Friday's Child

“What’s this?” Dierdre Watson asked as she peered at her executive assistant across the wide expanse of her desk.

“It’s a check,” he said, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

Dierdre rolled her eyes. “I see that.”

“But it’s a bank check,” he said. “Made out to you. Personally. You’re going to have to deposit it yourself. Accounting can’t do it.”

“Okay, then.” She shoved aside the draft prospectus before her and took a second look. “So? What is ‘Moluccan Cloud Tech’? Why are they sending me $20,000?”

The assistant wiped an eyebrow. “We don’t know. That company isn’t in our files. I’ve got a call in to the bank.”

“Twenty grand wouldn’t even cover the lobby rug,” Dierdre scoffed. “Take care of it, will you?”

“Uh…”

“There’s more? I really don’t have time for this.”

“It came with a note,” he said quickly, handing her a yellow piece of paper.

“ ‘Thank you, Mother, for letting me live,’ ” Dierdre read out loud. There was no signature.

She flinched, then recovered.

But the air in her office was suddenly thinner. She looked at the handwriting: jagged, with spiky lines, in black ballpoint. She shook her head to clear the memories.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said sharply, drawing in oxygen. “Is someone trying to scam me?”

Her assistant looked lost. “I’ll get accounting on it,” he said. “Maybe the lawyers, too?”

“Fine. Let me know,” she said in dismissal, dropping her prospectus proposal on top of the check.

But the numbers couldn’t hold her attention. Dierdre felt her 17-year-old self fighting to emerge from beneath the many layers of her executive cover.

In her mind, she was back in East St. Louis, back in that horrible hospital, signing her son away that rainy Friday. She could almost smell the sickly maternity ward and see the annoyed nurses waiting to move the next rounded belly into her bed. She never named him, not even in her mind, just like she never knew the name of his dust-in-the-wind father.

When she left the hospital, she decided to draw the curtain on her past. She left East St. Louis and moved in with an older cousin, Jessa, in Chicago. When Jessa threatened to kick her out if she didn’t get a job, Dierdre started stealing and then auctioning off some of her cousin’s knick-knacks online.

Soaking up the tactics of others online, Dierdre achieved a few small but satisfying successes. Without trying very hard, she learned how to use language and photos and positioning to extract higher prices, and stumbled into the market for Hummel figurines, a much more lucrative field. Other high-priced objects lured her, and her first ledger, a little black notebook with gridded lines that Jessa had given her, soon became four, six, then ten little black notebooks.

In two years, Dierdre could afford to rent an apartment and even hired a part-time assistant to keep track of inventory. Her own website, then her own company, followed over the years. Riding a crest of interest in arts and crafts, Dierdre unexpectedly found herself attracting venture capital. Her business plans were sufficiently vague about her careless youth, and no one was the wiser.

Now approaching her fifties, Dierdre delighted in her performance as a ruthless CEO who could afford to sneer at $20,000. Besides her Lincoln Park condo and her fluffy Samoyed dog, there wasn’t much else to fill up her life. Jessa had broken ties with her years earlier after Dierdre refused to give her money, and Dierdre avoided relationships with men – slippery, faithless cowards in her eyes. She measured her worth in millions of dollars now, and was gratified with the results.

Dierdre’s assistant came up empty-handed, as did her accountants and lawyers. No record of a company called Moluccan Cloud Tech existed as far as they could determine. The $20,000 check disappeared beneath other papers on her desk, and she poured herself into planning a corporate expansion.

Dierdre met Ekon Anders a few months later in the boardroom of his investment bank in L.A., where he and his team were evaluating her Chicago company for a public stock offering. After an intense morning of calculations, the group adjourned. Dierdre and Ekon sat alone at the mahogony table while the aides made copies of various documents. His associates lingered across the room at the coffee urn.

“You’re riding a rocket,” Ekon told Dierdre, pouring a bottle of Evian. “Your business is in the right place at the right time. As long as the stock market holds out, of course.”

Dierdre flipped her braid and smiled. “I’m not worried. My numbers are solid. Investors will see that.”

“Confidence helps,” he allowed with a grin.

She stretched her legs and ambled over to the wall of windows looking down on Olive Street, where the daylight was splintered by tall buildings into pockets of blinding sunshine and dim shadow.

“You guys are so spoiled out here with the weather,” she said. “How can you have Christmas when it doesn’t even snow?”

“I do miss the winter sometimes,” Ekon said. “I’m a Midwesterner, too, you know. Grew up in Illinois. Came out for school, met a girl, got married, never left.”

She looked at him closely: maybe in his late thirties, well-groomed and sharp in his expensive suit, with deep-set eyes and long fingers like hers.

“Do you have children?” she asked tactfully, taking her seat again.

He laughed. “I have a zoo. We have three foster kids right now, and my wife rehabilitates damaged animals. So it’s always an adventure – three-legged cats, birds with eye injuries, a couple of 12-year-olds, a teenager. They all have their own kinds of pain.”

Dierdre looked astonished. “Good lord, could you be any more of a saint? Jeez, I can't even be bothered to recycle my trash.”

Ekon shook his head, but smiled. “Don’t give me any strokes. In a way, I’m paying off a bit of a debt. But I love it – outside of this building, my life is a lot richer than crunching numbers and forecasting investment returns, believe me.”

Her face was still fixed with skepticism.

“Oh, sure, it’s hard sometimes,” he went on, tapping the table with his fingers, “when everyone in the house is sulking or slamming doors.

“But then one of the kids brings home a great report card, or somebody kicks ass in track, or a bird learns to fly again, whatever. We all celebrate – my god, our family parties are a riot. A joyful noise, as they say. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Dierdre was quiet.

“I have a dog,” she finally offered.

“No kids?”

“No. No. Absolutely not. How could I have gotten this far with a kid hanging around my neck?” she chortled.

Ekon didn’t say anything, but she sensed the room fill with a leaden weight.

“Okay, okay,” Dierdre scowled. “You did it. I guess you showed me up on that one.”

He shrugged, looking slightly bewildered.

The aides returned with thick folders full of fresh copies. Dierdre shook off her frown and made the rounds with gracious farewells and handshakes. They would all meet again in two weeks, this time in Chicago, to seal the deal.

Rather than celebrating her milestone, Dierdre found herself in a haze of annoyance in the long elevator ride down.

Would she have – could she have – built a business from scratch if she were raising a son? What would it have taken for her to keep the baby? She knew she was strong and determined – in the business world, at least. But as a 17-year-old, she had caved in a flash.

And why did he send her money after all these years? For the first time, she allowed herself to think about this child, her son, as an adult. Where was he? Did he have his own family? Did he have the same unruly hair she did? This Ekon guy was probably near the same age as her son. Was her son as anchored and selfless? Did he ever think about her?

Emerging into a lively lunch scene on Olive Street, Dierdre lingered near the revolving doors and watched the parade of humanity, feeling its hum of life and living.

She didn’t need that $20,000. But someone else could use it. When she got back to Chicago, she would find the check and get the money to the adoption agency that gave her son a second chance.

And maybe they would help her find him.