Free Top Producer by Norb Vonnegut Page B

they arrive. Our lobby, neutral walls appointed with splashy paintings by emerging masters, has no seating. There are no chairs or couches to give the dogs a break. The reason is simple. Our clients do not wait. We greet them when they arrive.
     
Our corporate message: We’re here for you .
     
     
 
     
I hustled into the reception area and found Sam. She sagged. Her head drooped. Her arms hung listlessly. Bent, dispirited, she looked defeated. Even those marvelous Siberian-husky eyes appeared gray and unremarkable. Sam did not speak. Nor did she did make eye contact.
     
She seemed at odds with the orientation of our reception area, her background colors misplaced in the foreground. Sam wore the urban, neo-Gothic garb of a freshly minted widow: black jeans, black ribbed top, no earrings or necklaces from her cache of bangles, and the ultimate heresy for a kid from Boston, black Yankees cap pulled low. Behind her, the paintings danced in a conga line of dazzling colors against the PCS walls. It should have been the other way around, the bright colors out in front.
     
Charlie would have gagged at Sam’s ebony monotones, and frankly, her appearance distressed me as well. For in Sam I found my reflection from eighteen months ago—despair, melancholy, a face without hope. That night in New Haven began my new life, the one I now hated. A voice inside my head, the homunculus from hell, punished me every day with one unanswerable question: Where were you when it counted?
     
Eighteen months later I still cursed the truckers that menaced I-95. And myself. If only I had caught the earlier flight from Miami to LaGuardia. If only I had said no to that extra martini with my client. If only I had been the one driving to our beach house in Rhode Island.
     
Sam and I shared too much death: her husband, my friend; my wife, her friend; my daughter, her goddaughter. During our undergraduate days of vodka and academic enlightenment, we had never anticipated howsharks and truckers would one day entwine our lives in shrouds of darkness. Perhaps through osmosis, Sam’s depression suddenly welled up inside me.
     
Our lingering clasp, the clutch of body against body, invited curious stares from visitors round the reception area. Earlier that week Annie and I had drawn similar stares from Lady Goldfish and her unholy spawn in Estrogen Alley. There was more to be gained from holding a woman, it seemed to me, than the uneasy sensation of being on exhibit.
     
As Sam trembled against me, unsuccessful in her attempts to stifle the sobs, I said, “Let’s grab a conference room.” We walked. And I cradled Sam’s waist, acutely aware of her need to be held. I had been eager to speak with her after the party, all those phone messages. Presented with the opportunity now, I doubted the right words would come.
     
“I’m sorry to surprise you like this,” she volunteered.
     
“Come on, Sam. You know better,” I whispered gently. With the meat of my palm, just under the thumb, I wiped a tear from her cheek. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”
     
“I know.”
     
“I’ve been trying to reach you all week.”
     
“I know.”
     
Sam was monosyllabic. I was one big knot. Humor, my standby for releasing tension, was no help now. It was hardly the time. Ever since Charlie’s funeral I had agonized over what to say, how to soothe my friend from college, a woman who had pulled me back from the brink.
     
“Sam, I’ve been through this,” I said, helpless and frustrated. “I wish I could say something to make you feel better. But I never heard the words myself, and I doubt they exist. Just tell me how to help. I’ll drop everything, any time, any place.”
     
“I need to ask you something.” Sam trembled.
     
Her eyeliner had smudged, but she still looked every bit the Siberian husky. Those blue eyes. That black hair. With my thumb this time, I wiped another errant tear from her cheek.
     
“It’s weird,” she added, her voice