’t always put them back in the right places after rounds. The blue dragon guarded the heart monitor, the red dragon stood watch on the head rails of the bed, a pair of golden wyverns hung by their tails from the IV stand—things that went into her veins, Jennifer well knew, needed particular looking after.
On the wall opposite the bed—the first thing Jennifer would see when she woke up—was a full-color poster of the magical world of James Christensen’s Voyage of the Basset. A land of dragons and elves and mermaids and endless possibilities.
She touched Jennifer’s quiet, composed face, kissed her cheek, and prayed a silent prayer for her to wake up and be well.
At the restaurant, the maitre d’ escorted her to the table. Carl was tapping away at his laptop. He stood to greet her, grinning broadly as he always did. He was wearing a tweed blazer over a faded T-shirt with a metallic-blue Digital Moviola logo emblazoned across the chest. He’d been wearing that T-shirt for years, filling out more of it every time she saw him. A Popsicle stick all through high school, Carl was Laurel slowly turning into Hardy.
They hugged. Rachel said, “Nice jacket.”
“Mom gave it to me for Christmas. She still acts like I can’t afford clothes.”
“You dress like you can’t afford clothes.”
The maitre d’ seated her and handed her a menu. She scanned the lunch entrees. Salmon, she’d have the salmon. Spending Carl’s money bothered her not at all. “What brings you to Salt Lake, Carl?”
“ViFEE-West.” Carl closed the laptop cover. “Video and Film Editors Exposition. I was going to give it a pass. But the sales guys picked up some big new account, and Bruce wanted me to come out and brownnose the clients. Make them feel so good about not going with AVID or EDIUS.”
Rachel thumbed through her mental Rolodex: Bruce, the CEO of Carl’s company.
“And how is work these days?”
Carl shook his head. “I’m surrounded by idiots, Rache. You wouldn’t believe what a pain in the ass it is to hire competent coders these days. I’m telling you, we get this next rev out the door and I’m gone.”
Rachel smirked good-naturedly. Carl had been threatening to quit every time the subject came up over the past five years.
“So why don’t you, already?”
“Every time I try, Bruce has the board throw more options at me.” He made it sound like an injustice of World Court proportions. “And then it’s another eighteen months to get vested again.”
“Yes, wealth can be such a heavy burden.”
“It’s these damned Scottish Calvinist genes we’ve inherited. Can’t resist the urge to sock away more acorns for the long winter months to come. You remember how much Grandma had on her when she died—and she couldn’t bring herself to put in air conditioning. Air conditioning! In Saint George! Anyway, do you have any idea what a house and yard like yours would go for in San Jose? A million, easy.”
“So move here.”
“Hey, don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”
The waiter brought water and a bread basket and took their orders.
“The thing is,” Carl explained, though she had heard it all before, “I wrote the thing in the first place because none of the video-editing tools out there are worth shit, not because I had some burning desire to design software for a living. But here I am, designing software for a living. I gotta get back to what I was doing in the first place.”
“I thought you hated film editing. I thought that’s why you got into programming.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I wanted to be an editor. Turned out I didn’t want to do editing for a living. Producing, then. I’ll be the one telling people what to do for a change.”
“You could go back to rattlesnake wrangling.”
“Now, there’s a thought.”
They