“Taylor, you’ll be the end of me,” said Mark as they walked out of their client’s office building.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Mark, those derivatives were crap and it was entirely appropriate for me to point out their rather obvious shortcomings. Fuck, you know what, I was even legally obliged to do so.”
They were both walking fast, both angry. They rounded the third corner of the building, heading to where they were parked at the back, right by the loading dock.
“Why couldn’t you leave that to the fucking lawyers? That’s why we hire them. God knows we pay enough in retainer fees. And the last thing we need right now is to pull back on these products, people are jumpy and if anyone thinks we haven’t done our due diligence we could lose clients.”
“Fuuuuck, Mark. Isn’t it obvious? We haven’t done our due diligence, not based on what I just saw. The stuff is bullshit and we shouldn’t be selling them.”
Mark stopped and turned, his face suddenly red. “They’re as good as anything else on the market. Everyone knows the deal — high risk, high reward.”
Taylor stopped by her car and turned to face Mark. “And what about our professional ethics?”
Mark’s face turned red, and his voice ramped up. “I’ve never seen ethics keep an investor happy, Taylor. Just money. And your ‘professionalism’ may have just cost us a boatload. I mean Jesus, Taylor, if this had been a simple lapse in judgment, then I could overlook it, you’re one the brightest I’ve got. But this is business, real business, not some fucking MBA case study. I need people who are willing to do what it takes. People who are willing to run the risks.” He sighed, and stepped back. “Look, what are you? Thirty-six? You’re still an attractive woman.” He smiled at her. His eyes roamed over her tailored blouse and pencil skirt, and she felt a little sick. “There’s still plenty of time to find a career that fits in with your, ah… morals. Or maybe you should start a family.”
She stared at him, realizing that she had just been fired. She’d never been fired. Her brain seemed to be singing with a sudden hard white noise, and then there was a loud beeping sound.
Taylor looked past Mark to see a beat-up cube van covered in gang signs and obscenity being directed to back up to the dock by a bored man more interested in Mark and Taylor’s argument than doing his job. With a horrified thrill, she realized that Mark’s Lexus was parked right beside the dock.
When she looked back at Mark, she saw him still leering, excited by her humiliation, or maybe by the thought of her, barefoot and pregnant.
She reached forward, put her hand on his chest and stepped closer. Mark’s eyes widened a moment. His brain re-engaged just a heartbeat later, but it was too late. Taylor had already driven her knee firmly into his crotch. She swore when she heard the seam of her skirt rip, but was gratified when she looked past Mark’s crumpled, moaning form to see the shocked dockworker frozen in position, now directing the cube van directly over Mark’s car.
She decided that a little shared pain was a good thing.
“Taylor, you’ll be the end of me,” Paul said to her over the headset as she drove down the road. “You’d have to be crazy and incompetent to walk away from the company now, or from me, for that matter. And you know what? I’ll be able to prove you’re crazy and incompetent in court, and the house, the company and our daughter will all be mine. Don’t fuck with me on this.
”Where the fuck did all this crap about ‘spiritual development’ come from anyway? We have shit to do, it’s year-end.”
Taylor could hear both the quotes and the contempt in David’s voice. This was the man she’d tied her life to. To make a different life. To have a family; to create work-life balance; to promote ethical investments that made good business sense.
She had a headache.
“Jesus, Paul, cool down, this is about the business. No one’s talking about divorce. I just feel that we’ve gone a bit off track. We’re promoting too many investments just because the returns look appealing. Some of them look a little shady. I got out of that side of the investment business for a reason – so did you, if you recall.”
“We have a family, Taylor. And a business where people depend on us. We have to do what we do to survive.”
“This was supposed to be different. We were supposed to be different, about balance, about ethics. Now all you seem to do is work. It’s all you seem to want to do. We make enough, but you always seem to want more. When was the last time you actually spent quality time with our daughter?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Taylor, and you know it. She’s more your daughter than mine, you saw to that. But I’ll tell you this, if you try to walk away from the business before year-end then it will be a divorce, and the next time you get any quality time with your daughter will be at her college graduation. Even longer, if you want it unsupervised.”
And she suddenly realized that David had come to hate her. She didn’t know why, and there was a good chance that he didn’t either. Not really. All the little resentments along the paths of their lives.
She knew, intellectually, that she could win custody of her daughter in court. Eventually. But she’d seen enough bitter divorces, seen good kids spiral into despair. She thought of her daughter suffering through that, discovering her own reasons to hate her parents during the course of a messy divorce.
And Taylor learned that some pain could not be borne.
And then she saw it. Obscene graffiti on the side of a truck that was veering back and forth between all three lanes of the highway. Moving faster than the other traffic, yet still managing to slow it all.
One phrase caught her attention. Held it. “Honk twice for the end of days.” It held her, that phrase, and almost without volition, she reached towards her steering wheel.
She honked. Twice.
And sobbed once, with a horrible relief, as she watched a ribbon of darkness unfurl and spread behind the truck as it traveled down the highway.
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