The Coaster by Erich Wurster Page B

sanitation market. They can sell this process to every business on the planet.”
    I stopped by to see Harriet on my way out. She was gone, but there was a thick manila envelope on her desk with my name on it.
    ***
    I returned to what was now becoming the normal domestic tranquility of my homelife. Martha Stewart was in the kitchen, the kids were studying quietly in their rooms, and the dogs were outside. It would almost be worth working hard all day if it meant coming home to this. Except I wasn’t getting paid.
    After dinner, I stuck my head into the family room. Sarah was sitting on the couch typing on her laptop in front of the TV. “I’ll be in my office,” I said. “I’ve got a few things to go over before my meetings tomorrow.”
    â€œWhat do you have to do?”
    I didn’t want to discuss the Sanitol deal with Sarah. If I told her about it, she would try to take over. She can’t help it. She’d ask a bunch of questions and start calling contacts and having meetings and the next thing you know it would be her deal. I wanted it to be my deal. Plus I wanted to find out what Sam thought before I went any further. “Nothing interesting. Just speed-read some financial crap so I can pretend to know what I’m talking about.”
    She didn’t look up from her laptop. “You don’t need to prepare to pretend you know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing that for years.”
    â€œMaybe this time I want to actually be prepared.”
    ***
    I went into my office and shut the door. When I use my office in the evenings, it’s generally to catch up on any Internet reading I didn’t get to during the day and watch TV in peace. Sarah doesn’t like the kids to be exposed to inappropriate material, which includes just about everything I like to watch.
    I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope Harriet left me. It contained a single file folder. I could tell by the handwriting that Sam had personally written “Sanitol” on the tab. The bulk of the folder contained copies of Sanitol’s financial projections and printouts of e-mails back and forth between Sam and Eric. Eric had told Sam essentially what he had told me. If the assumptions were correct, Sanitol was a gold mine.
    There were also a number of sheets of yellow, lined paper torn from a legal pad. Sam’s notes. I recognized his old-fashioned fountain pen scrawl. I’d seen it for years on birthday cards and thank-you notes. Sam still believed in the personal touch of a handwritten note. He could have handled that kind of thing easier with an e-mail, but he always said, “How can they tell it’s really from me if I don’t write it myself?” He was right, they couldn’t, which is exactly why most people of his stature don’t handwrite them. You can’t farm the job out to an underling if it’s ink on a piece of paper.
    Seeing his handwriting sent a little pang of sadness, with a tinge of survivor guilt, into my heart. The penmanship was virtually indecipherable, but it was pure Sam. The more powerful the person, the worse the handwriting. I’d decoded enough of his missives to the family that I figured I could get the gist of it without asking Sarah.
    I could tell from the notes that Sam was struggling with the numbers. There were a lot of columns of numbers added up by hand with question marks next to the results. It looked like he thought there must be some sort of math error. But even my rudimentary arithmetic skills could tell that everything added up. There were other notes to himself, like “Have E analyze competition” and “industry contacts.” Finally on the last page he had written “TOO GOOD?” in block letters.
    According to his notes, it sure looked like Sam had reservations about Sanitol, despite the possible financial boon. Selfishly, of course, I wanted this deal to be solid as a rock. A lot of