Chapter 17: As Time Goes By

We got through the summer. I kept selling, but I started consciously trying to make more time for my family. It was just so hard to do it all. I considered dropping out of school in the fall, but chose to change my hours instead. I started working only three days a week and added Friday to my days off. That didn’t mean that I didn’t work Tuesday through Friday. It meant that I didn’t go to the office. I was still likely to get called to show a unit or to close a sale. But I was trying to make sure that Emily had a mommy who was home for her and that it was me. I’d successfully battled two grandmothers who wanted to take her from me in my first life. Now I was battling myself.

“Slacking off?” Jim asked when I came in on Saturday morning in November.

“See any signs that sales are slowing down other than the usual move into winter?” I responded caustically.

“Not so much. Just watching for signs of burnout. You’ve been at it for almost two years. I don’t think you’re Superwoman.”

“Is my cape wrinkled?”

“No. Perfectly starched and pressed, just like your skirt, your blouse, your jacket, and probably your panties,” Jim said. “Ease up and let’s talk.”

“About what?”

“I’m worried about you. Wait. I know I don’t have the right to be concerned about your personal life or whether you take vacations. You perform on the job. You sell condos. Sales are higher than expected for this time. I’m wealthier than I have a right to be and am looking for places to put my money. You’ve been good for me. I’m just concerned that I’m not good for you,” he said. “Something has been eating at you for a couple of months. It’s almost Christmas and we should be planning a party, not stressing out over whatever it is that has you stressed.”

I sighed. Jim was right. He’d been more than an employer and source of product to sell. He’d even given me a place to stay when I first got to town. I supposed I owed him an explanation.

“How do you do it, Jim?” I asked. “How do you balance managing a couple thousand units, construction crews, rental office, and maintenance? How do you do that and have a life?”

“That’s where I can be more of a bad example than a good example,” he said. He opened the door to his office and I went in with him. Jim didn’t have a desk and credenza or a lot of decorations on the walls. Hell, he still wore a blue mechanic’s shirt with his name embroidered on a patch over the pocket. He had some comfy leather furniture that just screamed MALE! at you. There was a table if the meeting required one. A big TV was in one corner and I noticed that it silently displayed the Financial Network with a stock ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen. In one corner was a small dorm-size refrigerator with a coffee pot on it. He poured two cups and set one on the side table next to the chair he gestured me to. Then he plopped down across from me and sighed as he took a sip.

“I feel like I’ve been invited into the spider’s web,” I said, looking around.

“I don’t have a kitchen here and I don’t eat young women unless I’ve cooked them first,” he laughed. “Look. I don’t even have a couch. No place in my office that a woman could be assaulted. I learned that lesson long ago.”

“Really?”

“When my accountant told me I’d made my first million, I got pretty full of myself. I figured I could have anything I wanted and that would include the young women who seemed to fawn over rich older men. When I lost my first million, my accountant pointed out to me that my wealth was on paper and if I continued to split my liquid assets with random young women in order to keep them from suing me, I wouldn’t have enough left to rent one of my own apartments.”

“What did your wife think of that?”

“She agreed to a promissory note for half the valuation of the business at the time of our divorce.”

“So you paid her off and she left you, too,” I sighed. “I could end up in the same position.”

“You could,” he said. “I finished paying my wife off fifteen years ago. But I never stopped paying her. She thinks the monthly payments are still paying the initial settlement. Maybe that’s my guilt talking.”

“You’ve made fifteen years of monthly payments above and beyond your divorce settlement and she doesn’t realize it? I find that hard to believe,” I scoffed. What kind of an airhead did he marry in the first place?

“There are special circumstances. Her second husband left her after their Down syndrome child was born. He abandoned her. I didn’t have the heart to. I think she knows on some level. We talk occasionally. But money is all I had to give her. My business had my soul.”

“God, Jim, that sounds so bleak. Is that what I’m headed toward?”

“I guess that depends on you,” he laughed. “What I know is that I’d do it differently if I had to do it over.” That hit me like a slap in the face. Isn’t that what I swore to do? Do it differently.

“I hope you don’t get that opportunity,” I said. “I don’t believe that hindsight is 20/20.”

“I think the important thing is not to try to second guess it,” he said. “Just look at your life and tell me what is important to you. Go ahead. Try it. What is important to you?”

“My daughter,” I said immediately. “And Bruce and Lily. My job. Getting through school. I guess being comfortable in my life.”

“Great,” he said. He grabbed a tablet and wrote down what I’d just said and handed it to me with the pencil. “That’s the list you just gave me. I believe that the order you put things in when you think of them is the order of true significance. Now put a number next to each of those from one to five that shows how much you invest in each of them. Think of your investment in terms of time, money, emotion. What do you invest the most in?”

I wanted to just write 1 2 3 4 5, but I knew that was a lie and I knew he’d recognize that as well. I invested a lot more in my job than in anything else. I almost put Emily number two, but realized that the reason I invested so much in my job was because I wanted a comfortable life. Then Emily and Bruce and Lily. Finally, school. I started crying.

Damn it! Even when I was pregnant and alone and Jim gave me a place to live, I’d never cried in front of him. But there was the truth. My precious daughter ranked number three and my lovers number four.

“I think you need to reprioritize where you invest yourself.”

I couldn’t just abandon the business and I knew Jim didn’t want me to. He was making a huge amount of money from my work. And I would be letting Gordon down, as well. And my family needed the money. The comfortable life was for them. That’s what I told myself.

But I had to admit that the motivating factor for that was that in my former life, I’d felt powerless and having my own business and money was a way to take the power back.

I went back to the list that Jim had written down for me and decided to reconstruct it. I needed to define what each of these things meant. And I was going to start with my daughter. What did I want?

I wanted the dear sweet relationship that I’d had with my little girl in my former life. We’d been playmates. I rescued her from the evil grandmas and played games with her. In some ways, I suppose, she was my little dolly. I dressed her up. We had tea parties. We went to the playground. And as she grew up, we became co-conspirators as we talked about her friends and school and even the boys she dated.

She was sixteen when she asked to borrow the car so she could go bird-watching with a friend. I’d probed and she’d admitted the friend was a boy, but he was really a bird-watcher and wanted to show her what was in the park.