Aftershock Read online

  “I wish. But Ted’s sort of anxious about it. I think he’s getting some pressure from one of the investment groups, and he’d really rather sell to us.” Anna stared down at the sand while she talked, her mind obviously miles away in her office. “Now that we’ve started the process, I’m worried that any delay could get us into a bidding war with somebody else, and we won’t be able to go much higher.”

  Lily couldn’t blame Anna for the timing of this deal. Nor could she fault the way Anna had dropped everything to be at her side when she needed it most. “It’ll be all right. I’ve got a couple of appearances in court this week and preliminary motions on the docket for Monday. I won’t have any time for you anyway,” she said haughtily.

  “I promise I’ll wrap things up as quickly as I can. I was supposed to be down at Sweeney all morning, but negotiations heated up quicker than I thought.”

  Lily shook her head and smiled. “You and your empire.”

  “Almost empire,” Anna said. “Oh, I meant to tell you. I collected your mail. It’s on your desk, but I pulled out everything that looked like a bill and paid it so you wouldn’t get late charges.”

  “Well, aren’t you handy to have around?”

  Anna made a silly pouting face. “You just love me for my money.”

  “Don’t be silly. I have money now. I love you for your body.”

  The saga of Maria and Miguel Esperanza was never-ending. Over the past three years, the Braxton Street Clinic had handled two restraining orders, a divorce, and six different custody hearings for the couple’s children, Sofia and Roberto. Today’s motion was a request to return the children from their Aunt Serena to their mother, as Maria and Miguel were making plans to remarry. As she watched the once again happy couple leave the courtroom, Lily couldn’t help but think the reconciliation would only start the destructive cycle again.

  “Lily!” She stopped as she heard her name.

  Turning from the elevator, she saw Sandy approaching. “Go ahead, I’ll get the next one,” she said to the man holding the doors. “Hi.”

  “I wasn’t sure you were back.”

  “Yeah, I got back on Sunday. Sorry I didn’t call.”

  “That’s okay. I know you’ve been busy.”

  “Just trying to get caught up and back into the swing of things.” That and she had gotten very mellow the night before on a nine-dollar bottle of cabernet while Anna was in Palm Springs. “I know I said it already, but I really appreciated you and Suzanne coming up for the funeral. It meant a lot to me to have my friends there.”

  “We were glad to come.” Sandy wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Now that you’re back, why don’t you and Anna come over for dinner? I’ve got to stop at the store and get some fish to grill. It’s just as easy to get four fillets as two.”

  “Thanks, but Anna’s down in Palm Springs on business, and I still have a lot of work to catch up on.” Lily loved her friends, but she didn’t really want to be with anyone right now. “How about a rain check?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Lily noted her disappointed look. “It may take me a little while, but I promise we’ll be back into things again soon.”

  Sandy gave her a quick hug as the next elevator arrived. “We’ll be ready.”

  Chester barked suddenly, a sign to Lily that Anna had finally returned from Palm Springs. The projected two days had turned to four, but at least she was back in time to enjoy the weekend. Excitedly, Lily bounded downstairs, anticipating the commotion that always ensued when Anna greeted Chester. “You better save some of that for me, Amazon.”

  Anna jumped up from the floor and grabbed her around the waist. With Lily secured in a one-arm hold, she used her free hand to playfully scratch Lily’s stomach. “Is this what you want?”

  Lily screamed with laughter and tried to wriggle free. “Stop it!”

  Instead, the scratching turned to merciless tickling, and Lily dissolved into a heap on the floor. Chester immediately jumped on her, licking her face with excitement. Lily dragged Anna down by her shirttail, which was more than Chester’s poor bladder could stand. What might have been a simple hello was now all-out mayhem.

  “Ewwww! Look what your dog did!” Lily shrieked.

  “My dog?”

  “He’s your dog right now.”

  Chester seemed to know he was the object of their disgust and he sulked away, obviously ashamed of his loss of control.

  “Look, you’ve hurt his feelings.”

  “He peed in my lap!”

  “He’s upset.”

  “I’m upset!” Despite her hysterics, Lily couldn’t keep a straight face. “Come here, Chester. It’s okay, boy.”

  The hound put on his best pitiful look and ambled back to Lily’s lap for a scratch.

  “I’ll clean this up,” Anna said, extricating her long limbs from the pile on the floor. “You need a shower.”

  Lily chuckled to herself as she climbed the stairs. It was great to finally have Anna home.

  She got an extra treat when the shower door opened and Anna joined her. They took turns with back scrubbing, and then Anna stepped out. Lily took a few more minutes to savor the warm water. Once out, she hastily dried and slipped nude between the sheets . . . where she found Anna sound asleep.

  “You can’t be serious. You’ve been gone all week,” Lily said.

  Anna had known this wouldn’t go over well, but she was a week behind in making her presence known at the Volkswagen dealership. “That’s the problem, sweetheart, that I’ve been gone all week. I need to go meet the staff at Sweeney today.” She didn’t dare add that she also needed to spend tomorrow in her office at the BMW dealership.

  In a surprising display of frustration, Lily slammed her dresser drawer and spun angrily into the bathroom.

  “Honey, I’m sorry.” This wasn’t like Lily, but then Anna understood that she was still under a lot of stress. “You usually go hiking on Saturdays.”

  “You mean like I did with Mom, only by myself?” She kicked the bathroom door shut.

  Anna was jarred by the hurtful words, but knew she needed to change her plans. “I’m sorry. I’ll call them and reschedule for Monday,” she said, leaning into the closed door.

  A few moments later, the door opened a crack. Lily, looking contrite, scrunched her nose. “PMS?”

  Anna reached out and pulled her into a hug. “I’m a selfish, insensitive jerk.”

  “No, you aren’t.” Lily shook her head. “I’m just being a baby. It isn’t as if you working on Saturday is anything new. At least you’ll be home tomorrow.”

  In her head, Anna dismissed any notion she had of going to work on Sunday. Lily needed her at home, and it would be good for them to have some relaxing time together. “Want to come with me today and watch me kick some ass?”

  Lily chuckled softly. “That’s a pretty tempting offer. But I think I’ll pass. I’ve still got that mail to go through.”

  “You sure?”

  Lily nodded. “Beat it. Get your work done so you can hurry back home.”

  Anna kissed her and pulled away, glancing at Chester, who was sitting at her feet. “You be a good boy, Chester. No peeing on your mother.”

  Anna flipped through a stack of folders in the conference room of Sweeney Volkswagen, soon to be Premier Volkswagen. Her mood, already sullied by the guilty exchange with Lily, took a further tumble when she stepped out of her Z8 and heard a series of wolf whistles emanating from the sales offices. Between that and the aroma of cigarette smoke in the showroom, the anemic sales figures weren’t all that surprising.

  She seethed at the conversation underway on the other side of the corkboard wall. The voices were unnecessarily loud, as though the entire scene was being staged for her benefit.

  “I don’t care who she is. I’ve been working here fourteen years and I don’t need her telling me how to be a sales manager.” That voice belonged to Tommy Russell, she noted.

  “I hear she’s done a pretty good j
ob over at Premier,” offered another voice. Judging from something he had said earlier, she guessed it was Ben Dunlap, the fleet manager. “I’m sort of looking forward to the change. We’ve only hit quotas once in the last two years.” Anna smirked at his apparent dig at the sales manager.

  “That was her old man that kept everything running over there,” Tommy said. She could practically hear his sneer. “She’s nothing more than a pretty face.”

  “She’s certainly got that.” One of the salesmen. “And pretty lots of other things too. I wouldn’t mind having me a—” Someone wisely cut that crude sentiment short. Otherwise, she might have walked around the corner and cleaned house.

  Anna picked up the phone and dialed the receptionist. “Would you page Tommy Russell to the conference room, please?”

  She stewed for twenty minutes as Russell stalled. When he finally made it to the conference room, he took a seat at the far end of the long table. Tommy Russell was going to be a genuine pain in the ass.

  “Mr. Russell, I’m so very glad you could make it,” she began. “I have a number of charts I’d like to go over with you this morning. Please move to this end of the table so we can look at these together.” Her tone was firm, but polite.

  As he took the seat to her right, she was overwhelmed by the stench of stale cigarette smoke that seemed to radiate from his pores.

  “I’ll get right to the point. One of the reasons I wanted to buy this dealership is because I believed I could improve the sales performance and the service revenues. Your sales staff has been missing quotas for much of the last two years. New car sales have fallen thirty-one percent. Obviously, used car sales are off too, since you don’t bring as many cars in on trade when you miss your quotas.”

  She glanced through the picture window as a boom truck began disassembling the tacky yellow and green Sweeney Volkswagen marker. A nearby truck held the new beacon, a black and white sign touting this dealership as Premier Volkswagen.

  Tommy shifted in his chair. “We haven’t had much support. A couple of years ago, Gordon pulled his advertising out of the paper and started putting it into cable TV. The only people that come in here are ones who watch those weird infomercials at three o’clock in the morning.”

  Anna was mildly impressed that Tommy Russell had connected those particular dots, but he was conveniently forgetting his role in the dismal picture. “I’m going to spend some money here to sell Volkswagens. I can build the traffic on this lot, but I’ll expect to see a sizable increase in closings, and in used car activity.”

  “You get people on the lot here, we’ll sell them cars,” he said boastfully.

  “I have a small problem accepting that at face value, Mr. Russell. Your closing rate is much lower than the industry average, unusually low for cars of this caliber. Your sales staff is writing fifteen contracts a week that don’t close. That’s something I’ll expect you to fix. I can send you for training, or I can get a trainer to come in here and pump up the whole staff. But I’m going to expect results, and pretty quickly.”

  “We don’t need no trainer. We know how to sell cars. All we need is the traffic. The boys are chomping at the bit to have people walking onto the lot.”

  “Why don’t we come back to that issue in a moment? You’ve just brought up another point I want to address. I’ve noticed from my personnel review that there is not one single female on your sales staff. I’d like to see that change.”

  Tommy was obviously flustered. “I wouldn’t mind hiring a woman if I had one show up who knew the first thing about cars. All due respect, our customers would rather deal with men. They trust men more.”

  “Unfortunately, there just isn’t much evidence of that here. Besides, we’re going to try to broaden the customer base, so maybe we’ll find a few buyers out there who aren’t so narrow-minded.” Her implication was unmistakable. “You know, three of the top five sellers at Premier last year were women. I’m sure once we get a little diversity in the sales staff we’ll see the numbers go up.”

  He was grinding his teeth. “So which one of us is going to be in charge of hiring the sales staff? That’s always been a part of my job.” He reached into his pocket for a cigarette.

  “Don’t light that,” she said sharply. “Hiring of the sales staff will still be your responsibility. But I’ll expect you to do it according to my guidelines. In fact, Mr. Russell, I’m going to expect everything at Premier Volkswagen to be done according to my guidelines.”

  “Is there more?” He gripped the arms of the chair as if to stand.

  “Yes, there’s much more, but I want to make sure I get the chance to talk with all of the senior staff today, so we can schedule another time next week to go over specifics. But there is one more thing I’d like to take care of this morning.” She looked at her watch. “Effective at nine thirty a.m. today, there is to be no smoking anywhere on the property by any of the staff.”

  “You can’t be serious. Not even outside?”

  “No, not even outside. It’s my prerogative as owner to keep the workplace smoke-free for everyone. I don’t want our staff and customers exposed to secondhand smoke. Furthermore, those on the sales staff who smoke will no longer be allowed to get inside the cars for any reason. Not for a test drive, not to show the features, not even to wipe the dashboard. One of the best things about a new car, Mr. Russell, is the way it smells, and I want to leverage that asset.”

  He spun out the door without responding, his ears beet red with apparent anger.

  Anna picked up the phone and dialed the receptionist. “Would you ask Ben Dunlap to report to the conference room?”

  The day ended with a general meeting of all staff. Not surprisingly, Tommy Russell failed to show, and Anna sent her fleet manager to find him. When they returned together, she began.

  “Thank you all for coming. I’m not going to keep you long. I know you’re all eager to get home to your families. I want to thank those of you who welcomed me today, and assure you that I’m really glad to be here. As I told many of you, you’re going to see some changes here over the next few months as we complete the transition of ownership. I’m excited about our opportunities, and I’m confident that if we can work together as a team, we’ll all share in the rewards.” Applause broke out at that overture. She knew from the personnel records that salaries had been stagnant for two years.

  “At this time, I’d like to meet briefly with all of the senior staff in the conference room. Good night to the rest of you, and I’ll see you next week.”

  Anna followed the senior staff—all men—to the conference room and took her position at the head of the table. “Gentlemen, today was a good day for me because I saw just how much potential there is for this dealership. However, the reason for that potential, I’m afraid, is your current poor performance.” She paused and made eye contact with all but Tommy Russell, who had found something more interesting under the table. “Please understand that I am not dependent upon you to make this company successful. I am dependent on the competency of a sales manager, a fleet manager, a service manager and a finance manager. Who actually holds those positions is irrelevant to me. I will work with each of you as necessary to turn this dealership around, but I expect nothing short of your complete cooperation.”

  Tommy blurted, “Look, I don’t care if you do own the place. Threatening us with our jobs isn’t what I’d call a brilliant motivating technique. We could all walk out the door right now and leave you here to pick up the pieces.”

  Anna stared back coolly, sweating him just a moment for effect. “Mr. Russell, let me tell you a little bit about management theory. I do own the place, and it is therefore not necessary for me to prove my abilities to you or to justify my means. You’re the one in the grace period right now. If you believe yourself to be incapable of working as a productive part of this management team, I’ve already got two strong candidates on my other lot.”

  “Then you should call one of them, because I quit. I can find a job
at any dealership in the state.” He lit a cigarette and calmly walked out of the room.

  Driving down Wilshire Boulevard, Anna was at a crossroads— literally. A right at the next light would take her to Premier BMW, and a left would take her home. She had been away from her desk for five days, and judging from the backlog of paperwork she had found upon returning from Eleanor’s funeral, the mountain awaiting her attention would be high. But she had promised Lily she wouldn’t work on Sunday, no matter what.

  Ten minutes later, she pulled into her driveway, noticing immediately that only the side door porch light was on. Lily’s car was in the garage, which piqued Anna’s curiosity about why the house would be dark. She entered the family room, where Chester greeted her enthusiastically.

  “Honey?” Anna played with the dog as she waited for Lily to answer. “Lily?” she called, louder this time. She walked through the lower level, turning on lights as she went, finally spotting the unlocked patio door off the kitchen.

  She walked out onto the patio, where the underwater lights illuminated the perimeter of the pool. She finally spotted Lily in a chaise lounge at the far end. “Hi, babe. Everything okay?” Approaching the chair, she warily eyed the contents of the adjacent table—an ice bucket, a bowl of cut-up limes and a bottle of vodka, which was more than half empty. Lily was wrapped in a blanket, holding a glass in her lap.

  “How nice of you to drop by, Anna.” Despite the sarcastic words, her tone was low and flat.

  Anna was instantly filled with guilt. This was her fault for leaving Lily on her own all week. “I’m sorry. I stayed a little later tonight so I wouldn’t have to go in tomorrow.” She sat down on the chaise and took Lily’s icy hand.

  “Good. We can pretend to be a couple.”

  The words stung, but Anna didn’t respond. From this new vantage point, she could see that Lily was very drunk, her eyes closed and her chin dipping to her chest. She had no idea what she was saying. “Have you eaten yet?”