Sam
May, seven years later
Sam loosened his tie, undid his top button and rolled his head and shoulders. Then he stretched his arms. And did another head roll. Nope. It wasn’t helping. Nor was the view out of his fancy floor-to-ceiling windows. All well and good having a thirty-fourth-floor office with a stunning Manhattan skyline backdrop, but if you spent your whole life in that office, the view just reminded you of the life you weren’t out there living. No amount of head rolling and Central Park panoramas were going to make spending yet another evening in this room any more palatable.
Fricking clients. Seriously. So damn unreasonable. And so damn paying his fees, which paid his bills, which meant that he had to pander to their unreasonable damn demands, any time of day and a lot of the night. Unfortunately there was no halfway house with this job. You couldn’t just scale back, work half the hours, for a fraction of the money.
Sam adjusted the volume down on his phone. Jim Buck, his newest and biggest client, by fees and by ego, had been barking out suggestions and ridiculous demands for over an hour now. Sam had himself on mute and was working on his desktop at the same time, but it was hard to concentrate with all the shouting. How the hell was he going to put up with this man dominating his working life for the foreseeable future?
Finally, yes, Jim had stopped talking. Probably had an eighties throwback dinner featuring a lot of champagne, fat cigars and exploited women to get to.
‘Not a problem,’ Sam told him. ‘I’ll have that with you by noon tomorrow.’ He didn’t even bother to attempt to inject warmth into his voice.
He pressed the red circle on his phone and took a breath. Now he had an even more unenjoyable phone call to make, which he needed to do immediately. He swiped and pressed green.
‘Hi, Daddy. Are you phoning because you’re going to be late home?’ Liv didn’t sound annoyed or reproachful, just resigned. And very unsurprised. Perfectly pitched to make her father feel like crap.
‘Got it in one. I am so sorry.’ It was torture knowing that his kids were upset, and that it was his fault. ‘But listen. I have a couple things I need to do in person in the office but once I’ve done those I’m coming home to see you and I’ll finish my work once you’re in bed.’
‘Have you forgotten?’ Seriously, she’d make an excellent parent with her ability to convey quiet disappointment.
‘No?’ What had he forgotten? Not a physio appointment, please. He’d made every single one so far, but it was a constant worry that he was going to mess up and miss one. Surely the next one wasn’t until next week.
‘Our pizza and ice cream date? At Mariano’s?’
‘Wasn’t that Thursday?’
‘It is Thursday.’ Damn. Damn. He spent the whole time letting them down.
‘Liv, honey, listen. How about we do Mariano’s next week and this evening I order takeout when I’m on my way home and it’ll arrive just around the time I do?’
‘Do you think Mom would have forgotten?’ Liv had kept her tone so sweet, it took Sam a second to register the passive aggression in her words. He was still trying to form a reply when Barney spoke.
‘D-d-d-d-dad.’ Barney’s stutter was always more noticeable when he was upset. Liv must have had the phone on speaker. ‘You’re a liar.’ It took him a long time to get the word liar out. ‘You promised.’ Even longer to say promised. And then the phone went dead.
Damn.
Sam needed to stop letting his children down. He also needed to make some progress on finding the right speech pathologist or therapist for Barney. And he also needed to read through and comment on this contract because without his clients he probably wouldn’t be able to afford Liv’s extortionate health insurance, Barney’s extortionate therapist fees and all the other extortionate things in their lives.
He had great kids, a great family, great friends, a great apartment, a great job. A lot of great things. He was very lucky. He just needed to find some extra hours in the day to take advantage of any of those great things other than the job.
‘That was fantastic pizza.’ Sam stood up to get the ice cream out of the freezer.
‘Almost as good as Mariano’s.’ It took Barney a lot of attempts to get his words out.
‘It’s okay. We’re going to Mariano’s next week instead. It’s nobody’s fault that we had to postpone again.’ Liv’s words and tone of voice were saccharine. But the barb in there was definitely intended. Clearly it was Sam’s fault. Did she blame him for everything? He was beginning to think that he didn’t have the emotional agility to deal with a complex teenage girl. Especially given how busy he was. It had taken extreme willpower to avoid looking at his watch during this meal. He just didn’t have the time for a leisurely mid-week dinner with the kids.
‘I’m so sorry about messing up this evening.’ He gave the twins an extra scoop each. If only you could buy teenagers’ happiness with ice cream like you could with toddlers. Barney scowled at him and Liv smiled at him suspiciously angelically. Neither felt good. Sam smiled back at them anyway.
He glanced down. If he nudged his cuff against the edge of the table, maybe he could expose his watch face, unnoticed.
He had so much to do tonight. A phenomenal amount of work, plus he owed return calls and messages to his mother, two of his sisters and his best friend Luke, not to mention the woman he was currently dating, Melissa. And he needed to get back onto doing something about Barney’s speech, underlined by Barney’s stuttering anger this evening. And he should probably be thinking about Liv, too, trying to break through the barriers she seemed to be erecting between them.
‘It’s 9 p.m., Daddy.’ Liv’s eyes had flickered to where he’d inched his cuff back. Her smile was bland and wide and didn’t reach her eyes. Yeah, he should definitely be thinking about how she was doing emotionally. Not right now, though.
The kids in bed and hopefully sound asleep for the past three or four hours, none of the calls or messages he owed returned but the contract work finally finished, Sam checked the time on his office wall clock. Just shy of 2 a.m. He could go to sleep for four and a quarter hours or he could spend some time researching speech therapists and sleep for half an hour less. At least either way he’d be so tired that he wouldn’t dream. The nightmares were a killer. Last night, yet again, he’d woken at 4 a.m., bathed in sweat, his mind replaying images of the accident.
He was so unbelievably exhausted. But Barney’s confidence was so unbelievably diminished because of his stutter. And getting worse. And in just over a year’s time he’d be entering high school. Things needed to improve by then or he’d have a very miserable few years socially.
Sam was going to have to do the research.
He was good at his job, a lot better than he seemed to be at parenting teens with issues. Maybe he should approach this as though it was a tricky business problem. To which he would no question find a solution.
So. He needed to think outside the box.
Everyone and everything they’d tried so far hadn’t worked. To date, they’d just done a very good job of proving that you couldn’t solve every problem by throwing enough money at it.