The light was pretty low in the Silver Rail compared to the Mountain Grove, and it was pretty quiet, too, with just a few businessmen sitting around having one or two to chill out from the day, before they had to go home and face the wife and kids. It wasn’t the first time Jane had been in the place, although she was hardly a regular; she knew that later in the evening it could be considerably more lively.

It took a moment for Jane’s eyes to adjust to the light, but she soon found Sophia sitting in a booth to one side of the room with a glass of whiskey and ice sitting in front of her. “Feeling better?” Jane asked as she slid onto the seat on the other side of the booth.

“Takes the edge off,” Sophia smiled. “I’ll bet you think this whole deal is pretty weird, and right now I’m not so sure it isn’t. This afternoon was pretty disillusioning, and I guess I should have expected that.”

“You have to admit, it’s not the sort of thing many people would consider,” Jane replied neutrally. “But maybe it makes a little sense in a skewed sort of way.”

“It still does to me,” Sophia sighed. “I was just thinking that people tend to get married to each other because it’s convenient, rather than because they’re the perfect match for each other. Convenience often takes precedence over the quality of the match. I think that’s one thing that causes a lot of divorces.”

“You’re probably right on that,” Jane replied thoughtfully. “Granted, I come from a pretty small town, but I can think of several people there who got married to each other just because they didn’t have the opportunity or the willingness to look beyond the town. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”

“Exactly. It’s less a case of people being a perfect match rather than it is a case of people being willing to overlook differences, show some tolerance, and make things work. People have this notion that their mates should be perfect and get disgusted when they find out that they’re not. They have to make allowances.”

“That’s not exactly like how it is in the movies, but real life isn’t much like the movies.”

“Boy, is that ever true,” Sophia shook her head as the waitress came over to the table; Jane guessed the woman might be twice her own age and had seen better days in life, but she was still pretty nice. “Can I get you ladies anything?”

“I’d better not,” Sophia shook her head. “Another one of these and I’d have to call my husband to drive me home.”

“How about you, miss?” the waitress asked.

“A wine cooler, I guess,” Jane replied uncertainly. “A dark berry of some sort if you have it, otherwise it doesn’t matter.”

“I think there’s some blackberry. Would that be all right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

The waitress said she’d be right back and turned to leave. “I take it you’re not much of a drinker,” Sophia observed.

“I really can’t handle the hard stuff and don’t like the taste of beer,” Jane shrugged. “So, yeah, I guess I’m not.”

“Do you do drugs?”

“My first roomie after I came to Boulder smoked weed all the time, and she gave me a couple hits once. It was kind of fun but I decided it wasn’t anything to mess with, even though I had a contact high from her all semester. It’s not like I can afford to do much of it anyway. Fortunately she smoked so much of it she flunked out at the end of the semester, so I didn’t have to put up with it any longer.”

“Um-humm,” Sophia replied, the phrase having to have a deeper meaning than the sound. “You’re a university graduate from here, right?”

“Yes, I graduated last year in art history. I was only here for three years; my freshman year was up at UNC, but I transferred when I got the chance. I liked it better here.”

“Boulder is much more cosmopolitan than Greeley, I have to admit that. Are you planning on staying around here?”

“It would be nice, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to in the long run. I don’t want to be a restaurant hostess all my life. I’m on my feet too much, and I’ll tell you that it feels good to sit down.”

“Art history doesn’t seem like a field that would give you a lot of job options,” Sophia smiled.

“Yeah,” Jane sighed. “It would have been nice if I’d thought about that a few years ago, but I didn’t. At least I’m not married or anything so it won’t be a big trick to move if I did find something elsewhere.”

“Um-hmmm,” Sophia nodded, again sounding like it meant more than just the sound, like something else had been mentally checked off a list. And really, considering what Sophia had been talking about and their discussion earlier, Jane could pretty well figure out what list it had been checked off of. “Any prospects of finding something else?”

“Not really. I keep my eyes on the want ads in the Post and the Daily, but I don’t seem to find much. It seems like when I do find something that looks like a fit, it doesn’t work out. Like I said, I wish I’d thought to major in something else, but I have no idea of what it could have been.” Well, that’s not quite right, Jane admitted to herself. She’d enjoyed art history, even if it had seemed a little pointless. In the back of her head she’d more or less figured that she’d have found a guy by this time, and the art history degree, while otherwise rather pointless, would at least prove she was intelligent. She really hadn’t thought about it much more than that.

“I know how that works,” Sophia replied. “My husband has a degree in history, and he’s only getting to use some of those things now that he’s retired. At least it’s keeping him busy, so it may yet prove to be worth it. It didn’t help him a damn bit until he retired.”

Just about then the waitress brought the wine cooler and a glass, which mostly served to put a break in the conversation. Jane poured herself a glass and took a deep sip; it tasted good, mostly because the alcohol involved was barely noticeable. Even though she knew it could have little effect this soon, just knowing she had the drink made her relax just a little. Whatever happened with this conversation, she at least knew the day was over with and she wouldn’t have to face the Mountain Grove until tomorrow. That was worth something.

The promise of the alcohol hitting her system loosened her up just a little bit. “Look,” she said as she put the glass down, “We’ve sort of been beating around the bush on this whole thing. I hear what you’ve been saying and it might make a bit of sense, but the fact that the guy you’re working for – Rick? – is having you do this makes me wonder just what kind of a dud he has to be.”

“I guess it sounds a little pathetic when you put it that way,” Sophia shook her head. “And I’ll be the first to admit that Rick has some problems. I don’t mean anything serious, but like I said, he’s shy, especially around women, and he socializes better with computers than he does with people. In fact, he socializes with people better if there’s a computer involved. But I’ve learned that I can break through that reserve, and once I did it I found out that he was a pretty nice guy. It’s well . . . look, you know the stereotype about computer geeks, right?”

“You mean he can spend eighteen hours a day coding, sleep for a couple hours in the corner of his office, then get up and go back to it? Never sees the sun, and thinks the world is lit by florescent lights? Changes his clothes once a week whether he needs to or not, and lives on carry-out pizza but never remembers to throw away the boxes, so there’s a dozen of them laying around where they happened to fall?”

“Well, yes. There’s more truth to that stereotype with Rick than you might think, but that’s not all he is, and he’s really not much like that these days. Right now he’s got a big problem with what he’s doing with his life.”

“Something personal?” Jane frowned.

“No, business, but it’s impacting him badly. Look, I haven’t really known Rick that long, only a little over a year. From what I can figure out, that stereotype was a pretty good description of him back when he was an undergrad, and I suspect if he had the chance he’d turn right back to that kind of life. But he can’t, he knows it, and it frustrates him so badly I can see it killing him just out of sheer boredom.”

Jane shook her head. “Then why doesn’t he do something else?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated, and I don’t know all the background, but he came to the company we work for with a long-term, high-dollar contract when his old company was bought out. The company, Comsector, has a long history of not being able to see the forest for the trees, and they don’t want to pay him for the length of the contract, so they aren’t giving him anything to do in hopes he’ll get bored and quit. They can’t seem to realize he’d be worth more to them doing what he’s good at.”

“So why doesn’t he quit?”

“Mostly because there’s a non-compete clause in his contract. If he quits, he still can’t write software, which is what he really wants to do and is good at doing. So he figures he might as well be paid for doing nothing as opposed to not being paid to do nothing.”

“That makes sense,” Jane nodded.

“For a guy as impractical as he can be about everyday things, it seems pretty practical to me,” Sophia grinned. “But he’s getting bored just sitting around just like Comsector hoped he would.”

“So what does he do on the job, anyway?”

“Besides shooting the shit with me, playing solitaire on the computer and poking around online to find something to kill time with, you mean? Well, once in a while someone comes and asks him to consult on something, but that only takes up ten or maybe twenty percent of his time at the office. From what I can tell at home it’s even worse.”

“God,” Jane shook her head. “That’s got to be boring!”

“Bored shitless is a good way to describe him. For a while he went home and wrote code in the evening, mostly with the idea of releasing it when the non-compete clause expires, but he quit doing that mostly because he realizes that whatever he wrote now would be obsolete by the time he could legally release it. So we wind up sitting around and shooting the shit a lot. If you get right down to it, he needs someone to divert him into new interests, and I figure a wife ought to be able to do that.”

“So you dreamed up this idea.”

“It’s the Jewish grandmother in me,” Sophia smiled. “I meddle. It’s coded in my genes. Like I said, Rick is a nice young man even if he’s not very social. He’s become a friend, almost like another grandson. I wouldn’t want to say for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that Rob and I are the only friends he has who don’t spend most of their time cutting code. And those are pretty much online and he’s never met them face to face.”

“Nobody else? How did he get that way?”

“I don’t know,” Sophia sighed, then took another sip of her whiskey. “There’s a limit to how much I want to pry into things like that, but it’s pretty clear that it goes all the way back to high school, maybe even before. I mean, I have hints enough to be able to put together a pretty good picture of what must have happened. He went to a small school and it’s easy to imagine he must have been what we think of as your typical nerd. Smart, but an only child without much in the way of social skills to begin with. The other boys must have resented him because he was smart and would rather be studying instead of playing baseball or football or something, and the girls wouldn’t have anything to do with him because the boys didn’t like him. He didn’t have the peer contact to develop any social skills.”

“I saw that happen with a couple kids in high school,” Jane shook her head. “In fact, to be honest, it sort of happened to me, but nothing like as bad. I didn’t exactly have a lot of friends in high school, not that there were a lot of kids around to be friends with in the first place.”

“It happened back in my day, too,” Sophia nodded soberly. “But something else must have happened to Rick, something even worse, and I suspect a girl was involved, and she must have really hurt him. The result is that he doesn’t get along with women very well today. I don’t want to say he’s gay or anything because I’m pretty sure he isn’t, but the end result is that he doesn’t want to try to start anything with a woman because he’s pretty sure it won’t end up very well. And, in the general run of things, he’s probably right. Like I said, very little in the way of social skills when it comes to women, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Then how do you expect him to be able to get along with a wife?”

“Good question,” Sophia shook her head. “Pretty obviously, whoever she is will have to be tolerant and non-threatening, willing to lead him and guide him rather than drive him. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I hope that confronting the reality that he’s actually married will lead him to be a little flexible himself. Whoever she is, she’s going to have to be someone who can engage his imagination and interest, and hopefully get him interested in something else. In fact, that’s what I want her to accomplish. I’m planning on helping where I can, but the right young woman has got a tool she can use that I can’t.”

Jane frowned at that for a moment before she realized what Sophia was talking about. “You mean sex, right?”

“Absolutely,” Sophia grinned. “And if I guess right, it’d be a pretty powerful tool with him. He’s a normal young man in that way, and he has a lot of interest in it, but it’s just interest. Since he doesn’t have any prospects, over the past several years he’s sublimated his sex drive by shoving it into his work. Now that he doesn’t have any real work to do, he’s getting to be a real mess. I’m thinking that if he can get that part of his life in balance, some other good things will fall out of it, like an interest in something else, maybe even besides sex. Besides, sex is a tool that can be used in a lot of other ways.”

“I’m waiting,” Jane laughed.

“For what?”

“Waiting for you to explain that one.”

“Oh, hell, it ought to be obvious. Look, Rick is what we have to call a computer nerd, right? Let’s face it, sometimes he gets so wrapped up in cutting code that he might tend to let things like personal hygiene slide a little bit, right?”

“It’s part of the stereotype,” Jane smiled.

“OK, let’s assume for a moment that you’re his wife. There are several ways you can deal with the issue. You can yell at him, something like, ‘You stink! Go take a shower so you don’t make the house smell like we’re raising goats in here.’ For a guy like Rick, especially with the social skills he has right now, you wouldn’t see him for the next three weeks. He’d go back to the office, end up cutting code eighteen hours a day, and eating delivery pizza. When you did see him again, he’d smell ten times worse.”

Jane couldn’t help but giggle. “Like stale pizza with goat cheese, I’ll bet.”

“Right, you wouldn’t have solved the problem, just made it worse. Believe me, I went through that with Rob when we were young, that was back in the hippie days and, well, things were different. In this case, you have to take a more proactive, less confrontational approach. Something on the order of, ‘Rick, maybe you’d better take a shower before we have dinner because I want to do something really special with you afterwards.’”

“More of the carrot, not much stick.”

“Right,” Sophia laughed. “But you know what really does the job? Try, ‘Rick, let’s go take a shower together. I really love the way your hands feel on my body when I’m all wet and slippery and when you smell so fresh and clean. It just melts me right down to a puddle.’ That’s the most time-consuming approach of all, but take it from one who knows, it’s time very well spent, even when the hot water runs out.”

“That’s what you call positive reinforcement,” Jane said when she got done laughing.

“Right, it’s more work but it’s more rewarding, and more likely to be successful in the long run, especially in terms of making a positive change that will stick. Again, I know what I’m talking about since I’ve been there and done exactly that. But it’s not something that most women will try to do since it’s easier to just bitch, even though the results aren’t anywhere near as positive. The woman I can get to marry Rick is going to have to understand that from the get-go. Bitching is not going to work with Rick, at least not anytime soon. His ego and his social skills are much too fragile. It would only cause resentment, and ultimately failure. She’s going to have to get him to want to do something besides cutting code, and to be honest, it isn’t going to be easy.”

“You make it sound like it’s almost impossible.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be impossible for the right woman, which is why I’m willing to spend some time looking for the right woman. She’s going to have to be understanding, low-key, non-threatening, and willing to be patient. But there’s going to be a reward for the right woman, whether it works out or not.”

“You sort of hinted about that back when we were first talking about this,” Jane replied, taking a sip of her wine cooler. She’d been wanting to work her way around to this topic, but there hadn’t been a good opening until now.

“Well, yes,” Sophia replied, understanding the question. “I don’t want to put a dollar figure on it since that would involve some negotiation, but if it didn’t work out in the long run, the woman is going to come out of it with a pretty reasonable chunk of change.”

“You mean getting paid to be his wife,” Jane replied, getting down to the nitty-gritty.

“Well, no. At least not directly. Believe me, that was one I had to think out before I even raised the idea with Rick. Paying a woman to be his wife would be too close to prostitution, and he doesn’t need a prostitute, he needs a wife in every respect. There is a huge difference, and that’s what hung up one of the interviews this afternoon, the damn woman was too narrow-minded to explore the difference.”

“I can’t wait to hear you explain this one.”

“Look, just for illustration, let’s take this out of the context of Rick for a moment. Let’s assume a rich guy and a poor girl fall in love and get married. Things go on pretty well for a year or two, then she catches him in bed with another woman, and divorce lawyers get involved. Let’s say that when the lawyers get done, she gets a lump-sum settlement of, oh, half a million dollars just for the sake of picking a figure out of midair, and it’s half a million dollars more than she would have had if she hadn’t married him at all. Now, is she being a prostitute?”

“Well, no. There’s more involved than just sex.”

“You get the picture,” Sophia smiled. “It gets a lot simpler if the figure is specified in a pre-nuptial agreement since the lawyers don’t take anything like as much money. What’s more, it would be tax-free, which getting paid to be his wife wouldn’t be.”

“Tax-free?”

“Yeah, that surprised me, too. It was something Rob pointed out to me, but then he should know since he’s been a tax accountant for years. A lump-sum settlement isn’t taxable since the couple already had the money, they’re just dividing it in an agreed matter. In practice, it’s a hell of a loophole for the theoretical young woman I just mentioned. Now, to take this out of the realm of theory and back into Rick, he is not hurting. He may live like he’s poor, in a crappy rented apartment, and still drives the 1988 Olds Cutlass he got in high school, but he’s not hurting. I don’t know the exact figure, but Rob did his taxes a few months ago. It would be unethical for Rob to reveal the numbers, he did go so far as to say that Rick’s income last year was in the six-figure bracket and he’s in a good cash position. If I had to guess, maybe half a million in the bank or readily accessible. The rest . . .”

“There’s more?”

“Lots more, stock and stock options, mostly from a result of being in the right place at the right time when companies he was working for got bought out. I’m fuzzy on the details and Rick appears to be too, but that appears to represent eight figures at a minimum if he was to cash it all out, and it could be well into that bracket. Unfortunately, he’ll have to pay a load of taxes on that, but Rob has worked with some tax strategies to minimize the hit.”

“You don’t say,” Jane replied, her interest in the whole topic taking a big swing from the theoretical toward the practical. She wasn’t all the way ready to hop on the idea, just yet, but it seemed like a lot more valid concept than it had a few minutes before. A half a million? Tax-free? It wouldn’t be nearly enough to retire on, but it could damn sure pay off a pot load of student loan debt and cover grad school. Or something. She had no idea what, but there was an obvious range of options . . .

She didn’t think she was quite mercenary enough to marry the guy sight-unseen for his money, but if it didn’t work it would make a hell of a fall-back position! And if by some happenstance it happened to work out . . . well, there was more where that came from.

Interesting . . .

“If the gossip I’m hearing around the office is correct,” Sophia added. “It could double or triple itself without Rick lifting a finger. We keep hearing rumors of a buyout that would involve a big stock split. I don’t hold that much Comsector stock, but it could make a nice addition to my retirement fund. It’s not that far off, and I’d like to see Rick get this problem under control before it happens. I can help him cope now, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as easy if I’m not working with him.”

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