Free A Little Night Music by Kathy Hitchens Page B

that how I looked?
    James removed his sunglasses and gave him the once over. “Let yourself go a little eh?”
    Jon felt the breezy lead weight of his gaudy Sacred Music Festival shirt emblazoned with fifty colors. What once was a prize at last week’s Super Jam now seemed a liability in convincing James he hadn’t taken a mental tumble off the High Rise.
    “How did you find me?” said Jon. The day’s heat burrowed deep against his patience.
    “Landlord. Real gem. Told me to go fuck myself the last time I left you a message. I assume you never got it?”
    Jon’s stomach growled again. He walked toward the Bon Moment Bakery, James trailing beside him. “I stopped reading them. Used them to get bird shit off the fire escape.”
    “Jesus Jon. I knew it was bad. But this?”
    Jon halted his breakneck pace. “This what? You’re telling me you can’t handle a corporation we started together for three goddamned weeks without me?”
    “I’m telling you you’re out. As of tomorrow, nine am, if you don’t get your ass back in that boardroom and pretend you didn’t let some broad get in the way of the company.”
    James put his sunglasses back on.  Jon’s wild hair and unshaven face in reflection, so unlike the man who deserved to step back into that boardroom as CEO, erased every protest his cerebellum had mounted in the city block their conversation carried them.
    “Look, we get it, all right? It’s…unforgivable what Jessica put you through…” James’s tone eased from VP to the guy who had inked his name beside Jon’s in their first lease contract then went out for beers afterward to celebrate, as much as it could ease in the brisk pace he had resumed to keep up with Jon. “But all those people back at J.J. Birch who devoted their lives to our dream? They don’t deserve to be left out in the cold because of one selfish bitch. It’s time to return to the real world, man. Make this merger happen. Take care of those people who take care of us.”
    Jon crawled back—if only for a moment—into the shell of the man who had boarded that plane in Chicago, knowing nothing of New Orleans or its intoxicating play on the heart. It felt familiar, comfortable—that man still inside him—the man he had become in the fourteen years since his father left. Was he willing to toss it all aside for three weeks? For a woman who could hurt him in the end?
    “That’s not all,” James added. “A local journalist wants to interview you. Put a sympathetic spin on it. Thinks your story could get picked up by the national media. Could make J.J. Birch Financial a household name.”
    Jon stopped again. “I’m not doing an interview.”
    Immediately, Jon sensed James’s negotiation wheels spinning. “Sure, sure, no interview. But the company needs you. We’ve got seven thousand employees who need you. Promise me you’ll think about it.”
    “Goodbye James.” Jon opened the bakery doors wide enough for only himself. He entered the sub arctic refrigeration of too much air conditioning as James’s final words fizzled away.
    “I’m on the six-ten out this evening.”
    Jon stood in line, freezing his nuts off in shorts and a paper-thin shirt even he had to admit was ugly. The piped in jazz music set off a spark of annoyance. Didn’t they play anything else down here? And when the perky register girl behind the counter asked, “What’ll it be?” Jon had no answers.
    Beyond two beignets and coffee.
     
     
     
    Elli slipped into one of Jon’s button-down shirts and crawled out onto the fire escape. Somehow she knew she would wake alone. She sensed it that morning after they made love, he had been the Jon of the night before—attentive, wholly present, joyful. She cursed the daylight as if it had been responsible for bringing back the guy who had stood on the Modesta Garden veranda and all but pushed her into the arms of a man he didn’t know. Problem solved. Prospectus closed.
    She unfolded his note and read it