Material Girl

The news that he was going to die arrived like a distant rumble of thunder, a disturbing sound so far on the reaches of his consciousness that he lifted his head and wondered what he had heard. Aaron Lear looked to the windows of his office on the forty-third floor in lower Manhattan and noticed that the afternoon light was beginning to fade. Was it that late already?

He was still sitting where the call had left him—on his haunches, against the polished oak wall down which he had slid as his mind tried to grasp the words cancer and aggressive. His office was suddenly sweltering; the light was fading rapidly now, gray and black shadows draped his office. Aaron tried to breathe—he was not prepared for this, had not considered the possibility of his mortality. Even when he had first begun to have trouble—a strange bit of discomfort was all, really—he never thought it was something so… so foul. So goddamned final.

We don't know much of anything yet. Just hold on to that for now, his doctor had advised. Yet how could he hold on to something so vague? Aaron pulled himself to his feet, but his limbs felt as if weights had been tied to them and he leaned heavily against the desk. The room was now almost dark; he wondered how much time had really passed since he had picked up the phone. A fucking lifetime.

Of course he had suspected something was terribly wrong for weeks now, from the moment he had felt the hostile invasion of his body, had sensed the vague but undeniable state of war being waged within him when he had, by some internal monitor, felt the cancerous cells advancing like an army of ants through his stomach, into the winding turns of his colon, throwing their incendiary bombs down the chute.

Shit, he was only fifty-five!

It was impossible to even contemplate that he might be brought down. There was so much left to do, to see, to be't What about the dynasty he had built and still operated from his position as president and CEO? This vast shipping empire was all his doing, his creation, one he had started after he escaped West Texas and the life of a cotton farmer when he was nineteen. He had built this company truck by truck, plane by plane. He had begun by driving line-haul between Dallas and San Antonio , scrimping and saving until he could buy his own truck. Then there were two. Then four, then a fleet, expanding and growing under his guardianship until he was shipping freight around the world. Lear Transport Industries, better known as LTI, was like another child to him, the proud mark of a man and his life and accomplishments.

He was not ready to let go!

Bonnie. He had to talk to Bonnie, still his wife in spite of their fifteen-year estrangement, still his one and only true love. Bonnie Lou Stanton, his high school sweetheart, the homecoming queen with the laughing blue eyes, the only one to believe in him when the relationship with his father had soured. It was Bonnie who had come with him to Dallas when he had left the family cotton farm behind, Bonnie who had stuck by him those lean years when everything looked bleak and had encouraged him when he thought he was failing. And later, with a baby on her hip, smiling cheerfully as she made one can of ranch-style beans last two days. They had been closest then, drawing on one another's strengths. Exactly when they had begun to drift apart, Aaron couldn't really remember anymore, but he knew that he still loved her, would always love her.

His gaze fell to the picture of his daughters on his desk, and felt the smile spread across his lips.

They were the best thing he had ever done. There was Robin, his oldest, her curly black hair indicative of her spunk, her blue eyes steely with determination. And Rebecca, sitting gracefully in the middle, as pretty now as she had been the day she was crowned Miss Houston. Then Rachel, the baby, laughing when she should have been smiling, her blue eyes sparkling with the gaiety that was always with her. Three beautiful women who he had a hand in producing. Biologically perhaps, but he couldn't claim much credit beyond that, could he?

He had been an absent father for the most part—one of the more egregious things about him, according to Bonnie. God, how many times had they argued about it? He insisting that his work was what enabled them to live a life of privilege, Bonnie arguing just as strongly that wealth and privilege was not as valuable to the girls as a father.

A thousand tiny spears of bitter disappointment jabbed him; there was no denying the truth, not to a man being consumed alive by cancer. He had been a mean lover, a sorrier husband, and a pathetic excuse for a father while creating his empire. He had let Bonnie down in the worst way, his girls even more, and the pain of that realization was almost as lethal as the cancer in him.

The worst of it was that it scared him to death, left him practically trembling in the dark at the prospect of what lay ahead. The coward in him needed Bonnie like he had never needed her before.

In the dim light, Aaron found the phone he had thrown aside and dialed her cell. It rang three times before she answered it. “Hello?” The sound of crystal clinking in the background pierced his consciousness—Bonnie had her own life now. She wasn't waiting for his call anymore. Hadn't she made that abundantly clear?

“Aaron, I know it's you, I have your number on caller ID.”

“Bonnie.” He sounded empty, hollow. “Bonnie, how are you?”

She covered the phone; Aaron heard her whisper to someone. “Ah, fine.”

“Good… good.” How exactly did one go about telling his wife he was dying? “How's the weather in L.A. ?”

Her sigh was full of tedium. “Aaron, I'm in the middle of something. What did you need?”

He cleared his throat, tried to force the ugly words out. “Actually, there is something I need to tell you—”

“Is it one of the girls?” she asked quickly.

“No, no, not the girls. I… I don't know how to say this___”

“Say what?”

He closed his eyes, squeezed them tightly shut against the burn of tears. “I've had some bad news… I had a little thing happen this summer, and I went… well, I guess I don't have to give you the blow by blow, but it's…” He paused, pressed his knuckles into his eyes again, unable to say the words that would commend him to death.

He could hear Bonnie moving, the click-click-click of her heels on pavement. “Aaron,” she said low, her voice softer now, the way he remembered it. “What is it? What's wrong?”

The burn of tears burst through his knuckles, slid like lava down his cheeks. “I am sick,” he whispered coarsely. “Really sick. And… and I know I don't have any right to ask this, but… but I need you, Bonnie. I need you bad.”

There was no immediate response from her; Aaron caught his breath, felt the wet burn of his tears etch their grooves in his cheeks. He waited. Waited through the long pause in which he could hear the shortness of her breath, and when he thought he could not hold his own any longer, she said simply, “I will be there as soon as I can.”

Everyone would always remember where they were the day they learned Aaron Lear was dying. For Robin, his oldest daughter, that day started off as usual—with a frantic search of her spacious, empty, and covered-with-dust Tudor mansion for a stupid shoe.

She was in something of a hurry, seeing as how she had a stack of reports six feet high on her desk, the result of having spent the entire month of January in London . And there was the business of the deal with Atlantic , an idea that had come to her at a cocktail party after the Atlantic rep had bought her several drinks. She had been working on landing them for four or five weeks now and needed the deal sooner rather than later because Dad didn't like her region's sales figures. Or anything else, for that matter.

Which was why she was a little worried about yesterday's call from Mr. Herrera, the owner of one of LTI's oldest accounts, Valley Produce. He had given her assistant, Lucy, quite an earful, complaining heatedly that an unac-ceptably large percentage of his produce LTI transported was arriving wilted and spoiled at the grocer's destinations, and none of the LTI account reps seemed to want to do anything about it. He had therefore felt obliged to call the vice president of Southwest Operations (that would be her, Robin) demanding satisfaction. If he couldn't rely on LTI to get his produce to the customer in the time he required, he was very certain he could find a freight company that would.

What startled Robin about his call was not that he was unhappy so much as, how in the hell had his unhappiness escaped her? Valley Produce was one of the first companies to sign on with her father when he had begun his business some thirty-odd years ago and she was very certain Dad would not be very happy to hear from Mr. Herrera right now. Especially since the last time they had talked, he had been very displeased with her handling of a similar situation in Austin .

Yeah, well, Dad was easily displeased; that went with the territory.

Where the hell was her shoe? Dressed in a sleek, black (all her sleek outfits were black) Donna Karan short skirt and jacket, Robin searched the wreckage of her bedroom for the left of a pair of Stuart Weitzman black leather pumps. This chaotic state of living, while not entirely foreign to her, was still highly undesirable, and she was, she realized, desperate to finalize the deal with Jacob Manning to do the renovations she had started and abandoned.

All right, so her friends were right—the purchase of this house had been something of a lark. She had stumbled on it one Sunday afternoon as she drove, lost, through the Village, looking for the barbecue her friends Linda and Kirk were hosting. The house was nestled on a wide boulevard with giant live oaks and huge mansions. It was perfect, of course—not too big, not too small. So she had phoned her attorney, told her to buy it, then stored her belongings, shoved her clothes into one room, brought the dining room table, and let the rest of it sit empty in anticipation of the renovations she would do herself.

At least she had every intention of doing them herself. But she had succeeded only in knocking a couple of huge gaping holes in the walls before she was off to Madrid, and when she came back, there was London and New York, and then… whatever. Well, hell, how could she have known so many things would come up? Needless to say, she was hiring out the work before she went stark raving mad, and it was, come hell or high water, the one thing she would accomplish today.

When the wayward pump was at last located, Robin emerged from her house looking completely cool and sophisticated, with a lot of elegant accoutrements. The only accessory that did not reek of subtle sophistication was the black leather headband she had stuck on her head as a last resort for keeping her wildly curly hair in some sense of order.

Robin marched out onto the drive, passed Raymond, her yardman, with a jaunty wave, and proceeded to her Mercedes 500 E-Class. She fired her up and sped out onto North Boulevard .

As she turned off the boulevard, a man on a Harley pulled into her drive. He parked the bike, waved at Raymond. “You doing okay?” he asked as the yardman walked up to the door to unlock it for him.

“Can't complain, can't complain,” Raymond said. “You gonna be long, Mr. Manning?”

“Nah. Just need to look at a couple of things. I'll put the key out.”

“That'll do,” Raymond said.

Jake Manning walked inside the empty mansion, pausing in the foyer to peer into the dining room, where Ms. Lear had obviously set up shop. His nose wrinkled as he surveyed the wreckage—empty yogurt containers, papers strewn about, a curious pair of stockings draped on one chair. The obligatory computer, one running shoe, an empty wine bottle.

Jake moved on, up the great curving staircase to the upper floors.

Now here was the odd part, he thought as he reached the second-floor landing and surveyed the gaping hole in the wall directly ahead. That hole made no sense. She had freely admitted to it, had told him she “had started the renovations.” It made no sense because A, that hole served no conceivable purpose and B, while he'd never actually met Robin Lear (she preferred to have Raymond let him in), her house had all the markings of a society bitch. He should know—he did enough of their houses, could spot them a mile off. But this hole thing gave him pause. No dainty, cosmetically enhanced woman was going to make a hole that big.

With a shrug, he continued on to the master bath to double-check the dimensions.

In the meantime, Robin was cursing traffic, which was, as usual, moving at a snail's pace. She punched a number into her cell phone, and used the morning crawl to reschedule a dinner date, return two business calls, and track down Darren Fogerty's assistant—Darren being her contact at Atlantic—to set up a meeting for the next morning. When she clicked off that call, she was at the elevator, headed for the tenth floor suite of offices that housed the LTI Southwest corporate offices. All four of them. Oh, and a conference room.

She marched through the glass doors emblazoned with Lear Transport Industries, Inc., her briefcase swinging carelessly from her shoulder, and said hello to the receptionist as she stopped to pick up her phone messages. There were several new ones—from Bill {Flying in. Drinks tonight?), Darren from Atlantic , a sales manager of a cable manufacturer, and three that really caught her attention. Mr. Herrera (she needed a cup of coffee for that one), Dad (an elephant tranquilizer), and Jacob Manning, who would, if she was lucky, commence the renovation of her house immediately.