One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (2 page)

Finally, he began having affairs, and signaling that it didn’t matter to him whether she put up with it or not, he didn’t even try to hide them.

While Rob was getting his share of sex, she was getting less and less. He started coming home later and later after his late news shift, and she knew it wasn’t because he was working late. He fell into bed in those early morning hours, obviously sated by whosever bed he’d visited on the way home, and was snoring before she could fully waken to suggest a little attention for herself.

Amy had never been good at voicing her sexual desires, anyway—not even the very desire itself. At first she tried to show him, snuggling up to him in the morning, throwing off her nightgown and pressing her naked body against his. At first, the more he ignored her, the more she tried. Finally, he started sleeping on the couch to avoid her advances, and she knew it was over.

It was actually a relief when the station in LA started courting him; she wasn’t going to make another move without knowing what she was doing with her life, and he wasn’t going to turn down the biggest break of his life to wait for her. Not as long as he was getting all the female attention a young man could ask for.

She knew he would be gone soon and she could start focusing on what she wanted to be when she grew up.

~

The phone rang, jerking Amy out of her reverie and making her spill her wine.

“I am a klutz,” she mumbled to herself. “Katie was right.”

She hopped off the bar stool, sopped up the liquid with a dishtowel, and threw it in the hamper next to the trash can before she picked up the phone. By the time she could focus on the caller ID, it had stopped ringing. She hit “Return call.”

“Hi mom,” she said, sitting back down at the bar. “Sorry, I was sopping up one of my messes and couldn’t get to the phone in time.”

“You always were a klutz.”

“Why does everyone have to constantly remind me of that?” Amy laughed. “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to tell you I saw Rob on the news last night. He looks really great. Are you sure you two can’t work things out?”

“Maybe I don’t want to work things out with him.”

“Why not? You should! He is so good for you.”

“Good for me how?”

“He makes you look successful!”

Amy figured that’s what she meant. Her mother had been disappointed by Amy for some time, and she had a high regard for the importance of finding a man with a good income.

When Amy’s father died in his early forties in a Colorado mining accident, her mother sat down with her and laid out their situation in unambiguous terms. Unbeknownst to either of them, her father’s life insurance policy had been terminated for non-payment years before his death. Apparently, he had found something better to spend the money on—most likely his gambling habit, Rachel grumbled to her daughter. But even though she wouldn’t be able to help Amy pay her way through college and pave her way to success, she was confident Amy would use her brains and her common sense and succeed anyway.

Rachel remarried and moved to L.A. with Any’s new stepfather back in the late 1990s, just as Amy was entering her sophomore year high school. Amy had opted to stay in Denver with her grandmother rather than change schools in the middle of her high school tenure. By the time Amy and Rob moved to Palm Springs, finally close enough that mother and daughter could see each other regularly, her mother had gone from believing Amy would be a success whatever she did to believing she was destined for failure.

Amy had no idea what changed her mother’s opinion of her destiny. Perhaps it was the fact that even though she was nearly thirty, Amy still hadn’t settled on a career or made any measurable progress up any kind of employment ladder. Or perhaps it was that in the vicinity of Rob’s bright light, Amy’s talents no longer looked that luminescent. In any case, Rachel had gone from delivering pep talks that motivated her daughter to ladling out criticism that undermined her confidence.

“Mom, we aren’t getting back together,” Amy said. “Why would Rob give up all those bimbos hanging on his arms and come back to me? There’s absolutely nothing in it for him.”

“But doesn’t he love you? Don’t you still love him?”

The question had become tedious and beside the damn point, Amy had told her mother at least three dozen times.

“No,” she said flatly once more. “No. There is no love lost here. We quit sleeping together at least a year before he left. And it wasn’t good for me for a long time before that.”

“That’s your problem!” her mother exclaimed. “You young women confuse sex with love. You still loved each other. And I don’t really want to know about your you-know-what.”

“You mean my orgasms.” Amy sighed. She knew where her reticence to talk openly about sex came from. “Why can’t you just call it what it is. Why is it always ‘you-know-what?’?”

“Nice girls don’t talk about those things,” her mother scolded.

“Mom, I’m not going to talk about it with you, that’s for sure,” Amy shook her head at the phone. “Now did you call just to torment me about how good-looking you think Rob is, or did you have something else on your mind?”

“You sound awfully sharp today, Amy,” her mother replied, not answering her question. “Did something happen?”

“Well, yes, but it’s not important.”

“You can tell your mother,” Rachel cooed. Amy rolled her eyes. Her mother always tried to bring out the compassionate mother act. If she’d been such a loving mother, she would never have moved away to L.A. in the middle of her daughter’s high school years, Amy thought. But they’d been over that argument a thousand times and Amy wasn’t going to revisit it.

“It was nothing,” Amy said. “I just saw a dog get hit in front of the café today, and it’s still on my nerves.” There was no reason to mention Mr. Brown Eyes.

“Oh.” Clearly that wasn’t interesting or personal enough for her mother to pry into. “So how is the job hunt coming?”

“Is that what you called about?”

“I guess. I just wanted to know how you are doing. And to see if you want to come to L.A. for Robert’s birthday party at the end of the month.”

“Uhhh …” Amy didn’t mean for it to come out as a whine, but it did. Rachel knew that Amy wasn’t fond of her step-father, and it wasn’t just because he had moved her mother to L.A. way back when. Amy found him to be a boor and a blow-hard. What her mother saw in him she couldn’t fathom.

Robert had been an insurance agent who sold policies to labor unions, and he had the gruff manner of someone who’d surrounded himself with Teamsters and IBEW bosses his whole life. Amy imagined there weren’t a lot of women at the heads of those organizations back in his day, and he’d never developed a talent at treating women as anything but a “pretty little thing” hanging on a union boss’s arm. He had retired ten years earlier, and now there was no chance a new generation of union heads was going to help him get up to speed with modern gender politics.

“Did you say no, Amy?” Her mother knew how to sound hurt on the phone. She’d been doing it for years.

“No, I didn’t say ‘no.’ I said ‘Oh.’”

“Is that an answer?”

“Look, mom, I’ll think about it. I’ll see what’s going on. What’s the date?”

“The twenty-eighth. I can’t imagine you have anything going on,” her mother retorted. “Aren’t you still working weekdays at that dive?”

“Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t call it a dive.” This was not a new topic either. Did they ever have anything nice to say to each other anymore? “We have dozens of regular customers who love to come in and who are glad the place hasn’t changed.”

“Yeah.” Her mother snickered. “It hasn’t changed in about forty years. It’s not one of those places in Palm Springs that thinks it can still capitalize on the old Rat Pack mystique, is it? I mean Formica doesn’t really speak ‘Frank Sinatra’ to me.”

Amy couldn’t help but laugh. That was one sentiment she shared with her mother: the time for reliving and celebrating the old Rat Pack days was well over, but too many establishments in town didn’t yet realize it.

“No, mom,” she said. “We don’t have a single picture of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. or Frank Sinatra on our walls. But, okay. I’ll look into coming over for Robert’s birthday. Just promise me
he
won’t play Frank Sinatra on his fancy stereo system while I’m there if I do.”

Now it was her mother’s turn to laugh.

The last thought Amy had before falling asleep that night was of the dog. Somehow, talking with her mother had helped her push the guy in the BMW to the back of her mind. The last thing she needed was another man to distract her from moving forward with her life and proving her mother wrong. But, the dog was a different matter.

She hoped the little guy was okay.

The front of Rick’s Armani suit was covered with dog hair, but otherwise, neither he nor his car had suffered much from the run-in with the dog on his way to work. The only problem was how to get the hair off his clothes before his meeting with the bankers that morning.

Why had he decided to turn down that side street that morning instead of the main route he usually took on his two-mile drive to the office? He had no answer. It couldn’t be that he was fated to hit that dog and run into that tall, pretty brunette. Rick didn’t believe in a teleological universe; things didn’t happen for a reason. There were reasons things happened, sure, but that was an entirely different matter.

Still, he couldn’t get his mind off of her. Why had he never seen her before? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and he was pretty sure he knew just about every available female in Palm Springs—the straight ones anyway. He wasn’t necessarily fond of partying, but his role as his mother’s only son and his business as a developer of small hotels, condos and single-family homes required a lot of schmoosing with builders, sub-contractors, and their girlfriends and their girlfriends’ girlfriends.

And, those girlfriends were always trying to set him up. Ever since his divorce a year before from Beautiful Betty—that was his nickname for his wife, even before they were married—they had been hounding him to get to know someone they knew would be perfect for him. Just perfect!

Beautiful Betty was indeed beautiful. What was sarcastic about the name wasn’t that it wasn’t true. It was that beauty was all there was to her. He had fallen for her for two very good reasons: great sex and the fact that she wasn’t at all interested in his business. Those had been his two most important criteria, after good-looking, of course, and she had definitely fit the bill.

“Good morning, Mr. D’Matrio!” Rick’s receptionist called out as he pushed through the front door of his modest office building.

“And to you, Sandra,” he said, nodding stiffly in her direction and hurrying into his office. Sandra was bright as well as cheerful, but he was still a little miffed at her for refusing to take the job as his administrative assistant when Gloria left. Sandra said the job supporting him was one that took far more than forty hours a week, and would require her to be on call virtually every waking hour—even some non-waking ones. She said that was why Gloria had quit. Sandra had better things to do with her life than support his obsessive work habits twenty-four seven. He could tell that she had tried to say it nicely, but the effect was the same: he was without an assistant, and that made him grouchy.

Rick closed his office door behind him and dug through his office junk drawer for a pet-hair roller. He hadn’t used one since his own dog, Cletus, had died two years before, but he was sure there were still a couple of sticky rolls at the back of the drawer.

He located the blue plastic handle and pulled off the outer sticky sheet, still covered with Cletus’s long brown hairs. He fought back against the sting in his eyes as the sight of it brought back memories of that faithful mutt. Didn’t that dog he just delivered to the emergency vet remind him of Cletus too?

“No time for such silliness,” he reprimanded himself, running the sticky roller up and down on his suit. “I need to focus on my meeting.”

“Did you say something, Mr. Ellington?” Sandra’s voice crackled over the intercom on his desk. Rick realized he must have left it on the evening before after his quick conversation with her right before she left for the day. He was always doing that. Someday, it was going to bite him in the ass.

“No,” he called out. “Sorry. Just talking to myself.”

Besides, the intruding thoughts of the dog were nothing compared with the way the image of that waitress kept flashing across his mind. What was it about her? He shook his head again and plopped down behind his desk. He flipped off his intercom microphone.

“Now, let’s get to work.”

The bankers were coming to discuss financing of a small six-room inn he was hoping to develop out of a run-down little motel just south of downtown. There shouldn’t be any problem securing the loan; he had enough retained earnings to do it himself, but he liked spreading the risk by leveraging his bets with other people’s money. Not that there was much risk these days. Palm Springs’ tourist industry was about as healthy as it had ever been.

Rick loved this business. It wasn’t so much the design aspects of the remodeling as the satisfaction of making something out of nothing—turning something old and forgotten into something fresh and inviting. He felt like he was contributing to the community and doing it on his own—with no help from his very successful mother.

Of course, he never talked like that with his bankers. With them, it was all about the money, the return, the payback, the track record. They needed to see him as the hard-nosed businessman they could trust with their depositor’s money, a man who would never do something because it was right or beautiful or because it protected a piece of history or a legacy. They wanted to work with a man who only did things that made a profit.

He’d been lucky; his timing was perfect. Ever since this Palm Springs end of the Coachella Valley had become the hot end—thanks largely to the influx of a mostly male, gay population with impeccable taste and aesthetic values—his business had boomed, that is, the business of turning old, musty, mid-century motels that were scattered around the outskirts of downtown into modern, classy, architecturally authentic inns for the rich, mostly L.A. crowd.

It hadn’t started all of the sudden. There had always been a quiet, nice-paced, moderately priced business at these inns—ones like the Villa Royale and the Hotel California.  But suddenly, the concept had exploded and now the profits to be made in these projects had mushroomed. 

Developers had created the south-end Ace Hotel—basically a remodeled Howard Johnson’s—and the Saguaro Inn—out of an ugly old Holiday Inn—a few years ago. Those retrofitted hovels had caught on with the L.A. and European trendsetters, as well as the young hoards that came to Palm Springs every spring for the Coachella music fest.  And, now everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Rick’s remodeling and construction business, Buen Dia, had thrived, profited and expanded in this environment, and he now needed help running it. Not only did he need to replace his departed assistant Gloria, he also was looking for a chief operating officer who could manage most of the day-to-day development activities. He also needed the time it took to find them both, but there never seemed to be enough. 

“Mr. D’Matrio, your appointment is here,” Sandra’s voice crackled over the intercom again.

“Fine,” Rick said, reaching up to straighten his tie. “Please show them in.”

~

By the time Rick was able to sink back into the driver’s seat of his 10-year-old BMW Z3 and leave the office parking lot it was nearly seven in the evening. He would have worked later, but he knew that the emergency vet where he’d dropped off the injured dog that morning was supposed to close at seven. He wanted to check in on the mutt before they locked the doors.

As he pulled out into the sparse Palm Canyon Drive traffic, he remembered how much he loved the quick acceleration of the little two-seater. He could have bought any one of the new Mercedes or Porsche models, or the updated Z4. But he loved the old-fashioned aggressive styling of the Z3. And, it still had only about 20,000 miles on it, thanks to his short commute. Most days, when he didn’t have to dress up for bankers and it wasn’t raining, he didn’t even drive to work; he rode his bike. As seldom as it rained in the valley, he had put more miles on his two-wheeler than on his Beemer.

He quickly pulled through the gears, driving much faster than he should have. It was such a pleasure to drive through town before the snowbirds arrived and the streets filled up with clueless drivers trying to go the wrong way on downtown streets.

“Mr. D’Matrio!” the front-desk clerk at the vet’s office greeted him. “I’m pleased to tell you that Busker is doing just fine!”

“Busker?” Rick was surprised that the twenty-something desk clerk recognized him. He’d only been there once—that morning when he brought in the injured shepherd. He was also surprised that she was still on the job nine hours later. Maybe she’d be a good candidate for his admin position.

“Yeah, he’s such a sweetheart, we had to give him a name.” She smiled sweetly, and Rick surmised she was fully aware of his recently acquired single status. His divorce had been a prominent topic with the town’s gossipy bloggers. He was now considered one of the most eligible bachelors, not only for his good looks, but also for his success in business.

“Of course, you can change it once you take him home,” she said.

“What makes you think I’m going to keep him?” Rick adopted his gruff, business façade, the better to ward off any temptation to flirt with the youngster. He didn’t need that kind of trouble. He changed his mind about her employability; he needed a new admin and a new chief operating officer, not a new girlfriend, especially one this young.

“I don’t know how you could resist,” the clerk chirped in a sing-song voice. It was getting more high-pitched as time went on. He grimaced. “You want to visit him?”

Rick had planned just to stop by, give the clerk his credit card, ask about the mutt’s condition, and leave so he could finish some paperwork before his early bedtime. But the temptation to visit the sweet-faced patient was too strong.

“Yes, of course,” he said, pretending that was his intent all along. “Where is he?”

Rick knew it was dangerous to get attached to the mutt. He was a sucker for any dog that reminded him of Cletus, and this one had a special hold on him. For one thing, he’d been responsible for the broken leg, and for another, it was his run-in with the dog that had filled his head with images of the brunette waitress all day.

He followed the clerk back through a door into a warehouse-like room full of dogs and cats in metal cages. Their arrival was met by a cacophony of dog barks—high-pitched yips, low growls, sharp retorts, and high whines. How all of these animals, as dissimilar as they were, recognized each other as members of the same species had always amazed Rick. Cletus had accepted both the miniature dachshund and the Irish wolfhound in their old neighborhood as his close relatives, at first challenging them each for dominance and later greeting them with enthusiasm as interracial buddies.

“Hey, sweetheart,” the clerk cooed as they approached “Busker” at the end of a long row of cages. “How are you feeling?”

The dog looked tired and sore, and Rick felt guilty for his role in the poor creature’s pain. On the cage door, a three-by-five index card carried the name D’Matrio, a date, and a designation of the breed as “shepherd mix.” “Busker” had been added along the bottom with what looked like a bright red Sharpie.

“Hey, buddy,” Rick said, reaching in through the cage bars and scratching the dog behind the ears. Busker stayed down, his broken leg stretched out in a long cast behind him.

“Can’t he stand up?” Rick asked the clerk.

“Well, he’s been pretty heavily sedated,” she said, reaching through the bars as well, and tickling Busker’s front paws. “He’s only been awake about an hour since his surgery. The doc says he’ll be fine. He’ll be ready for you to take home in a couple of days. How did it happen, anyway?”

“Remember, he’s not my dog.” Rick corrected her. “I hit him on the street with my car this morning. I think he’s a stray. He had no collar.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “But he looks well fed and pretty healthy. We didn’t find a chip, though. And he’s never been neutered. You might think about getting that done.”

“Uh, I told you,” Rick interjected, “he’s not my dog. I just brought him here because I hit him. I’ll pay for his surgery and hospitalization, but you can find him a home, right?”

The clerk looked at him with sadness. “Really? No. We don’t do that. We’re just a vet office. If you don’t want him, you’ll have to take him to the shelter.”

“You mean the county pound?”

“Yeah. And if he’s not adopted in so many days, they’ll put him to sleep. Are you sure you want to do that to ol’ Busker?” She turned back to the dog and stroked his head through the bars. “You have money. Why don’t you keep him?”

“How do you know I have money?”

“Everyone knows you,” the clerk said, dipping her head demurely and fluttering her eyelids. It looked like gesture his grandmother might have used, flirting with jazz musicians back in Chicago in the 1930s. Where did that come from? The clerk couldn’t have been more than twenty.

She held out her hand to introduce herself. “I’m Taylor, Mr. D’Matrio. I’m so excited to meet you.”

~

Rick hated his celebrity. It was impossible to hide, impossible to do anything that the rest of the world wouldn’t know about within hours. It kept him sequestered inside his house until late at night, except when he was required to suck up to financiers and city planning officials over drinks and dinner, or at a philanthropic, artsy function that would land his photo on the society pages of
Palm Springs Life
magazine.

As he slipped behind the wheel of his car and pulled back out onto the quiet street, he fantasized once again—for the millionth time, it seemed—about disappearing. He could cash out, take the money he’d made over the past decade, buy some tropical island, and sink into the library of books he’d collected and never had time to read.