Mr. Drummel

     Felix Drummel had worked hard in his life. He'd come to America with about a hundred dollars, and parlayed that into a million dollar business. He'd worked for a lot of other people in that time, making them many times that.

     But he was always wary. He knew that it could all be taken from him in an instant. He'd been bankrupt before. He'd made bad decisions. He couldn't afford at this point in his life to be there again. He was too tired to build it all back up again from scratch this time around.

     Retirement. He and Alice talked about it a lot, but he didn't think he could get much for the business, certainly not enough to live on for thirty years or so, and then there was Damien's college to think about, plus what about if he found somebody? What if they had children? Where would be money to get Damien's life off the ground come from?
     When he thought about it, it just didn't seem possible. How was Damien going to start his life just as his parents were retiring? But Damien was kind of an afterthought. They'd done everything they intended to do before they had him.

     But Felix let himself get into magical thinking. We can pay for Damien's education. I have my business. We can pay for Damien to start something when he is older. I have my business. We can retire. I have my business. Everything would be solved by having his business. Never mind that Felix was approaching the age at which he physically was unable to do a good percentage of the job himself. Without Santos and Rafael, he was nothing. If they wanted more money, if they wanted a piece of his business, what could he realistically do? Damien was in no ways able to take everything over from him. He had a tough enough job just showing up every so often and sitting in the office playing video games on the computer.

     There was only one saving grace, and that was the obvious tenuous legal status of his employees. Of course, that put Felix himself in a tenuous legal situation, because he couldn't say, at this point, that he didn't know his employees didn't have legal status to work in the United States of America. I mean, he paid them in envelopes of cash, for God's sake. But he'd never been called on it. No, he'd never once ever had anybody say anything about it.

     So, there it all was. It made him tired to think about, because it was a damn house of cards. But it kept chugging along, somehow. People wanted to get their goodies and employees wanted to get their money, and somehow it all worked. No one was unhappy, except the cashier girls that worked underneath his wife. They would never last more than a couple of months.

     But, wow, Felix was tired. He was sixty-two years old now, and he felt every minute of that age. Could he really do this when he was seventy? Seventy-five? No, he would either quit it or he would die from it.

     And the way his ticker felt, he thought it could go either way.