Milt was incredulous as he looked at the two envelopes in his hand. Now what the hell? This sure couldn’t be good news, and with the exception of the trial being over with he had been hearing nothing but bad news for days. He didn’t need anything else, but it looked like it had come for him whether he wanted it or not.

There was no good place to open the envelopes right at hand, but as soon as he could he found a bench in the hallway where he could sit down and see what new problems he was facing.

The first one was a lawsuit from an Eloise Bennett seeking damages from a choking incident a couple months before. He remembered it; the woman had choked on a wad of sandwich, and had been unable to breathe until another customer performed a Heimlich maneuver on her. She’d passed out afterwards, and an ambulance had to be called. In the suit she was asking for a hundred thousand dollars in compensatory damages.

That was something he could deal with, he thought in relief. It was what he carried insurance for, and he could pass the whole deal off to the insurance company. They would probably settle for a lot less than a hundred thousand, probably less than ten percent of it, and he might not even have to go to court. So, while this wasn’t good news, it wasn’t the bad news it might have been.

With that much relief he opened the other envelope, pulled out the contents, and scanned down the page. It was another lawsuit, this one from Royce Palmer asking for nearly a million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract over the fact that he and Maxine hadn’t allowed adequate visitation for Petra after the divorce.

There was some truth to the charge, he knew, but what in the living hell was Royce doing asking for those kind of damages so long after the fact? Hell, Petra was twenty-one now, so those problems had been as far back as ten years ago and had ended when she turned eighteen. That made no sense at all!

Oh, yes it did.

All of a sudden he realized where all the trouble with the stores had come from, and maybe more besides. It all came from Royce, who clearly wanted to get back at Maxine and him over Petra. It seemed to be ridiculous after this amount of time, but Royce had to be the kind of man who held a grudge and waited for the right time to hit back. To open those damn Sandy’s Super Sub stores had to have been months in the planning, but it also had to have been timed with the wedding! Royce probably had guessed that Maxine would go way overboard with it and leave him financially stretched.

Although Milt was no lawyer, he thought that the notion of a breach of contract suit was silly – but it was a silliness that would take lawyers months if not years to straighten out, and at who knew what cost?

Milt leaned back against the wall with his head spinning. This lawsuit was the final straw. Even though he’d only talked to Mary Ann about the stores for the past week, it had been clear that they were in deep, deep trouble, and now this. What the hell was he going to do now?

Royce was sitting in his office, but his mind was not on his work. It was on what he had done Sunday, and how much he had enjoyed it.

It had actually been Ramona who had suggested going back to the zoo. She said she hadn’t seen enough during the earlier visit and there were some animals she wanted to see again, especially the monkeys. It sounded like a perfectly good idea to everyone.

Petra and Jeremy had decided to accompany them; Petra said it had been a long time since she’d been there, and Jeremy had never taken the time to visit the place. It had turned into a great day, especially because he and Maria had spent most of the day walking hand and hand like they were lovesick teenagers. It must have been catching, because Royce noticed Petra and Jeremy walking hand in hand occasionally too; when they split up for the night, he even noticed a little kiss between the two. That held promise, he thought.

He stared at the phone on his desk for a moment. Should he, or shouldn’t he? It was business hours. . . but he was the boss, after all. Why not?

Maria proved to be in the office at Parker’s Corners and not out on the floor. “How are you doing today?” he asked.

“Just fine, although I can think of someplace else I’d rather be.”

“If it’s the same place I’m thinking of, then I’m with you.”

“That’s it. I’d rather be with you right now.”

“My thoughts exactly,” he said. “What do you say we get together for dinner after work?”

“I could do that,” she said. “But Royce, I think I’d like to wind up at your place after dinner. I’ll get Naomi to look after Ramona for once so it can just be the two of us.”

“Great. Petra’s going to be working late, so we can be alone.”

“Sounds like a great idea.”

As he hung up the phone he had little doubt where that could lead them. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for it yet, or if she was, but he wanted it and it was clear to him that she did too.

It cost Milt a bundle to get his car out of the parking garage where it had been sitting for over a week. He was numb, still thinking about the implications of figuring out that it had to be Royce who was behind everything.

He did not know Royce well, but he knew him by reputation and from Maxine, whose opinions he’d heard over the years were pretty slanted. However, he knew that Royce owned Pafco Supermarkets, and those were big operations compared to his little sub shops. It was clear that if he spent the money to set up Sandy’s Super Subs for revenge, he had the money to keep selling his subs at a huge loss long enough to break Wilson’s Subs.

What’s more, if revenge was Royce’s intent, there was no reason why he would quit before he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do. The million-dollar lawsuit was just piling on for the sake of hurting him more.

It surprised him that Royce would do something like he’d done. He had seemed pretty reasonable over the years in spite of everything. After all, he’d just spent over a week learning that when a guy found his wife in bed with a lover, things could turn out vastly different as two dead bodies had shown. Royce had been angry, but hadn’t used a gun – except that after all this time he’d used a weapon that was just about as devastating and a lot more agonizing. Zimmerman’s wife and her lover hadn’t felt any pain at all, so in comparison Milt had thought he had been lucky – until now.

Milt wondered if there was anything he could do, but couldn’t think of much. It was clear that if he went to Royce, begged for forgiveness and asked him to call off his dogs that Royce would laugh in his face. He’d gone for years putting up with the humiliations that had been heaped on him, especially the things Maxine had done in blocking Petra’s visitation.

There was a possibility he might be able to save one or two of the stores, the ones farthest from the Sandy’s Super Sub locations, but it would be tight, and probably impossible. It was probably best to be thinking about if he could salvage anything of his life, rather than to try to save the stores. They were as good as gone, but he might be able to save something from them. He spent the rest of the long drive home trying to figure out what he could do, and couldn’t think of much.

Well, it was good while it lasted, he thought as he pulled into his driveway. But it’s over now, and Maxine is just going to have to understand that. Either she gets with the program or she’s going to have to be history, and it was as simple as that.

He unlocked the house and let himself in. Maxine didn’t greet him, and he wondered where she was until he found her in the living room just staring at the wall in a daze. She looked like hell, about like he felt. Her hair was a mess, and it looked like she’d done a lot of crying. “Maxine?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

“She’s gone,” she replied sadly. “My little girl is gone. Milt, what am I going to do?”

“You’re just going to have to pull yourself together and accept it,” he said firmly. “We’ve got problems. A lot worse problems.”

“Worse problems than my losing my Petra? She’s such a sweet girl and she depends on me so much.”

“Lots worse problems,” he said. “I’m going to lose the stores. All of them.”

“All of them?”

“All of them,” he repeated. “I wouldn’t be surprised that we have to file bankruptcy before the end of the month.”

At least she snapped out of her daze and sadness over Petra a little. “Milt, what happened?”

“Royce apparently decided it was time to pay us back for us cheating on him, and you blocking visitation for Petra. He opened sub stores close to all our locations and he’s underselling us by a lot. The health department closed a couple of our stores, and I sure would like to know how he managed that. Probably found the right guy to pay off.”

“Royce wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s harmless.”

“Harmless like a dog that’s been abused too much and decided to bite back. He waited until the right time to hit us too, when we were really stretched to pay for the goddamn wedding that never happened. Then to top it off he dropped a million-dollar lawsuit on us.”

“A million dollars? What for?”

“For all the days that you blocked him from having Petra years ago,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember, but I told you time and again that shit was going to turn around and bite us some day. Now it has.”

“But . . . but . . . I just wanted Petra to have a normal family life. I’m her mother, and I didn’t want her pulled two ways.”

“Well, guess what,” he shook his head. “Royce wanted his fair share, and you wouldn’t give it to him. That’s all in the past, and now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do to survive this mess. I don’t mean getting out of it since there is no getting out.”

“What do you mean?”

“The stores are toast. I figure I might be able to keep Haviland Street and maybe one other open long enough to use up the supplies we already have, but they’re done when that happens. But that means no income. I’m going to have to find some other job and so are you, just to try to cover the rest of the expenses, which includes paying for the wedding. We may be able to keep the house if we file bankruptcy, but maybe not since we’re under water on it and we might be better off to just walk away from it.”

“It’s going to be that bad?”

“It’s worse. There’s still that million-dollar lawsuit. I don’t know what to do about that, but we could damn well find ourselves paying Royce fifty cents of every dollar we earn for the rest of our lives.”

“But . . . but . . . what about Petra?”

“Right now Petra is the least of our concerns. She’s an adult and she doesn’t need us to take care of her. If she’s smart, she’s probably gone to Royce to beg his forgiveness. He might give it to her, but there’s no way in hell he would give it to us.”

Petra was tired when she got home from work later on in the evening. She was still learning the tricks of stocking shelves, and her feet hurt since she had not yet gotten used to standing on them all day. But still, she was learning the satisfaction of finishing a shelf and looking at it done right. There was more to the job than she had thought.

She walked into the house and back to her room, looking to get out of her store clothes, but she heard noises coming from her father’s bedroom – familiar noises indeed. She even faintly heard Maria moaning, “Oh, Royce, I love that!”

Well, it was about time, she thought. It sounds like both of them are breaking a long dry spell.

Under the circumstances she figured she’d better not make any noise, and she could keep her store clothes on for a while longer; there was no point in intruding.

She went to the refrigerator and pulled out a soft drink, planning on going out on the patio to sit by the pool for a while – maybe a long while, but in this case she didn’t mind. Both of them deserved the time to do what they wanted to.

Just as she was heading for the back door she happened to glance out a side window and saw a car pulling into the driveway. It looked familiar, and it was – it was her mother’s car. Oh, shit, she thought. Not now, of all times. With that, she hustled out the door, trying to close it quietly behind her. “Hello, Maxine,” she said as she walked over to the car.

“Petra! So this is where you decided to hide out,” she replied snidely as she opened the door to get out. “I thought you might run to him when you turned your back on me.”

“Not quite,” Petra replied. “I went to the arms of the father who still loves me after all the stuff you pulled on him.”

“Petra, we need to talk about that, but right now I need to speak to your father.”

“No, you can’t. I won’t let you.”

“Petra, this is important.”

“What he and his girlfriend are doing is important, too. It’s called making love. They deserve the time by themselves and I won’t let you interrupt them. They’ve both had a lot to get over, but now they’re finally doing it.”

“Petra, I need to talk to your father about what he’s doing to us. Do you know how he’s trying to break Milt and me?”

“I know all about it. Well, maybe not all the details, but I know most of them, and it’s something you deserve.”

“Why do you think we deserve it?” her mother replied, her anger clearly rising. “We haven’t done anything to him.”

“The hell you haven’t,” Petra replied, struggling to keep her calm. “Was Daddy the one who was caught in bed with a lover when you were married? Was Daddy the one who left you for someone else? Was Daddy the one who tried to keep us apart? No, that was you.”

“I didn’t mean . . .” Maxine started, realizing that her daughter was being vehement without raising her voice. “Petra, I wanted you to grow up like a normal girl, not split apart between two families. I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just wanted you to grow up normally.”

“So you kept me from him however you could,” she replied snidely. “You signed me up for ball leagues when I was smaller so I wouldn’t be able to see him when I had practice, but when he started coming to the games you pulled me out of there so I wouldn’t have a chance to see him, right?”

“I . . . you weren’t getting what you could get out of the ball leagues,” Maxine protested.

“What? I couldn’t have fun, I couldn’t be with my friends, I couldn’t have good, healthy exercise, and I couldn’t give my daddy a chance to be proud of me? No, you couldn’t have it, so you signed me up for music lessons that I hated instead. You sent me to a residential camp all summer so Daddy couldn’t have any vacation time with me.”

“That wasn’t the reason . . .”

“You know better than that and so do I,” Petra continued. “You complained that it wouldn’t be fair to me to yank me out of camp so I could be with him. I know you did, so don’t deny it.”

“But you were having such fun at camp.”

“I was miserable at camp. I hated it. The only thing I liked about it was when we got to ride horses, and we only got to do that once a week. Even after I was in college, you were the one who said I should get a job as a counselor there so I’d have some work experience. You only wanted me to do it just so I wouldn’t have the chance to be with my daddy, right?”

“It was your choice to do it,” Maxine maintained.

“Yeah, it was my choice to do it, after you bugged me about it every time I turned around. You literally never shut up about it until I caved in. It’s the same thing with the wedding. I didn’t want a big extravaganza of a wedding. I just wanted a little thing, my family and a few friends, and my daddy. But no, you had to have it your way, and you bugged me about it and did stuff behind my back so there was no way I could say no because it had already been done. In spite of everything, I’m glad Barry bugged out so you had to get the whole thing slapped in your face. I just thank God that Barry proved just what kind of a creep he really was.”

“Petra, I just wanted the best for you! Yes, I may have gone a little overboard on the wedding, but it was a chance to make it the perfect wedding. It would have been something to remember all your life.”

“Well, you got your wish on that. I won’t ever forget the embarrassment and humiliation of having to stand at the back of the church and apologize to hundreds of people over what happened. With any kind of luck, Daddy will have made sure that you won’t ever have the money to pull that kind of thing on me again if I ever again decide to get married.”

“Maybe you’re right on some of that,” Maxine replied, backpedaling a little. “But there’s still no reason why your father set out to ruin us.”

“Oh, I think he had every reason in the world. He thought he’d lost the daughter he loved because of all the crap you dumped on him. He lost his family because he came home and found you in bed with Milt. He was working hard, just about killing himself to keep two jobs going, and he needed a little support and compassion to try to make it through. Instead, you kicked him in the gut. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had shot the both of you like that Zimmerman guy did, but he was thinking about what would happen to me, so he didn’t.”

“How do you know that? We never talked about it. I was feeling lonely because he was never at home, and, well, things happened. I probably shouldn’t have done it but it felt so good to feel wanted.”

“So you ruined a happy family for a piece of ass, right? You did it without even thinking about the effects that it had on everyone else, things that have gone on for ten years, right?”

“I never intended for things to work out that way.”

“It never should have happened in the first place,” Petra snarled. “You weren’t thinking about Daddy, you weren’t thinking about me, you weren’t thinking about our family. You were just thinking about yourself, and it ruined things for a lot of people. Don’t you think Daddy had a right to be upset? Don’t you think he had reason to be angry?”

“Well, perhaps, but he seemed so placid and accepting about it.”

“Maxine, that was because he was trying to keep from hurting me. He agreed with you on one thing, that he wanted me to grow up as normally as I could. Well, guess what? You ruined that, too. To do that he had to pile up a lot of anger, a lot of hurt, and keep it inside. It built up for ten years. He tried to keep from letting it pile up, but you know what? He’s in his bedroom with his girlfriend for the first time right now, and she’s the first girlfriend he’s had since you decided you had to have a little piece on the side. Ten years! It’s taken him ten years to get up courage enough to try to love someone again. That was a hell of a lot to steal from him, and I don’t blame him one damn bit for wanting to get back at you and Milt. In fact, I wish him the best of luck, both with his girlfriend and in breaking you every way he can.”

“Yes, but it’s been so long. I can’t see why he has to be doing it now.”

“Daddy and I have talked about it a lot in the last few days. He wanted to do something like what he’s doing long ago, but he decided to hold off until I was out of the line of fire. He said he almost did it when I graduated from high school. You tried to tell me that he’d forgotten about me, that he didn’t care about me. Mom, he bought my car, and he paid for my college, that ought to have told you something different.”

“He was just trying to buy your affection. I told you that.”

“Yes, you’ve told me that time and time again. He had to use money to show love to me because you wouldn’t let him have the time with me to show it. But you know what put him over the top, and made him decide to dump the whole truckload on you at once? It was when you insisted that Milt be the one to walk me down the aisle at my so-called wedding. I told you that I wanted my daddy to do it, but it had to be your way. Hell, you couldn’t allow either of us one bit of consideration.”

“But Milt did so much to raise you, I thought he deserved the honor.”

“Milt didn’t do much to raise me except to let Daddy pay for the big things,” Petra sneered. “Milt isn’t all that bad a guy except for being a man who will have sex with another man’s wife, but he’s not my daddy, he never was and he never will be. I know who my daddy is, I love him and he loves me. That’s a hell of a lot more than Milt ever did.”

“But don’t you think he could give us some consideration . . .”

“Oh, he gave you plenty of consideration, mostly considering how to break you to pay back what he owed you. Now, I think you’d better get back in your car and go away. I don’t want to see you again for a long time.”

“But Petra, I’m your mother, and after all we’ve been through I just can’t let you go. Can’t we work things out?”

“Come and see me in ten years,” she replied. “That’s how long you tried to keep Daddy and me apart. After you and I have been apart that long, I may be willing to be a little more forgiving, but not now. Now, just leave, or I’ll have to call the cops to have you thrown off the property. You know what that’s like, don’t you?

“Oh, that was humiliating! I couldn’t get a ride home, I had to get one of the girls from one of the shops to pick me up, and I’ve still got to go to court.”

“Tough luck. Go find someone who cares. In fact, just go.”

“So where did you go?” Milt asked Maxine when she came in the door.

“I went over to Royce’s,” she said, obviously fighting back tears. “I thought maybe I could beg him to ease up on us.”

“I take it he told you no,” he replied.

“We never got that far. Petra was there and she wouldn’t let me see him. She said he was too busy making love to his girlfriend to bother with me. She wouldn’t let me in, so I never saw him.”

“I could have told you it wouldn’t work. He’s got us between a rock and a hard spot, and he knows it. The only reason he would have gone to the trouble in the first place would be to get us there, so why would he let us up easy?”

“Petra . . . Petra told me that she doesn’t want to see me again. Royce has filled her mind full of every sort of bad thing that he could. All I wanted was for her to be a normal girl, and he’s ruined it. Now she’s living with him and calling him ‘Daddy.’ Milt, I don’t know what I should do.”

“I told you before that Petra is the least of our problems right now. Let her go for a while, and then maybe she won’t be quite so angry.”

“You might be right. I didn’t see much chance to talk sense into her. Milt, there was nothing I could say that would make her listen to me.”

“Like I said, we’re going to have to put her out of our minds. We have much worse problems we have to deal with.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “I was thinking that we might be able to keep the Haviland Street store open for a while, but it’s going to be a struggle as long as Royce is undercutting us on price so badly. I thought maybe we could store some of the fixtures and open up somewhere else, but that’s going to be an expensive proposition, and we’re not going to have the money and no chance of getting it. But then I realized that even if I did, it’s a losing proposition.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because if we open up anywhere else in this city, what’s to keep him from opening another one of those damn Sandy’s Super Sub stores close to us and undercutting us there, too? He’s done this much, so he can probably do it again if he wants to. The only thing I can think of to do is to get out of the sub business in this town altogether. Maybe we can go somewhere else and open up. The alternative is for us to get jobs, and he’ll still be after us with that damn breach of contract lawsuit of his.”

“There’s no hope?”

“None that I can see. Maybe things will look different in the morning when I can get a look at the books down at Haviland Street. There might be something there I’m missing, but I doubt it. I’ll tell you what, I’m not sure how bad I want to try to find a job in this town and have to be looking over my shoulder for him to wreck us again. The more I think about it, the more I think the best idea is to get out of his sight.”

“What do you mean by that? Move away?”

“Yeah, maybe down on the Gulf Coast or somewhere, at least some place where he’s not likely to be looking for us. We are going to play hell about trying to open a sub shop down there with our credit rating tanked, which it will be if we lose the house and leave a lot of unpaid bills and a bankruptcy behind us. But I know subs, so maybe I can get a job in a sub shop or something.”

“I don’t want to have to move away from Petra.”

“Maxine, I don’t see much choice.”

Petra noticed that her father and Maria were rather cuddly when they came out onto the patio sometime later. Wow, that must have really been a good one, she thought. They deserve it, both of them.

They were surprised to see her sitting there in a lounge chair. “Petra,” her father said, “I didn’t know you were home. I thought you were on until nine.”

“Schedule change,” she shrugged, although her smile was wider than her face, if such a thing were possible. “I got off at six instead. I got home and saw you were busy, so I just decided to sit out here and read.”

“Petra, we, um . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” she grinned. “Although you may think of me as your little girl, I really am an adult and what you were doing doesn’t bother me so long as you were enjoying yourselves. You don’t have to hide it from me.”

“This is going to take some getting used to,” he shook his head and sat down crosswise on a nearby lounge chair; Maria sat down next to him. “It’s not the way it used to be,” he went on.

“No, it isn’t,” she smiled. “By the way, Maxine dropped by.”

“I didn’t know that.” He blushed a little and reached for words: “I guess I must not have . . . um, been paying attention. What did she want?”

“Oh, she wanted a lot of things, like to get things back to the way they used to be. She wanted to beg you to let up on Milt and her. Apparently they just figured out what’s going on and that you’re the one behind it. I told her that they didn’t have a chance. You took ten years of shit from them and the time had come to get even.”

“It took them long enough, but then I’ve been told that Milt was on the Zimmerman murder case jury, so maybe he’s been out of the loop.”

“I didn’t ask. Maxine is all too used to getting her way with me, and she was really frustrated when she couldn’t get close this time. It’s not done all the way yet, but I think you’ve done a pretty good job in getting even with them for both of us.”

Royce shook his head. “I really would rather not have done it that way, but they weren’t going to get the message unless I got their full attention first. I really should have done something about it years ago but the time was never right.”

“I told Maxine something like that. In fact, I told her a lot of things she didn’t want to hear, and she didn’t like hearing them. I don’t want to sound vindictive, but it felt good to finally be able to say them.”

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