CALIFORNIA PARADISE
Chapter Fifteen
Rose sat in a chair next to Jack, her back
straight against the cushioning.
Cal sat across the desk, waiting for Jack to
finish the calculations. Cal, of course, didn’t know that Jack had finished
minutes ago and was simply getting back at him for excluding him earlier.
"Cal," Rose spoke. The room began
to spin again, but he clutched the arms of his chair, and it stopped.
"Yes?" he managed to ask.
"It’s hard for me to ask you this, but
it’s just been eating away at me this entire time. Um…you wouldn’t happen to
know where…uh…my mother was, would you?"
Her hopeful eyes began eating away at him.
Even Jack, busy at work, looked up at him to see his response. "No,"
he bitterly stated. "I lost touch with your mother after the sinking.
She--she said that she never wanted to see me again. She thought that I had
brought on your death, Rose. What was I supposed to do? Your name wasn’t on the
survivors’ list."
"It’s okay, Cal." The heartbreak
was written all over her face.
She sat, deep in thought, for a long time.
Jack forgot about pretending to work and started setting up a meeting with Cal
to take a look at the foundation of his house, and still Rose didn’t say a
word.
Finally, after a lot of thought, Rose
brightened up. She cheerfully talked with both Cal and Jack and, even if it was
only for a brief period of time, they forgot that they were all supposed to
hate each other.
Afterwards, Rose became an almost permanent
fixture in the office, coming in the afternoon with tasty lunches for all of
them and filled with good cheer.