“And so were you,” she said in a hollow voice. “Instead, you’re working at the Mutual Bank Building as a security guard.”
It was a low blow, but no lower than the one he’d just dealt her.
“My cartoons are an evangelism tool,” he said. “They touch lives.”
“And so will my park.”
For a moment there was a thick silence between them, silence wrought with history and bitterness, silence that spoke volumes about betrayal and loyalty, and that fragile emotion called love.
Struggling to get past that history, Andi leaned on her elbows and clasped her hands under her chin. “As I was saying, Justin, the cartoons are good. And I understand that you haven’t been able to sell them to a network or any other lucrative medium.”
“So far,” the animator conceded, leaning back in his seat and resting his chin on his fingers. “I’ve come close, but the Christian theme and all the biblical parallels play against them. I’ll find a place for them soon enough. I’m a patient man.”
“You don’t have to be,” Andi said. She shifted her gaze to the television screen, where the nearsighted farmer was making his way across a cornfield, his animals running ahead of and around him, protecting him without his knowledge from the traps set by the troll.
It was time to make her move.
Andi turned back to Justin, praying he would see the sense in her offer and not some underlying motive. “I have the answer,” she announced. “I’d like to buy the exclusive rights to your cartoon and use the characters in Promised Land.”
Contrary to Andi’s expectations, there was no change in Justin’s expression, in his breathing, or in the steadfast way he studied her over steepled fingertips. There was no indication, in fact, that he’d heard her at all.
“Did you hear me?” she asked finally.
“I heard you. It’s just that I’m not surprised, really. When your secretary called, I assumed there would be some such offer.”
Andi forced a smile. “Good,” she said, not quite certain that she meant it. “Then you’ve thought about it.”
He breathed a mirthless laugh. “Thought about it? I guess you could say that. But it didn’t take much thought. I have no intention of handing over the exclusive rights to my cartoons to you or anybody else.”
Vexation rippled through Andi’s stiff muscles, and she cleared her throat and opened the file on her desk. “Justin, I hope you aren’t putting our past problems in the way of something that could help us both. You do realize, don’t you, that there’ll be a lot of money involved?”
“There’s always money involved, Andi. Aren’t you the one who taught me that?”
She closed her eyes. Of course they couldn’t get past that history, that stuffed baggage they both dragged behind them. Some things just didn’t go away.
She took a deep breath and decided to face the problems head-on. “You can’t blame me for what happened to us, Justin.”
“Then who can I blame?”
She got up and shoved her chair back, then crossed her arms and paced over to the window. “My father lied to me, Justin. He told me he’d offered you fifty thousand dollars to break things off with me and leave town, and he said you took it.”
“And you believed him!” The words erupted as if they’d been held in too long. “You believed that I would take a bribe from him to end my relationship with you.”
“Well, you left,” she said, spinning around. “You disappeared for a week, without so much as a word. What was I supposed to think?”
“I was furious at your father,” he said. “And yeah, I disappeared, because I was angry and upset and didn’t know whether to tell you what your father had done and ruin your image of him. I didn’t know if we had a future together, if I could stand the constant pressure from the man who never thought I was good enough for his little girl. I didn’t know if I could ever be good enough for you, and I had to think—”
“So of course, I was the bad guy. I shouldn’t have accused you, Justin …”
“You shouldn’t have doubted me,” he said. “You knew what kind of a man I was. Your money and your family were liabilities to me, Andi, not assets.”
“I know that.”
“Then when did you come to know the truth?” he asked. “When did you finally stop thinking I had been paid off?”
The question hung in the air for a moment. “I knew it the minute you said it,” she whispered. “I knew I had made a mistake. But just thinking you had done it became the end of us.” She swallowed, tried to control the wobble in her voice. “And then a few years ago, my father’s life changed. He became a Christian, Justin, if you can believe that.”
Justin looked up at her, doubtful.
“He confessed everything, and I forgave him. I think he even tried to find you, to ask for your forgiveness. But nobody really knew where you were at the time.”
He looked down at the plush carpet beneath his feet, and she couldn’t tell from his eyes what was going through his mind.
“When we started looking for an animator, Wes brought in your cartoon and included it with the tapes we were considering. When I saw Khaki’s Krewe, I knew it was just what we needed, Justin. I had no idea it was yours. I was doubly surprised to find that you were back here, in Shreveport.”
“My mother had a stroke two years ago,” he said. “I moved back to help out. My staff agreed to come with me. Mom died, eventually.”
“Oh, Justin,” she cut in. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “She’s with Dad now. She was really suffering. Anyway, we decided to stay here. I inherited their house, so I set up the studio there. We’ve been working hard to get our cartoons into the right hands. But I don’t think I want to hand them over to you. I’m not that hungry.”
Andi swallowed the lump in her throat, and slid her hands into her pockets. With a lift of her chin, she walked around her desk to stand in front of him. Her voice was hoarse when she spoke. “Justin, as a businessman you must realize what Promised Land could do for your characters.” A smirk told her he was enjoying this. “Absolutely. Just as you realize what my characters can do for Promised Land.”
She locked eyes with him for a moment, then bit her lip and went to peer out the large plateglass window, seeking a way to put this ruinous enmity between them to rest.
He strode toward her. “As I said, I won’t give you exclusive rights. But there are other possibilities,” he began in a soft, matter-of-fact monotone. “I might consider working with you. My staff and I would have to retain absolute control of our characters, have the last word concerning everything that’s done with them, and of course continue producing the cartoons. And we would sell them to anyone else we choose. I’m no fool. Profits made from merchandising—like toys or clothes or movies—would go to me, not to you.”
She turned to him, her back against the window that held the view of the amusement park that had been the focus of her plans and dreams for six years now. A moment of silence followed as her emerald eyes cut into him with cool contempt. “I don’t do business that way, Justin,” she said finally. “When something concerns Promised Land, I like to be in control.”
A sarcastic smile tipped one side of his full lips. “Like father, like daughter,” he mumbled under his breath. “Manipulative, dictatorial …”
Andi swallowed and tried to step back, but the window against her back prevented her. “And I suppose I controlled you?” She held his intimidating gaze, refusing to let him know his devastating effect on her.
“Didn’t you?” The muscles hinging his jaw rippled. “I’ve learned a lot of lessons since I saw you last,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Hard ones. And you probably have, too. If anything, we’re probably both more stubborn than we were before, and you’d have to be crazy to think either of us could compromise.”
“Have you learned any lessons about pride or arrogance, Justin?”
His gaze locked with hers. “Have you?”
br />
Andi swallowed and stepped away, putting safer distance between them as she cut out a mirthless laugh that contained more emotion than she’d counted on. “Justin, Wes taped that cartoon at two o’clock in the morning at the tail end of a program that no one in his right mind would watch. And you have the nerve to pretend my offer doesn’t mean anything to you? If I were you, I’d be thinking about my future.”
“Don’t tell me about my future,” he said. “I’m the one who has to work nights to supplement my income. I’m the one in hock up to my ears to finance something I believe in-something I believe is my own divine calling. But I’m not going to hand my cartoons over to you the way everything else in your life has been handed over. You want to do business? Then you think about my terms. And if you decide that we have something further to discuss, you know where to reach me.” He started toward the door, but Andi’s words stopped him.
“You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?” she asked him through tight lips. “You love throwing your poverty at me like it’s some elite club I’m not invited to join. Well, wallow in it, then. It’s always easier to settle for something, isn’t it? As long as you convince yourself that it’s your calling—” Her words choked off, and she turned her back to him and forced the mist in her eyes to dry. Struggling to rid her face of expression, she stalked back to her desk and closed the file as if the offer was no longer extended. “There are other animators, Justin,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth she remembered a similar threat flung eight years ago. “There are other men,” she had said in desperation, grasping at anything that would have kept him from walking out the door.
He remembered, too, and as he had done the last time, he called her bluff. “Then do business with them,” he said simply, walking to the door. He stopped halfway out, then turned to voice an afterthought. “And if you do decide to contact me again, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call until after ten in the morning. I allow myself four hours of sleep a day, and between six and ten A.M. I don’t like to be disturbed.” The door slammed behind him, leaving Andi staring after him in silent rage.
Chapter Two
Justin’s foul mood had only gotten fouler as he pulled onto his gravel driveway behind the cars of his staff members who were, no doubt, hard at work, while waiting with bated breath to hear how his meeting had gone. He had warned them what his answer would be, but they’d convinced him to go, anyway, and just hear her out.
He went in the screen door on the side of the house and let it slam behind him. Madeline, one of his chief animators, looked up from her work at her drafting table, her black curls bobbing in her big eyes.
“Justin, how’d it go?”
“Justin’s back?” he heard from another room, and Gene and B.J., two of the other animators, dashed in. “What happened?” they asked.
He plopped wearily down in a chair and pulled his feet up. “Where’s Nathan? I might as well get it all out at once.” “Nathan!” Madeline shouted indelicately. “Justin’s back! Get in here!”
Nathan plodded in, three straight pins in his mouth and a handful of sketches to be put on the storyboard. He dropped the sketches on the shelf beneath the board and took the pins out of his mouth. “You’re back,” he said. “So, has our ship come in?”
Justin blew out a disgusted breath. “No. I told you yesterday that Sherman Enterprises was not going to be our ship. Nothing’s changed.”
Madeline got up from her table and came around to perch on the arm of the couch. B.J. couldn’t stand the suspense. He propped his foot on a stool and leaned his elbow on his knee as he asked Justin, “Did she make you an offer?”
“Yeah, if you want to call it that.”
They all kept staring at him, waiting, and when he didn’t volunteer it, Madeline asked, “Well, are you going to tell us what it is?”
He shrugged. “I don’t see the point. I’m not taking it.”
Madeline looked at Gene, who had plopped down on the couch next to her. They both rolled their eyes.
“Buddy, you’re gonna have real low morale around here if you don’t at least tell us what she said.”
“That’s right,” Nathan told him. “You expect a lot out of us, and none of us has even gotten paid regularly in the past few weeks. Man, we’ve all got investments in Khaki’s Krewe.
Justin rubbed his eyes. “I know you do. You have every right to know.” He sat up and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Okay. She wants to buy exclusive rights to the Krewe and use the characters in Promised Land.”
“That’s great!” Madeline shouted, springing off of her perch. “Do you have any idea what that could do for the cartoons? Can you even imagine how great this is?”
“It’s a God thing, man,” Gene said. “You know it is. We’ve been struggling and scraping and sacrificing—we’ve each had to maintain second jobs to supplement—and every day we sit in here and pray that God will deliver us if he’s really calling us to do this. Don’t you see, buddy? It’s an answer!”
“It’s not an answer,” Justin said. “God would not answer my prayers through Andi Sherman. You have to trust me on this.”
Madeline’s face was reddening. “Justin, did you turn her down because of a busted relationship when you were in college? You wouldn’t really be that stupid, would you?”
He didn’t like being called names, but Madeline had always gotten away with it. “No, it wasn’t the relationship. You all know there’s no love lost between me and the Sher-mans, but that wasn’t the only thing. She wants absolute control over the characters. You know I can’t give her that.” “There’s a real important word you should learn before you grow up,” Nathan said. “It’s ‘negotiation.’”
“She wasn’t interested in negotiation. She’s used to getting her own way.”
Madeline breathed a mirthless laugh. “And you’re not? Give me a break, Justin. I can just see you two standing there like the characters in that Dr. Seuss book. You know, the ones who refused to get out of each other’s way, so they just stood there as cities grew up around them and the world changed …”
“I don’t have to play this game with her, Madeline. She’s out of my life.”
“Oh, no,” B.J. said as he lowered to a chair and covered the back of his head with his hands. “It is about their relationship. We’re not going to get paid and all our work is going to keep going to waste on obscure cable channels at two o’clock in the morning, all because of a stupid teenaged romance.”
“You guys have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“We know that our paychecks are late,” Madeline said. “We know that we’ve hung in here with you for a long time, killing ourselves to meet deadlines for those obscure little cable stations, just knowing that one day God was going to turn everything around. And when he does, you have too much pride to accept it. You beat everything!”
“All right, that’s enough,” Justin said, storming out of the room. “I have work to do. In fact, we all do.”
He left them in the room and slammed into his own bedroom that he sometimes used for an office when he couldn’t concentrate in the studio. He looked down at the stuff he’d been working on yesterday. It was a funny gag, one they’d all brainstormed on, but today it seemed dry, lifeless. What would it have been like to see his characters made into three-dimensional creatures, roaming around the park shaking hands with children, singing and dancing on stage …
There was no use dwelling on it. It wasn’t going to happen. His staff would get over it, if they didn’t mutiny first. Someone knocked on the door, and irritated, he called, “What?”
Madeline opened the door and peeked in. Her face was downcast and still angry. “I’ve decided to work at home for the rest of the day.”
He sighed. “Yeah, it figures. Tell you what. Just tell everybody to go home. If everybody stays, we’re going to wind up getting into it again, and I’m just not up to it.”
She hesitated at the door. “Justin, if you go
t some sleep and thought this over, maybe you’d have a clear head. Maybe then you could reconsider.”
“My head is as clear as it’s going to get,” he said. “I’m not giving her the exclusive control of my characters, and that’s final.”
Madeline didn’t have anything to say as she turned and walked away. In a few moments, he heard the others leaving, one by one. Was that the mutiny he’d worried about? he wondered. Was he going to lose his staff if he didn’t do something quick? Something that would make a difference?
He got up and went back into the studio, crossed to the storyboard, and pinned up the sketches that Nathan had brought in. Then he went to Madeline’s table and worked for a while on the continuity sketches that would take them from one gag to the next. His shoulders ached with the effort, and his head ached with the angry thoughts that kept flitting in and out of his mind.
It was late afternoon when he moved to the couch. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on the storyboard mounted on the wall in front of him, representing one scene in the segment he was working on. Fatigue diluted concentration, but he pushed the thought of sleep to the back of his mind, for he simply had too much to do before he left for work at nine that night. He checked his watch. Five o’clock. He wondered if his staff had accomplished anything today or if they’d just spent the hours stewing.
He shouldn’t have told them of Andi’s offer. What was it to them if someone else owned his characters? They weren’t the ones who stood to lose anything. He grabbed a sketch pad and sank back onto the small couch facing the story-board. Did they think he liked living one day at a time? Didn’t they know that a true answer to his prayers wouldn’t come with Andi Sherman attached? Didn’t they realize how important these cartoons would be if he just waited patiently for the right offer, one based on God’s terms?
He leaned his head back on the cushions of the couch and crossed an ankle over his knee, propping the pad there. Absently he began to sketch Bucky the rock ’n’ roll horse, with a microphone in his hand. Around him grew the figures of the other characters—Khaki Kangaroo; Ned the nearsighted farmer; the bird named Melody; the dowager pigs; the bear named Bull; the Cha-Cha Chickens; and Trudeau the troll. Without any conscious thought, he let his pencil fly across the page, sketching the background buildings and rides of the amusement park. His characters looked right. If only Promised Land weren’t synonymous with Andi Sherman.