“Do they know what’s at stake?” he asked, looping his arm around her waist and drawing her in against his side.
“Oh yes. That’s why they call me their Envoy, Jensen. They’re preparing me-us,” she amended, “to speak for them and defend their rights.”
“Sounds to me like a good way to spend the next ten years.”
MY FATHER, THE POPSICLE by Annie Reed
Jodi thought she was an orphan until one sweltering Thursday night in late June when she received The Letter from Billingsly, Wendham & Owens, attorneys at law.
That’s how she always thought of it after that. The Letter. Wasn’t that how you were supposed to think about things that changed your life? All capitalized and important?
At first she thought it was a joke. She’d just worked a double shift at Hot Dog on a Stick in the new mall south of town. She was dead tired, and sick of the smell of lemons, corn dog batter, and hot grease. Her head hurt from where she had to pull her hair up under that stupid striped hat, her shoulders ached from all the fresh lemonade she had to mix, and to top it all off, the air conditioning had been out on the bus ride home. To say the bus had been fragrant was the understatement of the century. She was in no mood for jokes. Her roommate Harry had a pretty twisted sense of humor. A fake letter from an attorney was just his style, but tonight it wasn’t funny.
“I ought to rip him a new one,” Jodi muttered as she opened her front door. “Hear that, Harry?” she said to her empty apartment. “I ought to rip you a new one.”
Not that Harry was home yet. Harry worked as a bartender at the only gay club in town, and tonight he was on swing shift. Whether he could hear her or not, after a day spent swallowing the snappy come-backs she wanted to make to clueless customers whose IQ wasn’t much higher than the hot dogs they ate, muttering about Harry’s lack of humor sure as hell made her feel better.
Still, the envelope did look kind of authentic. Hmmm…
Jodi dropped her keys and the rest of the mail on the coffee table. It was all junk mail flyers and offers for credit cards neither one of them could afford, so it didn’t much matter where she left it. She plopped down on the couch she’d rescued from a secondhand store, slipped off her sensible, style-free shoes so she could stretch her toes into the carpet, and ripped open the envelope.
She skimmed through the introductory stuff. Dear Ms. blah-blah-blah I represent more blah-blah-blah bankrupt estate. The word assets caught Jodi’s eye, but the word that brought her up short was father.
What?
If this was Harry’s idea of a joke, it definitely wasn’t funny. He knew she had no sense of humor when it came to her family, or lack thereof.
She ended up reading The Letter three times in a row, each time with an ever-increasing shakiness in the pit of her stomach, not to mention a growing sense of unreality.
The Letter wasn’t the easiest thing to understand. Jodi had managed to finish high school-barely-but there had been no money left after her mother died for college. She made enough to pay rent and keep herself fed, but higher education was out of the question. The letter writer sounded like he had degrees up the wazoo and wrote to impress. Way out of Harry’s league. But Jodi did understand enough of the letter to realize that she’d been wrong. She wasn’t an orphan after all. She did have a father.
He was just frozen solid.
Billingsly, Wendham & Owens, attorneys at law, occupied the twelfth floor of a fourteen-story office building of gleaming chrome and glass. It took Jodi three buses and nearly an hour to get there, and if it hadn’t been for the letter in her purse, she would have turned around and gone home without even stepping inside.
Jodi didn’t know which was more intimidating-the building or the idea of meeting with an attorney. Even when her mother had died, there’d been no attorneys involved. Jodi’s mother hadn’t owned much of anything. Jodi just kept paying the rent on their small apartment until the memories became too much and she realized she could move somewhere else if she wanted to. She had no one left to tell her she couldn’t.
She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor with three other women, all dressed far better than Jodi could afford. She’d worn her best pair of jeans and the only semi-dressy blouse she owned. She clutched her small purse as if it might fly away and leave her any minute.
The elevator ride was swift and quiet. No one in the elevator looked at anyone else, not even covertly in the mirrored walls. The doors opened directly into a reception area with a black marbled floor and indirect lighting. Jodi had to concentrate to keep her voice from shaking as she gave the receptionist, a girl probably no older than Jodi, the name of the letter writer-Artemus Owens, Junior, Esq., whatever that meant.
The receptionist took Jodi into a conference room with dark walls, thick burgundy pile carpet, and the same indirect lighting. A huge, dark wood table with a top so polished it looked mirrored dominated the room. High-back, black leather chairs surrounded the table. Jodi felt like she was sinking in black tar when she sat down.
The room was probably meant to soothe clients with an impression of old money, like in some of the movies Jodi had seen, but all it did was remind her of the little chapel in the hospital where her mother had died. Only here the room smelled like stale coffee instead of burning candles.
Mr. Owens didn’t keep her waiting long. Jodi had been expecting someone old. Weren’t old guys the only ones who got their names on the letterhead and sat around in offices like this? Artemus Owens, Jr., looked like he was thirty-maybe-and he wasn’t even wearing a tie. He had dark hair and kind eyes and looked like he could have been a manager at one of the stores in the mall, only nicer. He even shook her hand like she was a grownup.
“I understand you’re here about the Cryonomics bankruptcy,” he said as he sat down. “What can I do for you?”
“About this letter.” Jodi pushed the letter toward him across the glassy surface of the conference table. “I don’t get it. Does this mean my father’s alive?”
Mr. Owens glanced at the letter, looked up at her. “Well, not exactly ‘alive’ in the accepted definition of the word. He’s been stored at the Cryonomics facility for the last ten years.”
Stored? That made her father-her father; god, how odd it was to even think that she actually had a father-sound like some unwanted piece of furniture locked away in a storage shed.
“I still don’t get it. What does ‘stored’ mean?”
Mr. Owens tented his fingers on the table in front of him. “You don’t know about any of this, do you?”
Jodi shook her head. At least his voice was kind. He didn’t make her feel like one of her high school teachers when she’d given a wrong answer in class. “I didn’t even know I had a father,” she said. Jodi’s mom had never mentioned him, not that she wanted to share that gem with a relative stranger.
Mr. Owens pushed a button on the phone and asked someone named Shirley to bring in two bottles of water. “And one of those Cryonomics brochures we have in the file.
“OK, it goes like this,” Mr. Owens said to Jodi. “Cryonics is the process of preserving people who are dying so that at some unknown time in the future they can be defrosted when technology exists to cure whatever’s wrong with them. Some call it science, others call it desperation. Cryonomics made a business out of it, although not very successfully, as it turned out. The specifics about the process and the company are in the brochure Shirley’s bringing in.”