Dick stares at the two birthday cards on his desk in front of him, still unable to decide: Taylor Swift or the teddy bear? The Taylor card sings, but he can’t recall if Kiley idolizes or despises the singer. He spent an hour in the Hallmark store trying to find the perfect card to welcome his daughter into teenagedom. Finally, the salesclerk took pity on him. She asked Kiley’s age, then handed him the Taylor Swift card. The woman frowned at his teddy bear choice. Dick bought both.
He smiles at the teddy bear card. It reminds him of the stuffed bear Kiley slept with when she was a toddler, a brown raggedy animal, half an ear gone and only one black button eye.
It’s hard to believe so much time has passed.
His alarm beeps, and he puts the cards back in his briefcase, grabs his cigarettes, and walks from the cubicle. With a nod to Graham, who is at his workbench in the lab, he continues to the stairs, then climbs the three flights to the roof of Pentco Pharmaceuticals.
Squinting against the brightness, he walks to the parapet, lights a cigarette, and takes a deep drag. The soothing nicotine fills his lungs, giving him his third heady buzz of the day. As the smoke drifts, he looks at the brilliant blue sky stretched to the Santa Ana Mountains in the distance and thinks God must hold a special place in His twisted, sadistic heart especially for him. For a month, he’s waited for the steely gray clouds to clear, and now, here it is, a day beautiful as the maker can make, and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
He glances over the parapet at the concrete below then back at the mountains and sighs. Man plans, and God laughs, his dad used to say.
The thought occurred to him on a morning similar to this but the sun obscured. There was nothing particularly memorable about the moment except for the certainty. Nothing to look forward to, and the best of his life behind him. He might have done it right then but didn’t like the idea of leaving on such a gloomy day. He wanted baseball weather, blue skies and sun. But like a cruel joke, the past month set records for consecutive days of overcast skies and rain, Southern California dark and stormy as Seattle.
He lifts his face and sneers at the blinding blue heavens, then lowers it back to the sidewalk. Give or take, it’s about thirty feet. A thin hedge runs beside the strip of concrete, the bushes trimmed each Tuesday by a pair of brothers, Eduardo and Armando. The landscape team has been with the company longer than Dick. He remembers meeting them his first day, his boss at the time introducing him as the new hotshot chemist who was going to find a cure for allergies.
He scoffs and flicks the ashes of his cigarette over the edge, watching as they float like snow to the ground. His own fall, accounting for acceleration, will take less than a second. Which means, in less time than it takes to inhale a breath, the toil of thirty-nine years will be over.
He studies the spot he expects to land and considers again the awful possibility of failing, of waking up to people oohing and ahhing and tsking over him. The odds are slim, the physics of survival nearly impossible, but bad luck has always had a way of finding him.
With a last glance at the stunning blue sky, he crushes the cigarette beneath his toe and returns to the stairs, a hard wish in his heart that the weather holds until Monday.