AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’s fifty-six now, still a badass out here surfing. She’s a Playa de Corazones lifer, like me.
Yoshimi is also one of my mentors. She created an app that did extremely well in her corporate life, cashed out, and now she’s living the life. Our friendship is unorthodox but I wouldn’t trade it in for anything.
We float in chest-high water on our surfboards, our eyes peering west so we can see when the next good wave will come. Her long black hair touches the water.
I’ve just finished giving Yoshimi a synopsis of how my interaction went with vacation babe, AKA Indy, as I’ve officially nicknamed her.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask her.
“Dammit, Jack,” she says, shaking her head. “Just when I think you might have turned a corner, you go and tell a story like this.”
“It’s a service. I’m helping her kick her app addiction.”
“You can’t just lecture people about their technology usage unprompted. That’s over the line.”
“She’s probably been spending five hours a day on her phone. She’s got a problem. This entire society has a problem and no one is owning up to it. She’ll thank me later.”
Yoshimi frowns. “There’s this thing called money, and it isn’t as easy for most people as it is for you. Now her phone is broken and she’s got to shell out for a new one. Not everyone is a gazillionaire CEO like you who can just buy a new phone every day like it’s no big deal.”
“I’m not a gazillionaire. Billionaire.” I huff.
Yoshimi rolls her eyes. A big wave comes but the timing of its crest isn’t quite right so we let it pass.
“You need to be kinder,” she sighs. “I’m your only true friend in this town. And when you tell me stories like this it makes me feel as though I’ve failed you, and that means I have failed your mother.”
“I’m kind,” I snap, almost accusatorily.
She raises an eyebrow. “Are you, though?”
“Sometimes,” I add. ”Okay, maybe not all the time.”
“How’s business going, anyway?” she asks. “Did you get everything cleaned up during your trip to headquarters in December?”
“It’s going,” I huff. “I need a new CFO, though. Someone with vision and who understands the new mediascape. Someone willing to take calculated risks. I had to fire a whole lot of people. Felt bad about that, but if we don’t turn that ship around, no one’s going to have a job there and some people weren’t pulling their weight.”
“Letting people go is always stressful. How about your hotel business here?”
“Last year was extremely profitable, but I recently lost about five million overnight.”
“What the hell happened?”
“New hotel environmental laws came into play this year. So that big property I bought in Panama is effectively useless. It was given back to the state.”
“No refund?”
“No refund. The government keeps all five million.”
“Ooof. That’s rough.”
Finally, the perfect wave comes and we ride it to the shore.
On the beach, Yoshimi’s fifteen year old son is curled up in a ball in the sand next to his surfboard.
Yoshimi gestures to me and then waves for me to come out for another wave.
“What’s up with the kid? Why’s he so morose?” I ask once I get back out into the water.
“Kevin has had a crush on this girl all year long,” she says, “and she just started dating someone else, so he’s upset.”
