A Promise to Cherish by Lavyrle Spencer

at the thought of the boys.
    She counted the days.
    A brown and white cat padded silently into the room and preened his fur against Lee’s ankle.
    “Oh, P. Ewing, you’ve been on the bed again, haven’t you?”
    Lee looked down, watched the cat move sinuously against her, then crossed to one of the beds to plump its pillow and smooth the spread. On her way out she scooped up the cat, buried her face in his fur, and reached for the light switch. But she paused in the doorway and turned, assessing the silent room once more. “Oh, P. Ewing, what if I lose my job?” she lamented. “I’ll have to give up this place.”

    O N Friday morning Lee was working on a bid for a simple sewer and water installation in Overland Park, which would service an area where a shopping mall was to be built. The bid letting was scheduled for two that afternoon. These last few hours were always the worst. The phone constantly jangled with calls from salesmen giving last minute quotes on materials, from reinforced concrete pipe to catch basin castings. She’d just received a price quote on sod replacement which was several cents under the previous low bidder and was recomputing the labor subcontract cost when the phone rang. Preoccupied, fingers still flying over the calculator buttons, Lee reached unconsciously for the receiver, cradling it between shoulder and ear as her eyes continued scanning a column of numbers.
    A moment later she realized she’d picked up a call meant for F.A. A smooth, masculine voice was saying, “. . . can come to terms on that twelve-inch reinforced concrete pipe we’ve had laying around the yard. The flaws are in the reinforcing, not in the concrete itself, so it’d be mighty tough to detect.”
    F.A. chuckled, then returned in a silky tone, “And we’ll split the difference right up the middle?”
    Horrified, Lee jerked the receiver away from her ear, clutching it in white knuckles, realizing she should have hung up the moment she’d identified the call as someone else’s. But it had happened so fast! She rested the receiver on her job sheets and stared at the lighted button on the face of the phone, waiting, digesting what she’d heard. With each passing second her disgust grew. She’d heard it said many times that F.A. knew every dishonest trick in the book and wasn’t afraid to use them. But she’d never had proof before. Using substandard materials, price fixing, collusion, buying off the competition before bids—there were countless deceits it was possible to practice. Some were illegal, some merely dishonest. But either way, until now it had been no more than hearsay.
    The light blinked off, and Lee slipped the receiver silently back in place.
    She was still sitting there in a turmoil when F.A. rounded the doorway into her office. This morning the gnawed stub of an unlit cigar was clenched in his teeth.
    “Whoever you got to supply the twelve-inch reinforced concrete pipe on that Overland Park job, we won’t be goin’ with them. Gonna get that pipe from Jacobi.”
    “Oh?” Lee retorted coldly.
    “Yeah, you can figure it at twelve-fifty a foot, materials only.”
    “And what margin of profit are you working on at twelve dollars and fifty cents a foot?”
    His beady little eyes narrowed on her like laser beams. The cigar stub shifted to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Never mind, just figure it at twelve-fifty a foot.”
    Lee erupted from her chair. “No, you figure it at twelve-fifty a foot!”
    “Me! That bid’s due at two o’clock this afternoon and—”
    “And it won’t be turned in by me, not with flawed pipe from Jacobi figured into it!”
    His sausagelike fingers slowly extracted the wet cigar from his lips. “So, Little Miss Big Ears has been listening in on somebody else’s phone conversations, huh?”
    “Yes, I heard you and Jacobi on the phone just now, but it was entirely unintentional. As a matter of fact, I only heard about ten seconds worth of the