“What are your ambitions here at Edwards Aviation?”
“Um, what do you mean?” she asked nervously.
“I mean, what do you hope to do here in the future? Do you have ambitions for Casey’s job, my job? What is your dream?”
She seemed extremely cautious as she looked at me and thought about what it was she really wanted to do. Jennifer was young, probably only about twenty-two or twenty-three. I knew she had a degree, but I wasn’t even sure what it was in. She had to want something more from her employment than to be a secretary to me all her life.
“Well, I have liked working with the finance department and helping Mr. Zane while you were gone. It was exciting, but I love my job and wouldn’t want to leave it. I enjoy working for you, sir.”
“How about this,” I started to say as I tried to keep a straight face. “We are growing fast and will need some new leadership soon. I’d like you to work side by side with Mr. Zane and learn the overall workings of the organization. Then in a few months, we can visit again and see what you’re best at and maybe move you to a new position.”
“Um, sure. I could work with him on my breaks and lunchtime, maybe even after five o’clock. That would be fine.”
“No, you do not understand what I’m saying. I’m actually moving you into a different position. For the time being, I’m not sure what it will be called, but your full-time job is going to be learning how to run the company from the perspective of each executive. Of course, this will be a very time consuming position and very hard, so I’ve taken the liberty of giving you a raise.”
I reached onto my desk and handed Jennifer an envelope that had her new salary information on it. My face was stuck in a permanent scowl as I tried desperately to hold back my excitement for this new opportunity I was giving Jenn.
“No, this is too much…” Jenn started to say as she looked in the envelope. “I can’t take this.”
“Oh, you can and you will. You worked tirelessly while I was gone and you did it on a secretary’s salary. You deserve this and I’m back dating the salary to last year so you will get that on you next check. I want you to stay. We need a strong, smart woman like you in our leadership.”
“Mr. Edwards, I don’t know what to say,” Jenn cried as she got up and hugged me.
“Say yes,” I smiled back at her.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she screamed.
“Now go see Casey and he’ll get you all set up with your new office.”
It felt good to be doing good things around my company and for the next few months that was all that I occupied my time with. I let Casey and Jennifer take on the day-to-day tasks of running the company and I made it my mission to set up our internal programs that would help employees and built my company into something I could be proud of.
I had hoped all of the good deeds I was doing would fill the emptiness that I had been feeling since getting back from Montana. But even four months later, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. I had picked up the phone on several occasions to call her, but then decided against it. After four months, she was surely over me. I had lied to her, slept with her, and then left without notice; there just was no coming back from something like that.
Even if I wasn’t going to have Sarah, I did still miss the great scenery and relaxation that I had in Montana, and one afternoon I decided to take a look at property there. Perhaps buying a vacation home in the state would give me a hideaway that I could rejuvenate myself from.
I had vacation homes all around the world, but none of them ever felt relaxing for me when I got there. They were in big cities or on beaches, but I had never truly felt as relaxed as I had been while at the ranch. The idea of owning my own ranch wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I certainly couldn’t run a place like the Millers had, but I did like the idea of building a cabin far away from everything else and maybe even getting myself a horse.
Buckjoy had come to trust me and I enjoyed taking care of him. He was wild and by the time I had left, he was tame and a great horse to ride. He was loyal to me and I felt bad that I wasn’t there to take care of him. I had to hope that he would let Sarah care for him and treat her just as well as he had treated me.
My search for a cabin started simple enough, just a general look at cabins for sale in the state. The more I looked though, the more I realized that the entire state wasn’t as beautiful as the Miller ranch had been. For fun, I looked up the property north of the river just to see if it was still for sale. Maybe they had found a buyer, or maybe not; I wasn’t sure what I had hoped to find. But when the photo of the river with the mountain in the background popped up, I couldn’t help but laugh.
I remembered that moment so vividly as I had jumped into the water to prevent Sarah from falling in. The rush of cold water had engulfed me and the shock to my system had me wide awake until late in the evening. I also remembered Sarah’s hands as she had forced me to take my jeans off and the excitement I felt from just looking at her.
She was amazingly beautiful, smart and one of the most incredible women I had ever met. There wasn’t a day that had gone by where I hadn’t thought about Sarah’s amazing smile and what it would have been like to marry a woman like her.
When I was with Sarah, I felt like the world was so much smaller and my chances of happiness so much larger. At the very least, I had learned what it was to be in love and it was going to be really damn hard to move on with life knowing what I had once had.
The Miller’s property was listed for four million dollars, which was a little disappointing since Sarah had said she had hoped to at least get five million for it. I was sad to see that the property hadn’t sold yet; that meant that the Millers were still struggling financially and I hated knowing that. They were good people and I took it upon myself to forward the land information to a couple of developers I knew, just to see if they might be interested in land up in that neck of the woods.
Overall, I was happy to be back home. I really couldn’t complain at all; my life was just like it had been before. But it was just as empty as it had been before as well. I went to work and came home without the excitement of someone who I cared about and that was hard to move forward from. The more I tried to get back into my old life, the more I felt like my old life didn’t fit me anymore.
It didn’t excite me to fly from city to city and visit with clients. I got no enjoyment out of the random women that flirted with me and tried to get me to sleep with them. Life just wasn’t getting back to normal at all and I had to figure out why. I had been happy at the ranch. Even if my back story had been made up, I was happy; and I wanted to feel like that again.
When Casey invited me out to drinks, I wanted to refuse, but decided it was time I made more of an effort to get out in society again. Casey wasn’t just my vice president; he was my friend and a fun night out was exactly what we needed.
Hanging out with Casey was different than hanging out with my other friends that I had been refusing since I had gotten home. Casey was a father and I knew he wasn’t interested in going out so we could pick up women. He had genuinely just asked me so we could relax, drink and catch up; that was exactly what I needed.
“You look like an old man lately,” Casey said over the club noise. “I swear you aged ten years while you were gone.”