“Is this the one you’re looking for?” she asked.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t see it,” Richard said, a little sheepishly, as he searched through the drawers of his dresser. “Set it aside for me, will you? I want to wear it tomorrow.”
Clare hung the suit back on the rack in the closet and retraced her steps down the hall to Peter’s room, picking up the book and settling herself once again on the bed beside her son.
“How come Daddy couldn’t find his own suit?” the ten-year-old wanted to know.
“Sometimes, grown-ups have a hard time seeing what’s right in front of them,” his mother replied, smiling gently and tapping the tip of his nose with her index finger. And then she began to read again from the place where they had stopped.
***
“How was your day?” Clare asked an hour later, as husband and wife sat in the dining room, at opposite ends of the banquet-sized mahogany dinner table, finishing their after-dinner coffee. It was a beautiful room, large and airy, as were all the rooms in the house, this particular one boasting rich mahogany wainscoting and velvet-flocked wallpaper. It was used mostly for special occasions, or when Richard was home for meals.
Clare had spent her first two years in Laurelhurst remodeling and redecorating the house under her husband’s watchful eye. There was nothing wrong with the way the place looked when they moved in, but Richard didn’t want to live in the former owner’s shadow. He wanted his own stamp put on everything.
“About the same as always,” Richard replied to her question. “Busy, frustrating, productive.”
“That’s good,” she said brightly. “Well, the productive part, anyway.”
“Thompson’s still giving us problems in manufacturing. I’ve told him he either straightens it out or we move the whole damn thing to Taiwan.”
Nicolaidis Industries was a conglomerate of half a dozen or so companies, sitting on the cutting edge of the medical technology field and running the gamut from equipment to pharmaceuticals, and from research and development to production. In 1987, the Nicolaidis Building had added its black glass profile to the Seattle skyline. And since 1992, the Nicolaidis Foundation had been responsible for donating millions of dollars to benefit those less fortunate around the world.
It was all the vision of Clare’s father, a Greek by birth, who had immigrated to America at the age of seventeen without a penny in his pocket. Gus Nicolaidis began the business with a five-thousand-dollar loan, and proceeded to build and nurture it into a corporate success story. And then, ten years ago, two years before succumbing to lung cancer, Gus handed the reins, if not the horse, over to his assistant, the husband of his only child. Richard promptly took the company public, and was now close to tripling its profits.
“Move it out of Alabama?” Clare asked. One of the things her father always prided himself on was the fact that the business was one hundred percent American -- conceived in America, operated in America, produced in America -- his tribute to the country that had taken him in and allowed him to live free and prosper.
“Why not?” her husband responded. “Every corporation with any smarts is moving production out of the country these days -- and very profitably, too, I might add. Your father’s keep-it-in-America idea has been out of touch with reality for decades. And it’s been killing our bottom line for years.”
“Well, I guess you know best,” she murmured. “But maybe we could talk about it a little before you make a final decision.”
“Yes, I think it’s fair to say that I do know best,” he assured her, doing everything he could to hide his irritation, because he didn’t need her on his back about this, at least, certainly not right now, when the plans were so far along. “But of course we can talk about it, if you like. I’ll have Henry put some numbers together for you.”
Henry Hartstone was the corporation’s chief financial officer. Before Richard, he had worked for her father for many years, and Clare both liked and trusted him.
“You haven’t mentioned the trial runs lately,” she said. “How are they going?”
Richard brightened at that. “So far, the results look terrific,” he told her. “I’ll know better in a couple of weeks when I get out to the plant and see firsthand. But we’ve got so much riding on this that I can’t conceive of anything going wrong.”
“Well then, nothing will,” she assured him.
Richard smiled. He had full lips, white teeth that were only slightly crooked, and a devastating smile that, even after twenty years, still made Clare’s heart thump a little faster.
“From your mouth to the industry’s ears,” he said.
They fell silent then, and for a few moments all that could be heard was the clink of china cups against china saucers.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” she said, after a while, “but I do believe I had my first real compliment in years from Glenn Thornburgh this afternoon.”
“Oh, before I forget,” Richard announced, as though she hadn’t spoken, “I won’t be home until late tomorrow night.”
Clare looked at him in surprise. “What?”
“Mason’s coming into town, and Doug and I have to take a dinner meeting with him.”
George Mason was one of Richard’s up and coming research wizards out of the California plant. Douglas Potter was Nicolaidis’ vice president in charge of research and development.
“Richard, tomorrow night is the Children’s Hospital benefit,” she reminded him.
He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I forgot,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t put this meeting off. I’ve been trying to get Mason up here for over a month, and I finally just flat out told him to make it happen. Look,” he added, as though it were a novel idea, “why don’t I get James to fill in? He ought to fit into my tux if he doesn’t have his own.”
It would hardly be the first time in the three years he had worked
