He didn’t see Mr. Grant and Mr. Ferrell walk up to us. “Never guarantee what you can’t deliver, Peter,” Mr. Grant said, his voice angry but controlled.
“Mr. Grant . . .” Potts said. Then he turned to Mr. Ferrell, genuflecting. “Mr. Ferrell, it is such an honor to meet you. Your work, the Florence Initiative, is sheer genius.”
“You should tell that to the man who made it happen,” he said, turning to me. “I believe you’ve met Mr. Jacobson, our new Global Chief Creative Officer for Leo Burnett Worldwide.”
Potts looked like a man who had just been convicted of double homicide.
“Unfortunately,” Mr. Ferrell said, “from what I just heard, it sounds like you have a problem working with him.”
Potts flushed. “No. Not at all. Things are good,” he said, turning to me. “Everything’s good, right?”
“Not everything,” Mr. Grant said. “As you know, Peter, Leo Burnett is proud of the work we’ve done in creating an egalitarian work environment. We’ve worked hard to abolish the traditional models of corporate hierarchy and elitism and replaced it with cooperation and teamwork.
“I just spoke with H.R. It would seem that our way of doing business is very much at odds with your practice of what I’ll call for lack of a better term, personnel exiling. For that reason we’ll be making some changes. Timothy Ishmael will be your replacement as senior creative director.”
Peter looked panicked. “Please don’t fire me.”
“We’re not firing you,” Mr. Grant said. “We have a wonderful opportunity for you in New York. In fact, it’s the very same opportunity you gave Mr. Jacobson, and look how that worked out for him.” He winked at me. “And I’m told that you’ve already met your new manager, Leonard Sykes.”
I finally understood the dream I’d had in New York. And Leonard’s broken pots.
CHAPTER
Thirty-two
I have decided to journey the dark path to my past—to find the light of hope or to permanently extinguish it.
Joseph Jacobson’s Diary
At noon the agency closed. I took my things to the hotel, then caught the Blue Line at Clark and Lake. I was going to the diner. A small, hopelessly optimistic part of my psyche hoped that April might have called and left some contact information with Ewa or one of the waitresses. But the realist in me knew that wasn’t likely. I was going to the diner to formalize my loss and put the past to rest—like going to a funeral to see the deceased.
I had intended to go straight to Mr. G’s, but when the train stopped at Irving Park, my breath caught a little. How many times had my heart ached as she stepped off the train here to go home? Then I thought of something. Perhaps April’s roommate, Ruth, would know how to find her. I jumped off the train just before the doors closed.
In spite of the patches of ice, I practically ran the distance to her apartment. The main-level door was locked, so I buzzed the apartment, twice, but there was no answer. I waited there a few minutes until a tenant walked up to the door and opened it. I slipped in after her and went up the stairs to April’s apartment. There was a FOR RENT sign on the door. I don’t know why I was so surprised. April had been gone for nearly two years. I never should have gotten my hopes up.
I walked back to the platform, taking the next train just two stops west to the Jefferson Park station. It took me fifteen minutes to walk from the station to my old apartment.
It was a little past three in the afternoon. The traffic along Lawrence was light, the street dusted in white, its curbs concealed beneath tall banks of dirty snow. Even though it was freezing cold, across the street from my old apartment a woman in a parka was sitting on the steps of her house blowing soap bubbles for her dog.
I couldn’t believe that I’d ever lived in that place. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago. I wondered if this was how soldiers felt returning to a battlefield in peacetime.
I remembered. That first sleepless night walking down Lawrence Avenue, first to the Polish market, then, later that same night, to the diner. The night I met her.
Oftentimes it’s the smallest, seemingly inconsequential acts that make the biggest differences in our lives. What if April had remembered to lock the door at closing time? How different my life would be. How different I would feel at this moment. It was so easy falling in love with her. Why couldn’t letting her go be just as easy?
I took a picture of the ugly apartment building with my phone, then headed further down Lawrence toward the diner.
At the sight of Mr. G’s the memories flooded back, carrying such joy and pain with them I didn’t know if I could hold them all. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, I thought. No, it wasn’t an easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. There was no sense prolonging the agony. It was time to face the corpse of my failure, shut the lid on it and move on.