Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Read Free

paid mostly cash for. My own trading had never been on the
margin. I lost the bazillion or so dollars I’d been worth on paper.
But I was a broker: I’d never been convinced that was real money
anyway. I had my apartment. I had a Chagall etching I’d bought with
some pretend money I’d converted into real money. I thought: I’m
gonna be OK. I’m gonna coast through this. I still had a job. Not
everyone did.
    Then Jack.
    I thought briefly about not doing something
with stocks. I wanted to make a new life. I could do anything. I could wait tables. Become a real estate agent.
Be a film director. Open a dress shop. Or a cafe. But the reality
is this: the stock market is the only thing I know. Except I also
knew I didn’t want to be a broker anymore: I didn't want to invest
other people’s money. And I realized I was tired of having to stand
on a chair to see a slice of green. My apartment was worth enough
to buy a whole house in most cities that aren’t New York: it was
certainly enough for a stake.
    I had a lot of questions, was shy on
answers, but there was one thing I knew: my days at Merriwether
Bailey — or any other brokerage — were over. And it wasn’t just
that the new economy was looking like it was going to suck so badly
there’d be too many of us. I was good. I could have kept my job. I
just didn’t want it anymore.
    “What are you gonna do?” Sal asked when I
went in to the office to clean out my desk.
    As I loaded the cardboard box that was
proving to be too large for my few personal possessions, I had been
trying to impress details on my mind so I wouldn’t forget: The
laminated woodgrain that seemed to coat every hard surface in the
office (active traders can be messy), the dumb dippy bird on Jamal
Henderson’s desk (bright red with a real feather on his head and
always dipping towards water but never making it), the viral hum of
the air conditioner (noiseless noise, white noise). My eye stopped
on Jack’s desk, catty corner from mine. Empty now, his family
pictures gone. Had Sarah come in for everything? Or was there a box
somewhere in one of the back offices with “Shoenberger” scrawled
across it in big, black letters? I figured I didn’t really want to
know.
    It was 4:30 pm on a trading day. The markets
were closed, the bullpen in the post-coital lull that follows the
closing bell: Brokers cleaning up their desks, doing paperwork,
chatting softly, amicably; traders horsing around like the
self-satisfied adolescents they seem always to pride themselves on
being. All of this varied activity, all in anticipation of
tomorrow’s opening bell, while still riding the ebbing high of the
day’s trading. I knew this was one of the things I’d miss.
    “Carter?”
    “Sorry Sal. I was just thinking.”
    “I asked what you’re going to do.” I noticed
that the corner of Sal’s mouth was twitching, as it does when he’s
worried about something. I wondered if I might be the cause.
    Sal was my boss, but he was more, as well.
My father died when I’d only been at Merriwether Bailey a couple of
years. Sal hadn’t tried to be a father to me after my Dad was gone,
but he’d slid into the senior-male-figure in my life position
comfortably. Watching me closely through heartbreaks and workaholic
periods. Prodding me when I seemed to spend too much time at the
office or forgot to eat. He worried about me. I could see it on him
now.
    “I don’t know,” I told him honestly.
    “Just not this, huh?”
    I nodded.
    “Jack,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
    “I guess,” I looked again at the empty desk,
allowing my eyes to scan to the place where Jack had fallen.
Self-indulgent, self-punishing, I made myself stop. “And it just
doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Not so much.”
    He hugged me then. I hadn’t expected a hug,
not from Sal. But we both needed it: the touch of another human.
The world was changing. Jack’s death was the grand finale for me,
but Sal and I had both seen the changes