"Yeah," Dar nodded. "But you'll do all right too."
"Yeah?" Now a touch of incredulity entered Scuzzy's tone. "You know somethin? I woke up today and I knew somethin' cool was gonna happen to me." She carefully tucked the card away in the pocket of her shirt and stuck her hand out. "This is all right."
Dar took it and gave it a shake. "See ya." She released Scuzzy's hand and turned as the light changed and gave her the opportunity to cross over to the pier.
"See yah," Scuzzy repeated, waiting until the tall figure had disappeared from sight into the pier's square frontage. "Ain't that a kick in the ass?" She removed the card and looked at it. "I'm gonna go get me a job, so screw you, momma, saying not to talk to nobody on the subway!"
Turning, she sauntered back down the street, heading back toward Times Square.
DAR STOPPED BEFORE she went through the gates into the museum, taking a moment to enjoy the breeze off the water, and the sense that she'd emerged from the close confines of the city at least for a while. She found a bench and sat down on it, retrieving her PDA and opening it up.
To her surprise, a message she hadn't caught was waiting. She tapped on it.
Have I ever told you just how much I love you?
Dar blinked a few times, then rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes impatiently. Matter of fact, you have. But I never get tired of hearing it.
She could almost hear the sigh in Kerry's words when she responded.
I'm sitting at a table across from Shari and Michelle, suffering through an endive salad with the prospect of chicken breast over rice pilaf before me.
Ugh. Dar extended her legs into the sun and crossed them. Well, I'm sitting near the Hudson River, and I just sent a vagabond over to the local office to get a job.
(laugh) You call me a troublemaker?
Dar smiled in reflex. Hey, I rode on the subway to get here.
You did? No fair! I wasn't there to go with you!
The lump in her throat was getting to her. Dar shifted on her bench, then rolled her stylus in her fingers before she answered. No one was here to see me chicken out!
But you didn't.
True. Yeah, specially since the damn thing got stuck three times with me on it. They don't like me. Dar allowed. Well, I'm going in to see the Intrepid, then maybe I'll find one of those hot dog stands and get sick to my stomach.
(chuckle) Have one for me, since I'm suffering here with a raunchy vinaigrette. Hey--get a sailor hat so I can see my life-sized hamster dance.
Oh, god. Dar started laughing, her humor restored. All right. Take it easy and go grab a burger after the meeting. That's what I do.
I will. Love you.
Dar felt as warm inside suddenly as she did outside. Love you too. She sent the message and stood up, stretching her back out before she headed off toward the aircraft carrier's impressive bulk.
Sailor hat, huh? Dar looked forward to some quality shopping, for more than just her partner. New York, she decided, was potentially looking up after all.
LUNCH WAS AS sour as the vinaigrette. Kerry wiped her lips on her napkin and returned it to its place on her lap. She hadn't even bothered with the chicken, it's dryness evident to her even through the thin, lemony sauce drizzled over it. She stuck to her iced tea instead, and pacified her grumbling stomach with some of the rather benign rolls and butter the table had been graced with.
Long gone were the days, she mused, when she could be satisfied with a handful of carrots and some water. She still liked snacking on them, and had even gotten Dar to eat the little suckers, but they no longer provided a meal for her and neither did this collection of pretentious garden refuse and pseudo free ranging ancient fowl.
Bah. Kerry leaned back and nursed her tea. The small talk at the table was small indeed, and she only half listened to a discussion about an advance release of a new server operating system.
"Hey, Kerry?"
Kerry looked across the table at another of their rivals, though one of the more palatable ones she more or less got on well with. "Hey,
Ross?"
"You guys stick to one system? I heard you were a uni-house."
"Nah." Kerry shook her head. "We have a little of everything, depending on the application. We support way too many different companies to stick to one system," she said. "Mainframes, minis, six flavors of Unix, Linux, the full range of Microsoft, some Novell, you name it."
"That must be a support nightmare," Ross Cunningfurth said, with an easy grin.
"Training's the biggest chunk of my budget," Kerry replied. "But it's worth it. We can leverage like crazy. I have six different major support centers that all fall back to each other."
"Six?"
Kerry spread one hand out in a faint shrug. "International."
"Shit." Ross just shook his head with a chuckle.
"Yeah, but how can you even think about giving personal service to your accounts, with that size operation?" Shari's tone was dismissive. "Just a bunch of cookie cutters."
Kerry debated on whether she wanted to engage in the debate. Before she could make a choice, Mark spoke up for almost the first time that afternoon.
"It's not that hard," Mark said. "We got a system that profiles all the different accounts and systems, so whoever answers the phone gets the whole deal in a couple clicks." He shrugged. "What matters is you getting the call to someone who's got the right skill set. That's the trick."
"Exactly," Kerry picked up the thread neatly. "But you guys all know that. It's not rocket science," she added. "We save the rocket science for the solutions teams."
Mark chuckled.
"So, what's the deal with that new system you guys are rolling on?" Ross asked. "Bud here was at the trade show, and he said something like Dar was teaching routers to think?"
Shari laughed in derision. "What a load of BS."
Kerry looked across the table and caught Michelle's eye. The shorter women looked away, then visibly sighed and nudged her partner. Shari gave her an outraged face, but Michelle lowered her chin and stared at her until she subsided.
"Dar's working on a lot of new technology," Kerry went on after the awkward break. "Most of which I can't really go into, but it's fair to say we're being very aggressive in taking the limits out of our new hardware."
"Yeah, I can imagine what you're selling the government with our tax dollars to burn." Shari stared steadily at Kerry. "How many millions was it for the Navy?"
Bitch. Kerry braced her elbow on the arm of her chair and rested her chin against it. "Well..." she finally addressed Shari directly. "Considering that the systems they were running before we went in there were written by Dar when she was fifteen years old, I guess they thought they needed an upgrade."
"Fifteen?" Ross stared at her. "What are you talking about?"
Kerry grinned briefly. "She was trading programming sessions for peanut butter way back then. But the systems held up until they were ready for the next century."
Ross cocked his head. "I didn't know Dar was a programmer. I thought she was all infrastructure and design."
"She has many, many skills." A wicked twinkle entered Kerry's green eyes. "That has been a very successful contract for us. I've enjoyed working on it. It makes me feel good to know we're providing the best to the people who defend our country."
Shari rolled her eyes.
Kerry caught the interested expression on the Tech TV reporter's face as he sat there picking at his chicken. "That's what's given us a leg up on the new project. Dar's helping them write the machine code for it."