Chapter 4

Terra incognita was a double-wide trailer set up permanently on a small lot. There was a neat lawn, and plantings of flowers and small shrubs, all well tended. Out behind the house was a small fenced yard. I noted a playcube, the kind with a little tree-house type structure and a slide and swings.

I was about to enter the sanctum sanctorum and meet Gloria's mom.

She was a tiny woman, fragile as spun silk. Her name was Bessie Halop, and she got around on a small powered wheelchair. Looking around, I could see that the trailer had been converted to be wheelchair accessible. All the work surfaces and the stovetop were lower than normal and most of the cabinets were no higher than my eye level.

Bessie's wheelchair was parked next to a couch, on which sat my next surprise: a young girl playing some kind of children's board game with Bessie. I had minimal experience with young children, so I had no idea how old she was. Around seven or eight, I'd say if forced to guess.

Bessie didn't seem inclined to want to talk, seemingly content to watch me. That made me a tad bit uncomfortable, her unswerving gaze. So I gave all my attention to the child. She was a real natural kid. There was none of this cutesy-poo "are you going to be my new Daddy" stuff. She wasn't that impressed with me; that was for sure.

I didn't feel that comfortable around kids. I have read that they hate to be talked down to, so I decided to talk to her as if she were a very short adult. She condescended to tell me all about her school and how she wanted to get a puppy but Mommy and Gramma Bessie said they needed more space than was in their house. Her name was Teresa, but she liked to be called Tess.

Bessie just sat and watched me with an enigmatic little smile on her face. Very disconcerting.

Gloria had been busy getting food going and in the microwave. Now she came out and formally introduced me as her friend Jeff. When I was introduced to Tess, she shook my hand and then did a double-take at my name. Her face went from happy to meet me to grim, an odd expression on such a young face. It was no longer that that she wasn't impressed with me; she now seemed angry with me. She stood in front of me, hands on hips and challenged me.

"Are you the Jeff who made my mommy cry?

I must have looked blank, because she said, "One morning my Mommie came home crying, and I heard her and Gramma Bessie saying it was because of Jeff. Are you that Jeff? I know you spend a lot of time with Mommy. Why did you make her unhappy and make her cry?

I had no idea what to say. The only time I could ever think of that Gloria might have come crying after being with me was ... oh my God!

Gloria intervened and said that I was the only Jeff that she knew. Then she said that I had never, ever made her so unhappy that she cried. As she said that she was looking directly at me with her own enigmatic little smile.

It must run in the family, I thought. But then I looked at Bessie, and damned if she didn't have a genuine smile, big and broad and there was nothing enigmatic about it. And I had little doubt that we were on the same page about what we were talking about.

I knew damned well it would have been smart to keep my big mouth shut, but I had to say something. I told Tess and Bessie that I never wanted to make Gloria unhappy enough to cry. That if I had my way she would always be happy.

I said, "There was one time when I was very unhappy myself when she visited me and when she tried to cheer me up, things happened that neither one of us expected. So I may have made her a little bit unhappy then, although I never meant to do that."

Then Gloria said, "Tess, honey, there were some tears of sadness because my wonderful friend Jeff had been beaten down so badly by his nasty wife. But they were also tears of joy because I was able to comfort him and make some of the pain go away. You know about tears of joy, remember?"

Well, little Teresa wasn't satisfied with that. She said that she still didn't think she liked me, for making her Mommy sad.

"Oh no, sweetie," Gloria said. "It wasn't all Jeff's fault. I was a big part of doing what we did. I wanted it, so very much. But afterwards, I was afraid that I might have hurt the good friendship between us. That's why I was crying. But Jeff has shown me that he is still my good friend. Maybe my best friend of all, next to you and Gramma. And I hope we will be even better friends from now on. We are very happy to be working together. We do very well together."

Gloria's explanation seemed to reassure Teresa that I was a friend, instead of a mommy- troubler. She prattled on about her toys and her day. Then she asked, "Are you a hero, like my Daddy was? I don't 'member him much but he saved a lot of people's lives when he died and went to heaven."

I looked at Gloria, but she shook her head and I swallowed my questions and dropped it. Teresa asked if I had been a soldier like her Daddy. She asked me a few more questions but got used to me quickly and got bored.

To tell the truth I'm afraid I was kind of boring. I carried on that conversation with only half of my attention, because some of Gloria's words were rocketing around inside my brain. Something about how Gloria had wanted it so very much?

Gloria was watching me carefully, and when she saw me start to come out with something, she darted me a strong look and shook me off. So I cooled it.

Tess got bored by the adult conversation, and asked to be excused to go outside and play in her playcube. She told Bessie she would finish their game later. It seemed to me that she meant after I was gone.

That's me, the universal charmer.

With a certain subject off-limits for the nonce, Gloria told Bessie about the day we'd had, and the older woman clapped her hands together in glee when she heard about Cedric's comeuppance. Obviously Gloria had been keeping her apprised of our plans. She was very interested in how we planned to market our POD document support service.

So was I, because outside of a few faint notions, I didn't have a detailed plan; all my efforts had been concentrated on developing the plan and the proposal for the plan for AGC.

Well I was outnumbered by two smart women, who insisted that I pull my after-AGC marketing plan out of wherever I was hiding it and let them critique it. So while Gloria served out late lunch for herself and me, I brainstormed a marketing plan onto a notepad. There was a lot of research to be done on potential client firms. I didn't want them to be competitors of AGC. In fact, I didn't want them to be competitors of each other, either. They would have to be in different, noncompeting industries. We had to make them secure and certain that we had no likelihood of spilling proprietary information from one client to another. They had to be certain of our discretion.

While Gloria and I ate, Bessie went on Gloria's PC and did some searching. I told her she didn't have to do this, but she got offended. "Jeff," she said, "There are a great many things that I can't do any more. But I can sit at a keyboard and do research as well as anyone.

By the meals-end coffees, she had identified five industries by their North American Industry Classification System codes as not being in direct competition with AGC. "Now I can use the NAICS codes to search for marketing targets with no possibility of any conflict," she said.

She came up with four or five companies within each NAICS code, chosen because they had a main plant within 50 miles of Endicott City. "Go after the first name on each list," she said. If they bite, good. If not, go after the second, and so on. So you win one from each list plus AGC. I'd think that six clients would keep you hopping."

I laughed at that. "Six clients with startup problems all at once?" I said. "Gloria and I would be working 28-hour days, nine days a week. Oh don't get me wrong, it's a damned fine shopping list, Bessie. I had no idea how to develop anything like that systematically. We may have to make you a partner. JG&B Enterprises sounds pretty good."

Bessie told me to forget that, but I said I'd pay her for part-time work, starting today. And I'd do it whether she liked it or not.

"But we'll have to go slow on the marketing" I said. "We have to get AGC running smoothly before we take on any more startups."

By then Gloria and I were sitting side by side on the couch with a few nanometers separating us. Bessie smiled as us as she wheeled over with her printouts.

We talked for hours about the plan. And after that we shared our life stories.

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You know the bare bones of mine, which pretty much ran the gamut from Nicci to Stacy. But they were interested in my early life, what with my time in the service and education under the GI Bill.

Bessie had been a Public Relations analyst. When Gloria was twelve, her father died from complications arising from a routine appendectomy. Bessie had been left as a single mom, and struggled to make a home and get Gloria almost through college before the symptoms of her affliction could no longer be ignored. That was in Gloria's senior year away at college. Since then Bessie had been dealing with the effects of her disease and helping Gloria raise Teresa.

Then it was Gloria's turn. She made certain that Tess was still playing outsided and nowhere near enough to overhear, and told me her story.

She had been an awkward shy child, she said, very much the ugly duckling socially. She'd gone on platonic group dates but with no more sexual experience than a few brief caresses with her nerdy male friends.

Then, late in her senior year of college, one of the popular guys who shared one of her classes started chatting her up. She was surprised and pleased and excited.

"Jeff, I was as horny as any other college girl," she said. "I knew that some of them had lost their virginity in high school or earlier. I wanted to experience love and romance and sex, and I was very smitten. Joseph and I got more and more affectionate during that week, and I let him take liberties with my body, although I was still a virgin when he finally invited me to one of his fraternity parties.

"I bought a new dress and got myself a full works beauty treatment at a salon in town. I just knew that Joseph was going to make me a woman after the party. I half suspected that he might give me an engagement ring down the road. I thought I was in love with him after one week.

"Jeff, do you know what an ugly dog party is?"

I did not.

"Each fraternity brother is supposed to bring the ugliest girl he can fool into coming. There is a lot of drinking, and something more in the punch than just alcohol. I was pretty much out of it by the time the contest was held. Then there was a vote to crown the ugliest girl Miss Ugly Dog, and the brother who brought her got some kind of prize.

"I didn't win. I think I came in voted fifth runner-up. I was barely conscious by that time from something in that punch. Then I was taken off to a bedroom; I guess all the ugly dogs were stashed in beds around the frat house.

"Joseph tore off my clothes and took my cherry. It was a painful, brutal rape, but the drugs held the pain down while I was under their influence. He made me suck his cock to get hard again. I hated the idea. It was bloody and yucky with our juices, but he didn't care what I thought. I didn't have the will to push him away. He sort of mouth-fucked me and did get hard again, and then he went off to fuck the other ugly dogs. That was another contest, I think.

"Other frat brothers came into the room, ten or more of them, one after another, and took turns on me. I lay there, aware of what was happening, but unable to cry out or protest or fight them off. That's what some date rape drugs do to you.

"I must have had a dozen or more men's cocks come inside me before everything quieted down. They had taken me in my bottom and one of them used my mouth as a receptacle, too. Even under the influence of the drugs I gagged and threw up, and that took away whatever interest they might have had in me. They left me alone for a long time, with me covered and reeking from my own vomit.

"After some time the house was silent. I suppose all the brothers were exhausted from all the fun partying. I had drunk less than many of the girls, and so I had the least amount of whatever it was in my system. I began to get back to my senses as whatever it was began to wear off and I was able to find some clothes that were scattered around. They weren't mine, but I didn't care. I managed to creep out and get across campus to my dorm room. I took a long, long shower and douched myself, trying to get to where I didn't feel so dirty and full of their nastiness.

"I was sore and rubbed raw and bleeding, but I didn't go to the infirmary; I just patched myself up as best I could. I used sanitary napkins to stop the bleeding. Then I took my essentials in one suitcase and took a cab to the Trailways station. I rode the bus five hours home and told Bessie what had happened.

She wanted to go back with me and press charges, but I had no proof of anything. Most of the frat boys came from moneyed families, and we knew they could get most complaints quashed. The local cops were paid off to pay no attention to the campus, and the campus cops were there to protect the college, not the students.

"A few days after I got home we read in the papers that three of the other ugly dogs at the party had brought charges. It seemed that one of them happened to be the daughter of an Assistant State Attorney.

"The State Police rolled in one morning and raided the campus. They just swooped in with warrants and all of the fraternities were busted and shut down. They all had Ugly Dog Parties, so they all were busted. The stupid brothers had video taped a lot of the party that I was in, even showing them making a big ceremony out of spiking the drinks, some sort of date rape drug. And they videotaped the gang bangs of a number of the girls, and had them on DVD for their viewing pleasure. Mercifully I was not one of them.

There were expulsions and trials and fines and even imprisonment for many of the ringleaders, including Joseph. Most of the campus police were fired for collusion, and the local Chief of Police and his top staff were convicted for taking bribes to ignore the campus and complaints.

"There didn't seem to be any need for my accusations, and my stomach heaved at the thought of going back.

"Then it seemed my stomach was getting queasy fairly often. I did an early pregnancy test and realized that I was carrying that sweet little child you met today. I could never ever consider an abortion. No matter how it was conceived the result was an innocent child.

"I transferred my credits to a local college, and went part-time at night while I worked temp jobs to help pay our bills. By that time it had become increasingly difficult for Bessie to work only occasionally as a consultant.

"I was at seven months when I graduated. I didn't bother to go to the ceremony. I was able to work one more month, and then I had to quit to prepare for my baby.

"Bessie could work very little by then and we lived by taking money out of her pension funds until I could get back to work. We paid a few bucks to neighbors to come over and do what was needed to physically care for little Tess in the big things like baths. Bessie could change her and feed and burp her while using her walker. Anything she couldn't handle, she would call Marge next door or Dee-Dee from across the street.

"Once I had my degree I worked a couple more months as a temp. One job was at AGC, and heard about Stacy leaving. Well I applied and met you at the interview, and you know the rest."

I couldn't resist; I put my arms around her and held her to show her what I thought of her courage. And maybe to show some other things that I thought of her. Bessie wheeled herself over and we had a group hug.

We heard Tess coming back in from the yard and so we went to our respective corners, so to speak.

But before I left that evening, Gloria and I had time for a few private words. Even though Stacy and her asshole lover were the ones committing adultery, it was possible that they were trying to catch us. No real legal reason, just trying to make certain I was being appropriately miserable and maybe to get something on us to make their adultery look less bad. We would have to be discreet.

It was possible that we were being watched. And we did spend a lot of time togther, during working hours and after. We were now obviously business partners, So we would have to be careful. Paranoid? Maybe, but there was no point in taking any chances.

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We went to back to work as AGC short-timers and after-hours J&G vendors. In the meantime, Bessie backed us up on the computer as a full participant. We worked our two final weeks and collected our final paychecks but we would not start billing as J&G until we were completely terminated.

It was an interesting experience as our friends at AGC watched us work out our string and yet knew we were not leaving. There was talk of a Farewell luncheon, but I firmly nixed that idea.

Harlan Baldridge came down on our final day as AGC employees and took us to lunch. Among other things, I think he wanted to emphasize to the AGC folks that we had his OK. At the restaurant our nominal supervisor he ran us through our termination checklists. What a difference from the last time!

We kept our keys, but accepted orange Unescorted Vendor ID badges in lieu of the green AGC ones. We handed over our Corporate Amex cards. We each had an equivalent Amex Card issued under the J&G name. We had to give up the AGC laptops, but had already copied over the relevant TechLit files from the hard drives to our own new Laptops.

Harlan waved the termination blurb sheet at us and we all laughed. Nothing was said about EA's, and we both signed the meaningless document. The last things on his checkout list were our termination checks and the HR paperwork. We signed up for the COBRA extension of our health and dental care.

Then it was done and we all had sinful desserts and a brandy to toast the end of our run at AGC and our new partnership with AGC as support vendors.

We played hooky that afternoon and went to Harlan's country club to drive some golf balls and otherwise celebrate our new status. Harlan's wife Priscilla joined us for dinner, and she spent a lot of time talking to Gloria.

I looked at Harlan, but he shrugged his shoulders to show he was a clueless male just like me. Priscilla was very gracious and friendly to me for the rest of the evening.

The next day we hit the ground running as vendors. We had a lot of work to do, what with fulfilling our AGC commitments while making the changeover to online POD. It took us two days to get the website links up and running. We had a stack of checklists, and Gloria started disposing of some of the inventory of hard copy TechLit from our two storerooms.

The company had a recycling service to deal with our large volume of waste paper. We had them come in, take the designated manuals and such off the shelves and bundle them off. After they stripped one storeroom, AGC housekeeping services took apart the shelving and put it in storage for future use. We cleared out the other storeroom, and the housekeeping services people knocked down the partitions and opened the space up to the rest of the production floor. We stored the remaining hard copy stocks in what had been the office space that Gloria and I had used, while we moved ourselves up to the vendor temporary office spaces. Once in the vendor's spaces, we moved the hard copy remaining stock up to grace our temp offices and gave up the remaining office space down on the Production floor

Production would start readying the space within a few months as work could be done only when the fabrication lines were down for maintenance.

Meanwhile I went on a marathon road trip to AGC's clients and sales outlets to demonstrate how to order TechLit via the AGC webpage. Before I left them I made certain they had someone trained and reassured and clutching the how-to video. I was doing this for the local area, because that where most of our traditional clients were. We mailed out the video to the more dispersed offices and told them to call if they thought they needed a visit. I was quietly praying that they would take it as a point of pride to do it without help. As it was, a quick call to Gloria usually got them over any hurdles and successfully using the ordering system.

I couldn't start making our marketing pitch to the first of the possibles on the J&G potential client lists until my travels for AGC were over.

We were trying to be a scrupulous as possible in keeping our AGC responsibilities separate from J&G work.

In the interim, Bessie, who had no AGC responsibilities, did a good deal of telephone and online work, getting prices for binders and paper and printing format requirements.

And that opened up a can of worms. Once she got into the nitty-gritty details of how it worked, we discovered what the POD printing houses actually needed to be able to print with. I had royally screwed up by making one too many assumptions.

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I had assumed that as long as we had files in the Microsoft family, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so forth, the POD printing services could use them with no problem. After all, that was how the traditional sheet-fed flatbed press printers worked.

Big mistake! Wrong assumption and it was mine and mine alone. There were two commercial software applications that were designed specifically for publication: GUTENBERG and CAXTON. The publishing firms that we were counting on needed the files to be in one of those two applications. There were literally thousands of conventional Microsoft files that had to be converted into one of those publication-ready application formats.

The applications were different from those that were compatible with Microsoft, and had dozens of quirks that had to be learned and mastered. J&G, that is, Bessie, Gloria, and I, would have to master them and make those conversions, which were basically labor- intensive copy-and-paste operations. For thousands of files. And I had not known that and had not factored those labor costs into our budget or into our timeline.

We were screwed, and again, it was all my fault. I had been so smugly certain that my plan was airtight. I felt that I had let the women down, badly. I told them so, as bluntly as I could.

We had a narrow time frame to get the file conversion done. I would be spending hours each evening converting the AGC electronic files that we had into the optimal kind of formats that they needed. We bought two more laptops and three copies of the GUTENBERG application and Bessie and Gloria worked with me. After a full evening, it was apparent that even three strong, we needed help.

I asked to see Harlan Baldridge and told him the problem. I told him that I would have to hire temporary people to make the deadlines. I explained that it would not cost him anything, I would have to eat the costs. My concern was bringing people in who would have access to AGC proprietary information. Within an hour, Olivia had sent an AGC- wide all-hands solicitation for people with experience with the GUTENBERG application.

Olivia got 16 responses from AGC facilities in the region, most of whom were apparently moonlighting for extra income. Harlan gave them dispensation from EA restrictions on working outside the company, and we gave them access to the files within the AGC firewall. They were to submit their invoices directly to J&G, which would make the appropriate deductions and cut them their checks for the outside work.

I berated myself for my cocky attitude that had put us so deep in the hole.

But neither of the Halop women would let me beat myself up. I started to repeat my verbal self-accusations and apologies one evening. I was startled when sweet gentle Bessie reached over and slapped my face. "Stop it, Jeff, just stop it right now," she said. "Ok, you made a mistake, and we're all working to recover from it. So what?

"Jeff, you took me into your confidence and gave me back a sense that I was good for something besides babysitting and dishwashing. You have been the first man who Gloria knows that she can trust. No, don't interrupt! I know all about that one night. You needed comfort and support and affection at a low point in your life. You have no idea how much Gloria got from being able to supply that for you."

"Mother!" Gloria said.

"Now I'm telling tales that I shouldn't, but you have to know that Gloria feels a lot more for you than just friendship.

"MOTHER!"

I looked at Gloria, and then a smiling Bessie, and then back to a suddenly blushing Gloria. Nothing more needed to be said.

We worked together as before, except for the huge addition of Bessie. We took our lunches together and of course our dinners, at either my house or Gloria's. I had plenty of room for Bessie and Tess, and we put in some ramps for Bessie's wheelchair.

If anyone was watching for signs of impropriety between the two principals, there was the constant presence of Gloria's mother and daughter around the clock.

And it was fitting that two entrepreneurs spend time together. And much of our together time was spent working. And there were no repeats of that one evening.

We scattered a few emotional words and hugs here and there, then there and here. But we would be patient. After the lottery ticket would be claimed. After the divorce became final.

Gloria spent more time doing the nuts and bolts work at AGC than I did, and she now had total responsibility for the changeover to the POD model. She had painfully taught herself html and some other websitecraft to that end, but she enlisted the moonlighting talents of some AGC heavyweights so as to ensure that the ordering would be completely secure. This was proprietary data, after all.

I was on the road or frantically overseeing the file conversion process. I'd bring the converted files in to load them in the server that would service the ordering process.

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When was at AGC, I realized that Gloria's legion of girlfriends treated me warmly. They showed in many ways that they accepted me as one of the truly good guys. I knew that she would never have told them about anything specific between us, but I decided that they had tuned in to her happiness, and I suppose, from mine, too. You'd have had to be blind not to see how happy we were when we were together.

In a friendly warning, one of the girls told me that there were some people who were taking an interest in me and Gloria, and these were not people anyone thought of as being all that friendly. I had always assumed that Stacy might be suspicious, but if she was setting spies on me, I couldn't think of a really good reason why.

When my women and I talked about this I argued that there was no reason for Stacy to be jealous or concerned about me getting on. She was getting what she wanted, wasn't she.

But Bessie said that it wasn't enough for Stacy to have her heart's desire. Part of her happy ending had to be heightened by me being miserable. There had to be no happy endings for me. Reluctantly I was forced to buy into Bessie's explanation.

For several weeks we hardly saw each other during the day. When she could work out the scheduling, Bessie would bring Tess to our work site so we could have lunch together. There was a handicapped van service that acted like a taxi service for wheelchair equipped people. It had a power lift to raise the wheelchair up to the inside deck level so it could be rolled in and out.

I made a mental note to see about getting a similarly equipped van or SUV so that we could all go out on weekend jaunts sometime down the road. I felt that we were working up to being something resembling a family.

Right now we were a family with huge money problems. As we struggled to get out from under my budget miscalculations, our expenditures were way ahead of our periodic fees from AGC. I had to go get an unsecured loan from my bank so that we could make our mortgage payments and keep up with the other bills of two households. When we went through that, I started withdrawing money from my 401K. I took a big penalty and interest hit on each withdrawal, but we needed the cash to pay the bills. Gloria did the same, pointing out that we were all in the same boat.

You might be wondering why it was such a big deal. We had that big lottery payoff due within a few more months, didn't we? Sure but it was the same as a million years away. We couldn't borrow against it. There were some lending services that claimed they would lend money against sure future payments, but we still had that gap between my divorce and the final payoff date for the lottery.