Death Before Facebook

theirs.
    As soon as Sheila’s mouth was full, which assured Skip the floor, she said, “I’m getting the idea you aren’t happy with Jimmy Dee and me.”
    “I’m afraid of Uncle Jimmy.”
    “Whatever for?”
    “My mom said he’s queer.” She squinted at Darryl. “Are you queer too?”
    “Do you know what that means?”
    Sheila nodded vigorously. “Gay.”
    “Well, why would that make you afraid of him?”
    “Andrew told me gay people do bad things to kids.”
    “Andrew’s full of it,” Darryl said.
    Sheila flared. “Well, sure, you’d say that. You’re gay too.”
    Darryl grabbed Skip and planted one on her. “I am not.”
    “Hey!”
    Sheila giggled.
    Skip said, “Who’s Andrew anyway?”
    “My boyfriend.”
    “You’ve got a boyfriend?” She didn’t even have breasts.
    “I’m afraid to ask him over ’cause he might find out about Uncle Jimmy.”
    “That’s why you ran away?”
    “No! I ran away because Kenny gets everything and I don’t get anything.”
    Darryl said, “Did Kenny get to go to the Clover Grill at two-thirty A.M. on a school night?”
    She gave him a half smile, the slightly flirtatious look of a child who’s exasperated with a grown-up but too polite to say so. “Uncle Jimmy didn’t take me.”
    “Well, he probably would if you asked him.”
    “Uh-uh. He won’t let us eat burgers and fries.”
    “I bet he will now.” Skip had a feeling Jimmy Dee’s ideas about nutrition were about to be eroded.
    Darryl said, “Are you really afraid of Uncle Jimmy?”
    Gravely, Sheila nodded.
    “Do you remember your dad very well?”
    She shook her head.
    “You’ve never really lived with a man, have you?”
    Again, she shook her head, pouting.
    “We’re not so bad.”
    She gave him another closed-mouth smile. “Maybe
you’re
not.”
    “Well, what’s so bad about Uncle Jimmy?”
    She lowered her eyes, looked at her plate. “Nothing.” She thought better of it. “He doesn’t cook like my mom.”
    “You miss your mom, don’t you?”
    She nodded.
    He put an arm around Skip. “Well, you got a nice auntie here. Maybe you should spend more time with her.”
    Sheila looked at him hopefully. “And you too? Could we do things sometimes? Without Kenny?”
    Skip’s heart went out to her. “Sure, honey.”
    Later, lying in bed, Sheila tucked cozily into her fold-out couch, she thought,
What’s with this man? He charmed Jimmy Dee, who hates any man I’m with, and Sheila, who’s afraid of men in general. Damn. And me.
    * * *
     
    Friday was a big day for Cole, maybe the biggest of his life. Marguerite had wanted him to cancel his meeting, but not even for her would he do it. It was the culmination of all his work. Twenty years of struggle: little deals, almost deals, deals that weren’t worth making, deals that never panned out; and finally, he had a chance at the one that counted.
    His software was a group scheduler, basically a calendar—a way to keep schedules for entire companies, to know where everyone was at once, and what he was supposed to be doing. He’d gotten raves from the companies who’d used it; the problem was, they were little companies.
    Trying to sell it individually to everyone in the world was a sucker’s game. What he needed was somebody like Microsoft either to buy it outright or distribute it and pay him a royalty. Bill Gates hadn’t called, but this morning Cole was meeting with a software publisher that was about to be nearly as big.
    They had been negotiating for six months, Cole and his partner, mostly with a man named Burke Hamerton. A figure of $1.5 million had been named.
    At ten A.M. sharp, Cole walked into the meeting room at the Windsor Court that the company had reserved. He had gotten up early and ironed a shirt. He had packed his briefcase and repacked it.
    This morning, because the talk was all about whether the update of the project was going to work, it was just Hamerton and Cole, not Cole’s partner, and no one else from the company. Cole much preferred it this way. He only half understood the financial nuances, and they bored him. If, instead of having a partner, instead of participating at all, he could have hired someone to work it out and let him know the bottom line, he would have.
    But he’d learned the hard way, in the first five years of his career, that business didn’t work that way. There was only one person in the world he could rely on: Cole Terry.
    The room was sunny, well appointed. Cole couldn’t