No Way Back by Matthew Klein Read Free Book Online

anything in mind. Not yet. But we need to figure out a way to make money with the product that we built.’
    ‘Very good,’ he says, nodding. ‘Very good.’ A little kernel of popcorn is stuck at the corner of his lips. ‘I’ll start thinking about that. How to make
money.’ He points to his head, squinting and nodding. ‘How to make money... How to make money.’
    He continues to mumble the phrase, and I leave him there, with his popcorn, to consider his new mantra in peace.

CHAPTER 4
    I stay until six.
    When I call it a day, and step into the parking lot, with my suit jacket slung over my shoulder, I’m struck again by the Florida heat. Three steps to my car, and I’ve broken a sweat.
Four steps and I’m soaked. By the time I climb into the seat of the Ford, my hair is plastered to my forehead, and my skin is red and blotchy, as if I’ve spent the day working at a
smelter and not a software shop.
    I crank the air, and drive home.
    I call it home, but I’ve never seen it before. When I won the job at Tao, Libby and I agreed that I would take a one-week vacation without her. I flew from Palo Alto, where we live, to our
cabin in Orcas Island, just off the coast of Seattle. I spent the week fishing and thinking, in solitude. While I was there, Libby preceded me to Florida. She found us a house to rent, and prepared
it for my arrival.
    It doesn’t sound very romantic, or very fair, and it’s probably not. But turnaround jobs can stretch for twelve months, without vacation or weekends. The days last fourteen hours.
The pressure is non-stop. You need to arrive at the company ready for work. It helps to have a few days of quiet under your belt before you start. Libby and I are a team, and she did her part so
that I could do mine.
    So I flew in on the red-eye last night, from Seattle to Atlanta, and then to Fort Myers, and went straight to the office this morning. I haven’t seen the new house. I haven’t seen
Libby. The last time I saw my wife was seven days ago, when she dropped me off kerbside at SFO, kissed me, and told me to have a good time on my private vacation without her. I don’t think,
by the way, that she really meant it.
    While I was on that vacation, Libby found us a house. Not a particularly nice house, she warned me – not really our style – but a house that would suffice for a temporary assignment.
And a house that happened to be ridiculously convenient – just ten minutes from my office at Tao.
    I follow the directions on my GPS to the house. Minutes later, I turn into a deserted cul-de-sac, and pull the Ford into a gravel driveway. I see my wife right away. She is in the front garden,
on her haunches, digging with a trowel in dark earth.
    When Libby hears my tyres pop the gravel, she looks up. She’s wearing a wide-brimmed linen hat, a yellow sundress, rubber clogs on bare feet. I climb out of the car, stretch my legs, slam
the door with the bottom of my shoe. I walk to her.
    Every time I see my wife after an absence – even if only a day – I think to myself: How did
I
manage to get a woman like that? She is fifteen years younger than me, which
makes her thirty-something – just old enough not to be embarrassing when we show up together at a dinner party. She has chestnut hair to her shoulders, pale eyes, a pretty face, and a tall,
lanky body forged by regular gym workouts and a relentless discipline that I used to find charming but now think just a bit ruthless and scary.
    I don’t know what I’m expecting Libby to do when she sees me – maybe throw down the trowel, jump up, and hug me with mud-caked gardening gloves? – or, at a minimum, smile
that awkward, toothy smile I fell in love with so many years ago? – but she does neither. Instead, this is what she does. She remains kneeling in the vegetable patch, and regards me
curiously, as if I’ve returned from a ten-minute trip to the grocery store, and not a seven-day absence.
    When I’m close enough to her that