Empty Nests
Empty Nests
Nested Hearts Book One
Ada Maria Soto
Published by
Rookery Publishing
PO Box 300280, Albany, Auckland, 0752, New Zealand
http://rookerypublishing.com/
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Empty Nests First Edition (published by Dreamspinner Press)
© 2015 Ada Maria Soto
Empty Nests Second Edition
© 2020 Ada Maria Soto
Cover Art
© 2015 Paul Richmond.
http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN: 978-0-473-51846-2 [Paperback]
ISBN: 978-0-473-51847-9 [epub]
ISBN: 978-0-473-51848-6 [kindle]
ISBN: 978-0-473-51849-3 [ibooks]
For my parents, whom I will never let read this, but who started with nearly nothing and still managed to put two kids through college.
Contents
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About the Author
Also by Ada Maria Soto
Author’s Note
Second Edition
I started writing this book somewhere around 2010, maybe 2011. By this point I could not tell you what the inspiration was or even the particular motivation. I was working a night shift job that gave me a lot of free time, and living with my boyfriend in a one-bedroom apartment with his ex-girlfriend’s cat. Now I am typing these words in my home office in early 2020 and things have changed. Just yesterday the New Zealand government shut down the boarders. It’s Friday and I will not be surprised if I am home-schooling my child by Monday. When I wrote the story of single father James I was sure I’d never have kids of my own for a whole stack of reasons.
When I got the rights back to this book I hadn’t read it through in several years. I know this is an absolute comfort read for some people but for me it was just cringe inducing. I found things that should have never got through editorial. I found bits of language that I would never use now but in 2010 I simply didn’t know better. I found some sentences that were just badly written.
Everything I could find I have now fixed. If you’re reading this story for the first time know you are getting the deluxe edition. If you’re picking this up again you probably won’t notice any difference and if you do, you’re probably one of the people who called me out on something I couldn’t fix until it was back under my control. It’s fixed now, I think.
Author’s Note
First Edition
This book takes place in 2011, when it was still sort of possible to do big international business in Russia.
Several real places and organizations are named or appear in this book. No money or gifts have changed hands. In fact, they would probably be surprised to find themselves here. That said, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should take the time to check out your nearest not-for-profit music venue, if you haven’t already.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Roane, who cleaned up the disaster of a first draft. Thanks to Cooper West, who managed to pry my finger off the big Delete button. And a big thank you to Nick for working hard to give me the space to make this happen.
1
January 13, 2011
N 46° 03’ 36.0”, W 150° 55’ 48.0”
* * *
Gabe Juarez wanted to die. No, he was sure he was dying. It was impossible to feel the way he did and come out the other end alive. The hum of the Gulfstream engines felt like a dentist’s drill somehow pressed into every tooth simultaneously. He scraped his fingers through his black hair and felt the crunch of day-old hair gel. He wanted to be sick, but he’d already done that; now he was curled up in a ball, praying for death to come quickly. If it wasn’t for the fact that he loved his PA, he’d pray for the plane to drop out of the sky and vanish into the Pacific.
“Frank wants to talk to you,” Tamyra yelled from across the narrow cabin, her voice raised against the whine of the engines.
“Tell him to fuck off.” He felt too wretched to put any effort into speaking with his overly perky business partner.
“Not an option.”
He crawled away from the toilet. His company logo, woven in rows across the carpet, swam inches from his face until he squeezed his eyes shut. He found a workstation seat from memory and leveraged himself up into it while Tamyra held out the phone and watched. Some days he quietly hated her in much the same way he’d hated his mother when he was fourteen.
Gabe grabbed the phone. “Frank, fuck off.”
“A little hungover?”
He could hear Frank laughing under the words. “I’m never going to Japan again, I swear. Send anyone else—I don’t care who. I am never going back.”
“It’s a major account.” Frank was still laughing.
“I know exactly how major this account is down to the last yen. I know this entire deal ten times better than you do, and I don’t give a shit.” Gabe didn’t care if he sounded on the verge of tears. “Sake does bad, bad things to me, and you know it.”
“Tell you what, next time we can bring them out here, and you can introduce them all to tequila.”
Gabe’s stomach lurched at the word, but he filed the idea away. He knew he could handle tequila. “I am going to hold you to that.”
“I’ll bet. Now, I’m going to put you on speakerphone with the rest of the gang, and I want to hear the good word straight from your mouth.”
He pressed his cheek to the table in front of him and was thankful for its blessed coolness. “Half the school children of Japan under the age of fifteen will be using the TechPrim 9Plus hardware/software bundle within the next three to five years, with a ten-year support and rolling upgrade accounts.”
Gabe held the phone away from his ear as whoops echoed down the line. It might as well have been gunfire for the way it made his head feel like it was splitting open.
“Frank, I’m going to hang up now before I’m sick again.”
“Not a problem. Try to get some sleep.”
Gabe didn’t even answer that, just hung up.
Tamyra took the phone from his hand and replaced it with a glass of soda water. “Try to keep that down. It’ll settle your stomach.”
He squinted up at her, not raising his head from the table. She looked immaculate, but then she always did, with her tailor-made business suits and subtle red-gold jewelry lying perfectly against her dark amber skin. “Why aren’t you hungover? You went out too.”
“I’m not hungover because I talked the girls into taking me to one of those all-night malls. By the way, you bought me my birthday present last night.”
“You
r birthday isn’t until July.”
“And I’ve seen your schedule between now and July. Besides, you got me exactly what I wanted. You have excellent taste in jewelry.”
Gabe gave her a thumbs-up. “Good to know. Now can you please kill me? Please?”
She dropped a couple of shiny white pills onto the table. “Sorry, but you’ve got that presentation as soon as we’re back. We’re landing in Oakland and going straight from the airport.”
He tried to sit up, but his head began to spin. He dropped it back to the table with a clunk. “Oakland?” He could think of nothing he needed to do anywhere near Oakland. “What fucking presentation?”
“The UC Berkeley Future Hispanic Business Leaders Group.”
“Oh God, those start today?” He hated giving those talks. They were formulaic—any executive on the planet could give an identical one—and he always felt insincere, even when speaking the absolute truth. The fact that the talks were almost always arranged by the PR Department didn’t help. “You give the talks. You know my job better than I do, and you’ve got a better tan.”
“You know I could sue you for that comment.”
Gabe reached into his pocket and shoved his keys across the table. “If it means I never have to drink sake again, you can have it all.”
“You wish you were that lucky.”
He groaned and redoubled his prayers for death.
“Come on. I’ve got your notes and a clean suit. You can grab a shower before we land.”
He slowly pushed himself upright, taking deep breaths while trying to ignore his twisting stomach. Tamyra was actually looking a little sympathetic. “What am I going to do when you realize you are so amazingly overqualified for this job?”
“I don’t know, but let’s hope you don’t have to find out anytime soon.”
The fog had briefly scrubbed the air clean, and in the late morning sun, San Francisco sparkled, the Bay looked blue, and even the mudflats were hidden under a rolling high tide. Gabe wondered where his sunglasses were. The traffic whizzed by on I-880. The one time he was praying for a three-hour backup, the traffic gods laughed and removed every possible obstacle. He chugged another bottle of water and tried to look at himself in the little mirror conveniently placed on the back of the driver’s seat. He looked like he’d been in a fight. He might have washed and shaved, but there were still dark circles under his eyes, not helped by the capillaries that had burst while he was being sick.
Tamyra flipped the mirror shut. “You look fine.”
“I look like hell.”
“We’ve seen you look worse,” Jared, his driver, called from the front.
“That’s not the same as looking fine.”
Gabe sipped at another bottle of water.
Jared navigated the surface streets of Berkeley before pulling to a halt in a probably illegal spot, but anything that looked like a parking spot in Berkeley was probably illegal.
Tamyra dragged Gabe out of the backseat and shoved his briefcase into his hand. “Do you need me to walk you to the lecture hall?”
“I am the CFO of a technological giant.”
“Do you need me to walk you to the lecture hall?”
“No. Thank you. I’ll find it.”
“I’ll come find you when you’re done.”
Tamyra got back into the car, which sped off before a ticket could magically appear under a wiper blade. Gabe stretched his legs as he made his way across the campus. Students rushed past him, engrossed in debates on topics they knew nothing about. A few lounged on benches and bits of grass, taking in the sun before the fog crept back in. And as the breeze shifted, he caught a whiff of a controlled substance. Not for the first time in the last week did he wish he was back in college. He wondered if he could steal a hoodie from somewhere and simply vanish into the student population.
A grinning kid who didn’t look nearly old enough to be in college ran up to him. “Mr. Juarez?”
“It’s Gabe.” He held out his hand.
The kid took it eagerly. “David Garcia. It’s really an honor to meet you.”
“Thank you.” Gabe yanked his hand away. The kid was never going to make it in business if he didn’t work on his handshake. He made a mental note to add that somewhere in the lecture.
“If you’ll follow me? We’ve got you all set up.”
The lecture hall was one of the older ones with pull-down chalkboards and seats upholstered in ’80s avocado green. A few posters on the wall announced it was part of the English Department. That made sense. Business departments usually had better-outfitted classrooms. Luckily, there was a projector. There were also five dozen eager young faces watching his every move. He’d once had that look.
Someone had arranged a campus Tech Services guy to be on hand to help set up the presentation. Gabe might have been at the top of a technology giant, but he was glad for the assistance. He could never get his laptop to talk to projectors. They seemed to hate him. While that was being dealt with, he did a quick mental review of his lecture, deciding to put in a bit about handshakes at the beginning of the networking segment.
“Your system’s ready to go.”
“Thank you.” Gabe looked over the Tech Services guy. He always tried to remember something about everyone he met, even in passing, in case they became important one day. White, thirtyish, brown hair, average height—nothing particularly exotic but pleasant-looking, and Gabe’s laptop was talking to the projector in record time.
He settled himself at the lectern and cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, everyone. Please forgive my appearance. I just got off a plane from Japan. And here’s a word of advice right off the bat. Whenever you can, get the Japanese to come to you instead of you going there. The local sake is an absolute killer, and you will be expected to drink it for the honor of your company. All night long.”
That got a laugh. Lesson two, Gabe thought, always start with a laugh.
Gabe clapped his hands together. “Now, thank you for coming. My name is Gabriel Juarez, and this is everything I know about business.”
Gabe had glanced over his notes on the drive from the airport. It was a three-lecture series, all standard stuff about continuing education, and getting internships and feet in doors. It was a talk he could give in his sleep and possibly had been until his mouse froze. He wiggled it a few times, then poked a couple keys. Projectors hated him.
“And this is why I’m on the money side and not the tech side.” That got a chuckle.
The Tech Services guy came down from one of the back rows. “The projector in here has a habit of locking up every kind of laptop,” he said quietly. “It’s not just yours.” He pushed a few buttons in sequence, first on the laptop keyboard, then on the projector’s control panel. There was a beep, a whorl, and then everything was back to normal.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” The Tech Services guy went back to his seat, presumably to wait for another lockup. Luckily, when that lockup came, it was on the last graphic. The Tech Services guy came back down and worked his magic again. Gabe wrapped up his talk, fielded some questions, shook some hands, then waited for the room to clear out.
“And you have no idea why it does that?” Gabe asked. His laptop had already been shut down, disconnected, and slipped back into its case.
“Nope.”
Gabe looked up. The logo on the underside of the ceiling-mounted projector belonged to his company, but it was from a decade earlier. At that age it was well out of warranty, past any service contract, and almost certainly hadn’t had any kind of software upgrade in years.
“I’ll send out an e-mail to someone in hardware support. If it’s a known bug, there might be a patch. Though I may get the response in Klingon.”
The support guy laughed.
“It’s happened!”
“I’m not surprised.”
Gabe held out his hand. “Gabe, by the way.”
“James.” James had a good handshake, strong but not over
ly so.
“James. Thanks for the rescue.”
James’ face twitched into a quick, polite smile. “Part of the job.”
“Are you going to be around next week?”
“Most likely, unless the server room catches on fire.”
Tamyra discreetly slid up to Gabe’s side. “James, this is the world’s finest PA, Tamyra Dorsey. Tam, this is James… um.”
“Maron.” James held out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“James saved my bacon today by magically unfreezing my laptop.”
There was another flash of a polite smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Not magic, just practice.”
“Yes. I will write a memo about that.” Gabe turned to Tamyra. “I take it we need to get going?”
“Sorry. Work and four o’clock traffic beckons.”
James surveyed his domain. A dozen computer workstations, threadbare carpets, no windows, and a lot of Dilbert cartoons. He looked over his team, consisting of the people who just happened to get thrown at him because they wanted to work certain days of the week and would likely not be around for more than a year or two because they still had real futures ahead of them. Except maybe for Dave. Everyone was present, and everything was quiet. He figured he had about a minute before a phone rang again. He unclenched his jaw and took a long deep breath, letting it out slowly, trying to prevent extreme irritation from bursting into full-out anger.