The Gift Read Free Page B

he read the newspaper, and when being told rambling stories by his five-year-old daughter, he listened to the morning news. When his thirteen-month-old son demonstrated a new skill each day, Lou’s face displayed interest, his mind feeling the exact opposite. When kissing his wife good-bye, he was usually thinking of someone else altogether.
    Every action, movement, appointment, doing, or thought of any kind was layered by another. Driving to work was also a conference call by speakerphone. Breakfasts ran into lunches, lunches into pre-dinner drinks,drinks into dinners, dinners into after-dinner drinks, after-dinner drinks into…well, that depended on how lucky he got. On those lucky nights when he felt himself appreciating his luck and the company of another, he, of course, would convince those who wouldn’t share his appreciation—namely his wife—that he was in another place. To them, he was stuck in a meeting or at an airport, finishing up some important paperwork, or buried in the maddening traffic. Two places, quite magically, at once.
    Everything overlapped, and he was always moving, always had someplace else to be, always wished that he was elsewhere, or that, thanks to some divine intervention, he could be in both places at the same time. He spent as little time as possible with each person during his day, but always left them feeling that it was enough. He wasn’t a tardy man; he was precise, always on time. In his personal life he may have been a broken pocket watch, but in business he was a master timekeeper. He strove for perfection and possessed boundless energy in his quest for success. However, it was these bounds—so eager to attain his ever-growing list of desires, so full of ambition to reach new dizzying heights—that caused him to soar above the heads of the people who mattered most in life. Nothing, and no one, could lift him higher than a new deal at work.
    On one particularly cold Tuesday morning, along the continuously developing dockland of Dublin city, Lou’s black leather shoes, polished to perfection, strolled confidently across the sight line of one particular man. This man watched the shoes in movement that morning, as he had yesterday and as, he assumed, he would tomorrow. There was no best foot forward for this man; for both feet were equal in their abilities. Each stride was equal in length, the heel-to-toe combination so precise; his shoes always pointing forward, heels striking first and then pushing off from the big toe, flexing at the ankle. Perfect each time. The footsteps rhythmic, almost magical as they hit the pavement. There was no rushing or heavy pounding with this man, as was the case with the seemingly decapitated others who raced by at this hour, their heads still back at home on their pillows. No, his shoes made a tapping sound as intrusive and unwelcome as the patter of raindrops against a windowpane, the hem of his trousers flapping slightly like a flag in a light breeze on the eighteenth hole.
    The watcher half expected the slabs of pavement to light up as the man stepped on each one, and for him to break out into a tap dance about how swell and dandy the day was turning out to be. And as the watcher was soon to find out, a swell and dandy day it was most certainly going to be.
    Usually these shiny black shoes beneath the impeccable black suit would float stylishly by the watcher, through the revolving doors, and into the grand marble entrance of this latest modern glass building to be squeezed through the cracks of the quays and launched up into the Dublin sky. But this morning the shoesstopped directly before the watcher. And then they turned, making a gravelly noise as they pivoted on the cold concrete. The watcher had no choice but to lift his gaze from the shoes.
    “Here you go,” Lou said, handing him a coffee. “It’s an Americano; hope you don’t mind, they were having problems with the machine, so they couldn’t make a latte.”
    “Take it back