Once again Adam Caldwell looked at the big framed picture of his son Matt on the far wall of his office. In the photo taken two and a half years before, Matt was hanging onto one of the shrouds of his twenty-five foot sailboat, the Mary Sue, with a big grin on his face. There was a big iceberg in the background surrounded by ocean and spotty clouds in a blue sky.

Adam knew well that, when looked at up close, the picture, a snapshot taken with a good digital camera, began to break up into individual pixels a little. From time to time he’d given some consideration to having an artist make a painting from the picture, but he’d never quite gotten around to doing it. The photo was considerably more real; it gave him a little more connection to the memory of his son, dead four months now and buried at sea hundreds of miles south of Newfoundland. No, that picture represented how he wanted to remember his son: alive, happy, trying to wring all the living he could out of a life he rightly expected would be all too short.

In the last four months, the picture had taken on even more significance in Adam’s mind. He glanced at the clock: the phone ought to be ringing any time now. He looked at the picture for a moment more, and in his mind he promised the memory of his son, This is it. No turning back now.

Giving an audible sigh, Adam ignored the blowing snowflakes of the gray December day and turned to the report he’d been reading about production difficulties in the Betzer plant. It wasn’t important; the problem was a week in the past and had been solved quite adequately by the local management. The important part about it was what could be learned for the future, not that he cared as much about company issues any more. Matt’s death and the ramifications following it had immensely overshadowed the routine problem.

Any time now . . .

His life was going to be changing a lot, more than he could have imagined a few years before. Perhaps not changed for the better in the end, but changed. It would be worth it.

But however it went, the wait for what he knew was to come was agonizing . . .

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t waited enough already. He’d vaguely known this day was going to come for years, but it wasn’t until Matt’s death that it had become clear that the time to be doing it was near. Even then, things had to be gotten into order, which was why it had taken this long. After a quarter of a century of often being uncomfortable and not very happy, he knew he might as well do things right . . . which included some long-overdue getting even.

He glanced at the clock again: a minute and a half further on. For some reason he remembered how slowly the clocks had run during dull classes in elementary school. This was slower. There was the chance, in fact, a good chance, that she’d flipped out so bad that she couldn’t even dial the phone. In some ways that might be the best outcome. There was no way of telling; the die had been cast.

This was accomplishing nothing. By pure mental effort he turned his attention to the report again. The machine’s maker, Hadley-Monroe in Chicago, had been able to supply a software patch that had apparently solved the problem once and for all. Then it was just a case of getting caught back up, which unfortunately cost a little overtime. Not much, though, and the quality control figures were much improved . . .

The phone rang. Well, not a ring, but an irritating buzz that had often annoyed him, making him wonder why he’d approved the system in the first place. This was probably what he’d been expecting. He picked it up and said, “Yes, Marcia?”

“Your wife on line two,” his secretary said. “She doesn’t sound very happy, sir.”

“I expect she isn’t. Thank you, Marcia.” He held the phone away from his ear a little, punched the second button and said in a neutral tone, “Hello, Brittany.”

“Adam!” she screamed, making it clear that that keeping the phone away from his ear had been a good idea. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Just exactly what it says,” he told her. “I’m filing for divorce.”

“You can’t divorce me!” she screamed at an even higher pitch than before. “Not after what I’ve been through! I’ll take you for every cent you have.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” he said with a smile on his face. “Even if you could, which you can’t, it’d be worth it.”

“But Adam!” she said, still screaming on the verge of hysteria, “Why would you want to do this after all the time we’ve spent together? This is a hell of a way to treat me when I’m still upset after what happened with Matthew! I still don’t know what happened to him! Do you know? Why haven’t you told me?”

“I’ve told you,” he said, reminding himself to keep his cool. “In fact, I told you several times, at least three times when Dr. Preble was there with us. You just refused to accept the reality. Matt is dead. He died back in August. He was dying when we saw him in Boston, and you wouldn’t accept that reality either.”

“He was not dying,” she yelled, still nearly out of control. It was something she’d said any number of times in the past few months when Adam had visited her at the private psychiatric hospital where she’d been committed in August. “If only we could have gotten him back to University Hospital in Ann Arbor he’d be alive today. That damn Jap doctor didn’t have the brains to put a bandaid on a cut finger. But no, you had to listen to him, rather than listen to me.”

“Brittany,” he said, also not for the first time, perhaps not for the hundred and first, “I’ve told you before, Massachusetts General is one of the finest facilities in the world for treating leukemia. If they and the people they have there couldn’t help Matt, he couldn’t be helped. I’ve told you to talk to the people at University Hospital if you don’t believe it. I’ve done it. Matt was dying, and that was that. He knew it. Mary knew it. We all knew it and accepted it, except for you.”

“Then how come University Hospital could keep Matthew alive and those incompetents in Boston couldn’t? The people in Ann Arbor had to know something those idiots in Boston didn’t!”

“Look, Brittany,” Adam replied, still keeping his calm. “This is something we’ve known for years. The bone marrow transplant saved him when he was a kid, but we were told at the time it happened by the people in Ann Arbor that if it worked once it couldn’t be expected to work again. A bone marrow transplant wouldn’t have helped since it was Matt’s liver that was failing this time, and not even a transplant could have helped him since the anti-rejection drugs wouldn’t work anymore. There was no hope, Brittany. We all knew it, even you knew it, but you made such a pain in the ass of yourself that I never got to tell my son goodbye because you were always making a scene. That’s when I made up my mind that it was over between us, Brittany.”

Her screams hit a new and heretofore unattained level. “But why didn’t they keep him in the hospital? I mean, my God, we got to the hospital room that morning and found it empty, and they told us he’d signed himself out of the hospital! Whatever made them think they could let him do that? If he had to die, which I don’t believe he had to die for one second, at least they could have let him die in a hospital where he could be cared for properly. But no, he just signed himself out and disappeared, and nobody will tell me what happened to him.”

“Matt didn’t want to die in a hospital,” Adam replied, a wave of sadness washing over him as he remembered his last sight of his son, weak and sick in the hospital bed. “He’d spent enough time in a hospital, Brittany. Over a year, and you know that as well as I do. He’d seen enough people die in a hospital, including some of his friends like Laurel. I don’t blame him one bit. He deserved the chance to die happy, and I know he did. I’ve told you that too, and in the presence of Dr. Preble, but you didn’t want to hear it then, either, just like you don’t want to hear it now.”

“But he can’t be dead. He’s my little boy! I couldn’t let him die!”

“I’m afraid he is,” Adam said. “Brittany, I don’t like it one bit more than you do, but we always knew the chance was there that he would die young. You never accepted that, either.”

“But he didn’t have to die!” she shouted into the phone. Adam noted the slight change in tone of the response – maybe now she was accepting, at least a little, that her son was dead. God knew he’d told her that enough, that Dr. Preble had told her that enough. That might be a good sign, or it might not be. “At least he could have stayed at home where I could have taken care of him. He didn’t have to go running off on that fucking boat! Maybe if he’d stayed home and gotten together with Stephanie like I wanted him to he’d be alive today. But no, you had to let him go off in that boat and pick up that trashy red-headed bitch. You could have stopped him! But no, you let him go running off so he could kill himself.”

Adam ignored the sneering comment Brittany had made toward Matt’s wife, at least for now; when the time came he intended to shove it right back down her throat, but the time for it wasn’t quite yet. Willing himself to keep his temper under control, he replied as neutrally as he could, “There wasn’t any stopping him, Brittany. He knew he might not have much time and he wanted to enjoy himself. That didn’t include letting Stephanie whine at him every inch of the way, and it especially didn’t include letting you whine at him and bitch at him every inch of the way, either.”

“I didn’t bitch and whine at him,” she protested in her loudest bitching and whining voice.

“Yes you did, and don’t deny it,” Adam replied once he managed to get a word in edgewise. “Why do you think he spent every summer with his Uncle Jake? If you hadn’t been on his ass all the time, trying to run his life, then we both might have enjoyed having him around more in the few years he had left. I hold that against you too, Brittany. Matt deserved the chance to enjoy the few years he had, not putting up with your shit all the time. At least he got a couple years to enjoy himself, and he found a woman he could really love and who loved him along the way. Stephanie was just looking for a meal ticket.” Like you were doing when I made the mistake of marrying you, he added mentally without letting the words cross his lips. At least yet, but it wasn’t beyond the possibility of saying aloud before this conversation was over with.

“Stephanie was not looking for a meal ticket,” she yelled, the sneer evident in her voice. “She’s a perfectly nice girl, the daughter of a friend of mine.”

Bullshit, he thought. Takes one to know one. “He knew from the beginning she wasn’t the girl he was looking for,” he replied, trying to sound reasonable. “And as it turned out, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good and loyal to him as Mary was. If he’d married Stephanie, she’d have been out spending his money and looking for another meal ticket while he lay dying. Mary stayed with him, Brittany. It hurt her a lot but she knew it was something she had to do.”

“Mary was with him when he died?” she replied, not quite with the screech she’d been using the last couple minutes. “Adam, what happened to him? At least if he’s dead, I want to visit his grave.”

“Like I told you, Matt didn’t want to die in a hospital,” he replied, trying to keep the sadness from his voice. “He wanted to die at sea, with the woman he loved at his side, and she couldn’t deny him his last wish. After Matt signed himself out of the hospital, she took him back to the boat, and put out to sea. She sailed the boat and nursed him till he died, and then she buried him at sea.”

“Buried at sea? My God! There isn’t even a grave to visit? How could she do such a thing?”

“Because she loved him, Brittany. Because she loved him enough to let him die the way he wanted and be buried where he wanted, as well as loved him enough have to deal with the pain it caused her to have to do it at all. You may not think much of Mary, Brittany. You all but ignored her when she tried to be friends with you, but she’s a strong and tough young woman, and I honestly think she was the woman he needed. Even if I had the skills, I don’t know if I could do what she did out of love for him. I know damn well you couldn’t do it.”

“But why would she do such a thing?”

Adam took a deep breath. This was a good opportunity to drop a bomb that needed mentioning, something he hadn’t told Brittany before. He wasn’t sure it was wise now, but it was something he felt needed to be said. “She was thinking of him, Brittany. She wasn’t thinking of herself or the baby. It wasn’t easy for her, but she knew what had to be done and she did it.”

“Of all the thoughtless . . .” Brittany started, then the key word in Adam’s last statement got through to her. “Baby?” she said in a questioning voice. “What baby?”

“Matthew O’Leary Caldwell, born last month, on the seventeenth.” Adam said quietly. “The only grandchild we’ll ever have.”

“Baby?” she replied quizzically, much of the wind out of her sails. “She had Matthew’s baby?”

“She was somewhere around six months pregnant when Matt died,” he replied flatly.

“Pregnant? She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She didn’t look pregnant.”

“You didn’t notice it, and you wouldn’t have listened if she’d told you. You were being so self-centered about what you wanted that you just ignored everything else.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter now,” she huffed. “When can I see my grandson?”

All right here we go, Adam thought. “Probably never.”

“Quit kidding me, Adam. I want to see him.”

“What if Mary doesn’t want you to see him?”

“Why shouldn’t she want me to see him?” she said, panic clearly rising in her voice. “I’m his grandmother, why shouldn’t she want me to see him. You know I’ve wanted grandchildren for years, and now you’re telling me she won’t let me see him?”

“Mostly because she doesn’t like you,” Adam said. “And for good reason. You met her twice. The first time you were extremely rude to her. You brushed her off and talked past her like she didn’t even exist. You spent the whole time trying to browbeat Matt right in front of her without saying one nice word to her, not even a friendly ‘Hello.’ The second time, at the hospital in Boston, you ignored her like she didn’t exist and were an extremely hysterical bitch, totally ignoring what anyone else had to say. I don’t blame her a bit if she doesn’t want you to have anything to do with Matty.”

“My God, I never heard of such a thing! She doesn’t have any right to keep me from seeing my grandson if I want to see him! How am I supposed to know if he’s being raised right? How am I supposed to love him and do the things for him I need to do for my only grandson?”

She was edging toward the hysterical again, just like Adam had expected. “She has all the rights she needs,” Adam said, trying to keep a chuckle out of his voice. Perhaps keeping Brittany from Matty wasn’t morally quite the right thing to do, but the way Brittany had treated Mary in the past gave her all the reason she needed. “I have no idea what Matt must have told her about you, but that probably added to it. It wouldn’t surprise me if before he died he told her not to let you have anything to do with Matty, either. I don’t know about that, and I wouldn’t blame him, either. You were pretty damn rude to your son in front of her, too. Sorry, Brittany, but now you’re paying the price.”

“What? That’s unheard of! I can’t believe I heard you say that. Give me her phone number, I want to talk to her.”

“No,” he said. “As far as I know, she doesn’t have a phone. At least she didn’t have one the last time I talked to her.”

“You’ve talked to her?”

“Twice,” he reported, still trying to sound neutral. “She called me, I didn’t call her. First, right after she got into port after Matt died. She was handling it pretty well, but I could tell it had hurt her. And then again, after Matty was born. By the way, Matty is healthy. He was seven pounds, five ounces, nineteen inches long, the right number of fingers and toes and such. She told me she did have a blood test run and his white cell count was normal, not that it really means anything at his age. Beyond that, I haven’t heard anything.”

In the strict letter of the truth, he hadn’t heard anything more. There had been a few e-mails exchanged, but Mary only fired up Matt’s old school laptop once or twice a week. She had better things to do than to screw around online.

“Where is she?” Brittany asked. “I want to talk to her, and I want to see my grandson.”

“I don’t know.” Adam replied, knowing it was more or less a lie. He didn’t actually know where Mary and Matty were at that moment, but he figured a guess would likely put him within a hundred yards . . . er, metres that is. But Brittany didn’t need to know that – not now, and perhaps not ever. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the kid myself, and I haven’t.” That much was the truth; he knew he’d be seeing Matty sometime, but not soon – not until a few things had been settled. It was time to get around to that.

“I want to see him!” she shrieked, now in considerable hysteria. “He needs to be with me, so I can take care of him!”

“Brittany,” he said sharply. “You might as well get used to the fact that it’s not going to happen soon if it ever does. You have other things you need to be concerned about. Did you actually read the papers in the file the process server gave you?”

“I’m not going to divorce you, and that’s final! You’re going to help me find my grandson so I can take care of him.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Adam repeated, having to say it several times to get through her ranting. “And you’d better read that packet over and take it to a lawyer, and not Deke Hampton since he’s my attorney in this.”

“I don’t need to talk to a lawyer! I’m not divorcing you!”

“Brittany, you don’t get much choice in the matter. All this is covered in that file, which you have received from a process server whether you read it or not. I’m offering you a reasonable and fair settlement based on my current income, and you get the house out of the deal. I will give you the money needed to make the payments. I have paid off and cancelled all our joint accounts and credit cards. I’ve moved everything I want or need out of the house. If you don’t agree to the settlement in thirty days the offer expires, and we fall back to the pre-nuptial agreement you signed years ago. I don’t think I need to tell you that would be a considerably worse deal. The clock has been ticking since the process server handed you that envelope.”

“Adam, is it another woman?”

“There is no other woman,” he said. “In fact, you probably did a pretty good job of putting me off women. I don’t need the drama in my life. I feel just about as bad about Matt as you do, it’s just that I had to deal with it, rather than going out of my mind.”

“Adam!” she screamed. “I’m not divorcing you. Not now, not ever! You’re going to help me see my grandson. I don’t want to be without him! What makes you think you can divorce me, after all I’ve done for you?”

“You mean, after all you’ve done to me?” he replied, letting some venom rise in his voice. “Believe me, you don’t want me to get started on that list, but I made up my mind when you acted like such a hysterical asshole while our son lay dying. Why do you think Mary was forced to take him to sea to die in peace? That took the prize, Brittany. I would have filed a long time ago but Dr. Preble said it wasn’t a good time to do it to you. Now, you’d better settle down and pull yourself together before you read what’s in that envelope, or you’re going to be right back talking to Dr. Preble again, and this time I won’t be a part of it. Now, don’t call me again. The next time I hear from you it had better come through your attorney.”

“But Adam, please!” he heard her say as he put the phone back on the hook. He knew he could talk to her until he was blue in the face but it was unlikely he could get through to her any more than what he’d just managed, if he’d managed much of anything at all.

There was a good reason why he’d sent a limo to pick her up from the rest home, at least beyond not wanting to talk to her face to face. The limo driver was a paramedic, and the process server was an off-duty deputy sheriff, both of them wearing limousine driver’s livery. It had cost him no small amount to arrange that, and they were still standing by in case she flipped out again during the phone call. Well, she hadn’t quite done that although she might still if she thought about it – to the extent that she thought about things at all. The important thing was that the papers hadn’t been served while she’d been a resident at the home; what happened after that was immaterial, as far as he was concerned. If she lost it again, the clock on the settlement would still be ticking. He really wanted to be at least a little bit fair to her, after a quarter century, after all, but he was beyond waiting any longer. He’d waited long enough.

He stared at the phone for a moment, surprised that it wasn’t ringing again. Well, that was something else he needed to do. He got up and went out to the front office, where Marcia was sitting at her desk. She’d known this was coming and had helped with some of the details, although she didn’t know everything there was to know. “Marcia,” he said. “Don’t put through any more calls from my wife.”

“No more today?” she smiled lightly.

“No more ever,” he said with a light heart he hadn’t felt since the word about Matt had come last summer. “But especially not today. I’m taking a few days off, and if she or someone comes looking for me, you don’t know where I am.”

“All right, fine. Where are you going to be if you’re really needed?”

“Out of touch,” he said. “Away. If something comes up about the company, just pass it on to Bob. And if I don’t see you before then, Merry Christmas.”

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