“Look over there.” Gordian pointed at a scattering of sandstone near the base of the slope. “That rock.”
“The round one with that sort of reddish stripe?”
“No, no.” Gordian gestured. “The flattish one with those brown patches just to its right.”
His wife stood beside him, inspected, considered.
“It would be perfect,” she said, and nodded.
“Thought so,” Gordian said. “I’ll start digging it up.”
“Oh no, you won’t.”
His expression went from pleased to perplexed.
“You just told me—”
“I know what I told you,” she said. “But I can see from where we’re standing that it’s set deep in the ground.”
Gordian reached for the long-handled shovel he’d rested against a small, weathered outcrop.
“That’s why I brought my friend here.”
“Can your friend there dig by itself?”
“Ash—”
“Because I won’t let you break your back excavating a rock that probably weighs forty pounds and is going to be a ton of trouble to get out.”
They stood looking at each other a moment in the bright, warm noonday light. Both had worn jeans, hiking boots, identical heavyweight gloves, and denim jackets to keep the stones they’d come to collect from snagging their shirts. On Gordian’s head was a blue-and-white striped railroader’s cap meant to likewise protect his scalp, his wispy gray hair offering it scant cover from sunburn these days. Ashley’s thick blond locks, meanwhile, were in some kind of elaborate feminine twist-and-tuck under a lilac fashion bandanna.
“You can’t build a retaining wall with pea gravel and sand,” Gordian said.
Ashley frowned.
“Excuse me, wise guy,” she said. “Are you suggesting that’s what I’ve loaded into the wheelbarrow?”
Gordian decided he’d better curb his testiness.
“No,” he said.
“Pea gravel?”
“They’re nice, good-sized rocks, hon. I mean it.”
“I hope so, for your sake—”
“Although I do think we need some larger ones,” he said, scratching his head under the cap with one finger. “Especially for our end stones.”
Ashley produced a sigh.
“I don’t want you overdoing things, Roger,” she said. “On last count, it’s been a few years since you’ve been in your twenties.”
Or thirties, or forties, or fifties. Gordian thought with a limp smile.
“We could have bought dressed rocks from a stone yard and had them dropped five feet from my rose garden on a pallet,” she said. “If I’d realized you were going to be this stubborn, I might have hired a professional contractor.”
Gordian looked at her.
“I know a little bit about putting together a stone wall,” he said. “My father owned a construction supply business, don’t forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“You also shouldn’t forget your stated aversion to made-to-order retaining walls that look like big piles of potato chips.”
Ashley frowned again.
“Fried corn chips,” she said. “The comparison I made was to fried corn chips. They tend to be more uniform in shape.”
“I stand corrected.”
They regarded each other quietly.
“Ash, listen,” Gordian said. “I stepped down as chief executive of UpLink so we could finally share the personal life we’ve always missed. So I’d be able to spend more time doing things with you — and for you— after decades of endless responsibility to a corporation with thousands of employees scattered across every continent on earth. But the key phrase is doing things. I’m not a dodderer quite yet. And frankly, I’ve been bending over backward to show you I’m mindful of my limitations.”
Ashley glanced down at the lumpy soil underfoot, scuffed the toe of her boot around in a way that endowed her with an unaffected girlishness. Gordian managed to resist a smile.
“Okay, I concede,” she said, after almost a full minute of toe-scuffing had left a swash in the dirt. “With the stipulation that we can revisit this issue the instant I see you bend over backward with a boulder in your hands.”
“Sounds fair enough to m—”
The oddly distant tweedle of his cell phone interrupted Gordian.
He felt for it on his belt clip, couldn’t locate it, glanced down at himself. The phone wasn’t there.
It rang again.
Gordian searched the area immediately around him, didn’t see it there either, then looked toward the slope where he’d been rock-gathering in a minor panic, positive it must have fallen somewhere among the jumbled chunks of broken hillside.
“Over here, Roger.”
He glanced over at Ashley, surprised to see the phone in her hand.
“Where did—?”
“I picked it up off the ground after you dropped it half an hour ago.”
Twee-dle!
“You should answer before the caller thinks you’ve fallen asleep on your rocking chair,” she said with a lopsided grin.
Gordian scowled in response to her open amusement, took the phone, flipped up the earpiece.
“Hello?”
“Boss, great, I was getting ready to leave a message.”
Gordian opened his mouth, closed it. The two or three seconds it took him to place the voice at the other end of the line had nothing to do with it being unfamiliar to him. Rather, it was the unfamiliarity of the context in which he was hearing it. He supposed it had been years since he’d spoken with Lenny Reisenberg outside a business office, whether in person or long distance.
“Lenny?” he said.
“Yeah, Boss.” A pause. “This a bad time to talk?”
“No, no.”
“You sure? It should only take a couple minutes, but I don’t want to keep you from anything…”
“No, really, right now is fine,” Gordian said. “It’s been a while, Len. How are you?”
“Okay,” Lenny said. “Yourself?”
“Working hard at semiretirement.”
Lenny chuckled. “You were always so busy running the show at HQ, it must be an adjustment having some time on your hands.”
“That’s what I expected,” Gordian said. “But I’ve found out keeping busy isn’t the tough part.”
“Oh?”
Gordian leaned back against the outcrop beside his shovel and glanced over at Ashley. She was reorganizing some of the rocks she’d stacked in their wheelbarrow.
“It’s all still about negotiation and compromise,” he said. “Just happens to be of a slightly different nature than before.”
“You’ll have to promise to give me the lowdown on that one of these days.”
One of these days, Gordian thought. “What can I do for you, Len?”
There was momentary silence in the earpiece. Then Lenny exhaled.
“A favor, I hope,” he said. “I feel awkward even asking… guess it’s pretty unusual…”
“Business or personal?”
“I’m not sure there’s a clear line,” Lenny said. “Or if there is, it’s sort of fuzzy in my head.”
“Then I suppose you’d better lay everything out before that fuzziness spreads into mine.”
Lenny released another tidal wash of air from his lungs and started to explain.
Gordian listened closely. There was the Kiran salesman, Patrick Sullivan. The Long Island detectives who’d arrived at Lenny’s office while investigating his disappearance, followed by Sullivan’s wife appearing to solicit his help. His initial unwillingness, and her striking a resonant chord inside him that overcame it. Then his pledge to do what he could, Noriko Cousins shooting him down at Sword HQ, a Chinese herbalist named Yan offering sagacious advice, and an epiphany at a kosher deli triggered in some ambiguous way by a bite, or perhaps several bites, of a pastrami sandwich.