Free Angel Falling Softly by Eugene Woodbury Page B

was Laurel slowly turning into Hardy.
    They hugged. Rachel said, “Nice jacket.”
    “Mom gave it to me for Christmas. She still acts like I can’t afford clothes.”
    “You dress like you can’t afford clothes.”
    The maitre d’ seated her and handed her a menu. She scanned the lunch entrees. Salmon, she’d have the salmon. Spending Carl’s money bothered her not at all. “What brings you to Salt Lake, Carl?”
    “ViFEE-West.” Carl closed the laptop cover. “Video and Film Editors Exposition. I was going to give it a pass. But the sales guys picked up some big new account, and Bruce wanted me to come out and brownnose the clients. Make them feel so good about not going with AVID or EDIUS.”
    Rachel thumbed through her mental Rolodex: Bruce, the CEO of Carl’s company.
    “And how is work these days?”
    Carl shook his head. “I’m surrounded by idiots, Rache. You wouldn’t believe what a pain in the ass it is to hire competent coders these days. I’m telling you, we get this next rev out the door and I’m gone.”
    Rachel smirked good-naturedly. Carl had been threatening to quit every time the subject came up over the past five years.
    “So why don’t you, already?”
    “Every time I try, Bruce has the board throw more options at me.” He made it sound like an injustice of World Court proportions. “And then it’s another eighteen months to get vested again.”
    “Yes, wealth can be such a heavy burden.”
    “It’s these damned Scottish Calvinist genes we’ve inherited. Can’t resist the urge to sock away more acorns for the long winter months to come. You remember how much Grandma had on her when she died—and she couldn’t bring herself to put in air conditioning. Air conditioning! In Saint George! Anyway, do you have any idea what a house and yard like yours would go for in San Jose? A million, easy.”
    “So move here.”
    “Hey, don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”
    The waiter brought water and a bread basket and took their orders.
    “The thing is,” Carl explained, though she had heard it all before, “I wrote the thing in the first place because none of the video-editing tools out there are worth shit, not because I had some burning desire to design software for a living. But here I am, designing software for a living. I gotta get back to what I was doing in the first place.”
    “I thought you hated film editing. I thought that’s why you got into programming.”
    “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I wanted to be an editor. Turned out I didn’t want to do editing for a living. Producing, then. I’ll be the one telling people what to do for a change.”
    “You could go back to rattlesnake wrangling.”
    “Now, there’s a thought.”
    They both laughed, remembering the summer Carl had talked her and Phillip into helping him catch snakes for a study their Uncle Warren was doing at Utah State University. “What, you’d rather flip burgers at McDonalds?” Carl had argued.
    “Burgers won’t kill you.”
    “Give ’em fifty years and they will.”
    But she had done it anyway, because Carl was right: she didn’t want to spend the summer flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Her brother’s driving need to avoid boredom at all costs had its side benefits.
    She said, “I’m still amazed you didn’t get us killed.”
    “Hey, we got lucky. Some other kids, it’d be sobbing parents on the six o’clock news wondering why God let it happen.” He tore off a piece of bread and chewed it contemplatively. “The thing is, Rache, one of these days I’m going to have to wake up and face the fact that in my entire life I had one good idea in me. That’s it.”
    “One good idea is good enough for most people. Especially an idea like yours.”
    “Yeah, good enough.” He sat back in his chair. “It’s like David O. Selznick. Produced Gone with the Wind and then spent the rest of his life trying to top himself. Never did.”
    The waiter brought their salads, refilled their