So, like any competent executives, they pretended to have the answers, pretended these meetings were essential to operations and then drowned their dread in booze. Allusions to plans were discussed, but no one ever wanted to take the reins. In the end, all the money spent on parading everyone out to these meetings resulted in a change of interdepartmental language at best: refer to this as that and refer to that as this and somehow profit margins will increase. The structure always remained the same and business remained the same – failing.
Their auto insurance line had been tough lately. They were losing money big-time. The new cars were all now equipped with rear-end cameras, sensors, automatic braking, alert systems. The average car now contained computers more advanced than anything people had in their homes ten years ago. The cost of the cars went up. The cost of insurance claims went up. Now your average fender bender involved replacing a myriad of cameras and sensors, rather than just a piece of plastic. But, of course, no one wanted to pay for it. The insurance industry was plagued by pirates, little companies that operated out of strip-mall offices or – even worse – online, with virtually no overhead. Not like the millions it took to keep this tower running. These pirates offered minimum-cost insurance plans that undercut the bigger companies, deflated the prices, left every customer looking for less. Of course, those pirate companies came with risks, but most people don’t factor in the risk of your piddly, little, no-name insurance company not paying out a claim. Most people don’t plan for the accidents. They just go about their lives confident that today they will wake up and go through their usual routine unencumbered by the possibility of death and destruction. Until it’s too late, and then they’re left holding the bag, so to speak.
And now he was holding the bag, too. Conner’s income was tied to his performance, which was great in the good times and horrible in the bad. He and Madison planned for the good. Everything in their lives had seemed on the upswing. Now, for the second year in a row, the returns for Parson’s were coming in low, and that left him in a bad spot. Conner had managed to squirrel away enough money to make up the difference for a while, but now he was looking down the barrel of a financial gun and the hammer was dropping.
Naturally he kept Madison in the dark. She was from a family of ‘means’ – as her father would refer to it. Where Conner was from, they were just called ‘rich’. She had never wanted for anything, and Conner had to admit, it was part of his attraction to her in the beginning. Seeing her house, the way she lived, the way her parents lived. He hoped that success would rub off on him, that he would be absorbed somehow into a social level where he’d be insulated from situations like this.
Madison had always wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, something that was virtually unheard of these days. But she wanted to emulate her own upbringing for their children. She had gone to college and become a nurse. Her father’s world of finance had no appeal for her. Madison didn’t want to know where the money came from; she just wanted to live her life as she saw fit. She left the nursing job – an easy $60,000 per year – after Brent was born and stayed home with Conner’s awkward and often veiled assurance that everything would be fine. They bought nice cars. They entertained friends and family on holidays. He had to buy a $10,000 lawnmower just to do the yard, which was two acres of beautifully arranged ‘butterfly garden’ engineered by the previous owners.
Madison was a great mother; he couldn’t have asked for anything more. She treated their two children – and the third unborn – as a full-time job with the utmost alarm and seriousness. Every cough or sneeze or symptom other parents would dismiss warranted a trip to the doctor’s office. The medical copays grew, and Conner’s patience decreased. Now he felt on the precipice of a fall and it was getting hard to breathe. How do you tell the woman you love that the easy ride was over? The dreams of that perfect, upper-middle-class existence might be coming to an end? The penalty payments on the mortgage would continue to rack up. How do you choose between food and housing? The food you need now, and, well, the housing will have to wait. Just keep the lights on, keep telling yourself somehow the rest of it will work out. But in truth, he was trapped by the life he’d built. They all were.
And yet he was struggling, killing himself, to hold on to that trap, to stay alive in it just a little longer. Once, while hunting in his early twenties, Conner happened upon a coyote with
