By the time I’d parked outside the office I’d shrugged off the encounter. Refreshing dissent among owners at The Breakers remained a sensible tactic. I hadn’t been expecting that Hazel Wilkins’s issue with the decor would be quite so personal, but that was all to the good. Business concerns come and go and ebb and flow. Personal beefs are permanent. If someone who’d known the Thompsons for that long was prepared to start trusting me as go-between, it was going well. I didn’t actually care if she got what she wanted.
Karren’s desk was unattended when I walked in. Janine was in position bending over hers, laminating something. Personally, had I been born and bred a Floridian, I might have made the effort not to be fat when I grew up. In this weather and humidity, it’s simply not the thinking person’s choice. Janine cleaved to some other vision, however, and when stuffed into bright blue stretch pants, her rear end was another thing that Karren and I were at one in finding less than supergreat and perfect.
“Hey,” I said.
Janine let out a squeal and turned around. When she saw it was me, she rolled her eyes and fluttered a pudgy hand over her heart. She did this every single time anything happened that hadn’t been exhaustively trailed via radio, television, and public service announcement. How she’d managed to make it to twenty-six without a heart attack, I had no idea.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Live and in color. Who did you think it might be?”
“Well, you just never know.”
“I guess not. How’s . . .” I struggled and failed to come up with the name of her spawn. “Feeling better?”
This was not something I cared about in the least, but that morning a Danish positivity blogger had suggested going out of one’s way to attempt to get inside other people’s lives and minds, however small and unappealing they might appear, as a thought experiment in connection building.
“A little,” she allowed cautiously. A cynical person might have wondered whether the kid, whose name I suddenly remembered—Kyle—was in fact this morning so very healthy that he was being held up by pediatricians as an example to others everywhere, but that his mother was withholding this information in case she needed to come in late another morning that week.
“That’s great. Great.”
She smiled suddenly. “And so how was your dinner?” There was a strange inflection to her question, as if I was being upbraided for being coy.
I frowned at her, confused.
“At Bo’s, silly,” she said. “Was it great? I’ve always wanted to go. But of course it’s way out of our range. It’s on my list. One day.”
“It was fabulous,” I said. “As always. But how did you know I was there?”
Now it was her turn to look baffled. “Well, you asked me to make the reservation,” she said. “You sent me an e-mail, end of last week.”
“Right, right,” I said. That was one minor mystery solved at least. “Of course. Thank you for sorting it out. We had a lovely evening.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Where’s Karren?”
“You know, I don’t actually know. She left about half an hour ago. I did ask her where she was going, just out of interest or in case you needed to know, you know, and she was all, ‘To meet with a client.’ So basically, I think that’s what it is, probably.”
“Okay then,” I said.
I discovered where Karren had gone as soon as I logged on to check my mail. She’d sent me a note explaining that a man called David Warner had called midmorning (while I was sitting listening to Hazel zone out over her dead husband), asking for me and wanting advice on selling his house up the key. He’d wanted to get onto it right away, her e-mail said with judicious reasonableness, and I hadn’t been there, so she was going to take the meeting instead. She hoped that was okay.
“Bitch,” I muttered.
She knew damned well it wasn’t okay. Warner was a guy I’d met at a bar on the mainland a couple of weeks before. He had an eight-million-dollar house on Longboat about three miles north of The Breakers, and selling it should have been my gig. I’d done the groundwork. I’d met the guy and started the fire.
“Excuse me?” Janine said.
“Just clearing my throat.”
I sent a clipped e-mail to Karren saying how delighted I was to hear she’d been there to get onto meeting Warner’s needs, and that I looked forward to working with her on it. Then I hesitated, and did a little editing, making it friendlier and backing off the irony a tad. Thinking about it, David Warner had struck me right off the bat as a high-maintenance vendor. He was hefty, bluff, black hair flecked with gray and swept back, a man who had clearly supped long at the font of self-confidence: local boy made good (in the sense of “wealthy”), and convinced he could outthink and outexperience everyone on every goddamned thing—and sell his house better and faster and more lucratively himself, moreover, were he not too busy being so very rich the whole time. The more Karren had her hands full over the next few weeks, the less likely she would be to notice what I was doing with Tony Thompson.
I sent the e-mail, feeling satisfied. I’m all for being in the moment, but sometimes you have to take the longer view. Had I been Janine, for example, instead of bovinely accepting that Jonny Bo’s was out of my range, I would have saved for weeks or months to get in—and Steph would have been there with me, taking the chicken and drinking iced water and skipping dessert. You move forward in life by throwing a foot up onto the next rung, then hauling the rest of you up after, time after time.
There wasn’t much other mail to deal with. A couple of no-whats (as in “No, I’m not looking to sell my condo right now—what, in this market, are you insane?”), general crap and updates from the main office, plus a notification from Amazon that some order of mine had been shipped. I couldn’t even remember what was in it, so that hardly qualified as headline news.
I gave Janine a few pointless things to do and then left for a walk around the resort. Since the advent of cell phones, e-mail, and push notifications, sticking to your desk is a sign not of diligence but of inertia. I took a notepad with me and jotted down every single little glitch, snag, and imperfection I could find.
Two hours later I was sitting outside The Breakers’ market with an iced coffee and a head full of half-formed plans, when I saw Karren’s car coming round the circle. She parked, saw me, hesitated, then walked over.
“Thanks for picking up on the Warner meeting,” I said. “Glad you were there to do it.”
She glared down at me, then reached into her little briefcase and pulled out a pad. She ripped off the top few pages and dropped them on the table.
I leaned forward and peered at them. Notes on a house, in Karren’s tidy hand.
“He . . .” She bit her lip.
“Yes?”
“He thanked me for taking the time to come out,” she said coldly. “And said that he looked forward to dealing with you over the actual sale.”
I leaned back, being careful not to allow any hint of expression to make it to my face. “That sucks,” I said, reaching for my phone. “You want me to give him a call? Put him straight on what century we’re living in?”
“Fuck you,” Karren said, and stormed away.
I managed to hold back the laughter until she was back in the office, but it was hard.
Boy, it was hard.
I’d just climbed into the car at the end of the day when my cell rang.
“Mr. Bill Moore?”
The voice was young, female, professional.
“That would be me. How can I help?”
“I’m Melania—David Warner’s assistant.”