It had been a quiet morning. Lawrence awoke, feeling well-rested, and arose to prepare himself a breakfast of cut fruit and wheat toast. Valerie was in the kitchen, tying on her running shoes, having just finished her own morning meal.
"Good morning," Lawrence said, opening the coffee machine to put grounds in the basket. "Another early start?"
Valerie stood. "Yup."
"I admire your dedication, Valerie," Lawrence said, starting the coffee. "Be sure to come home this afternoon, though. Maybe we can convince your father to go out with us and see a movie or something. All of us need to take a day off, I think."
Valerie gave a half-shrug. "We can try."
"I'd like to. Keep in touch today, all right?"
"All right," she said. Then she breezed out the door. Lawrence took the strawberries and melons out of the refrigerator to begin cutting them up.
Soon he heard Leonard's footsteps falling heavy, trudging down the stairs. Lawrence dropped a couple slices of bread in the toaster, turning to pour two mugs of coffee. "You seem tired this morning."
He glanced over just in time to see Leonard rubbing his eyes as he took a seat at the table. "I'm always tired," Leonard muttered.
Lawrence let out a light chuckle. "I meant more than usual."
"I was up at the office until five this morning." Leonard pulled his hands away from his face and opened his eyes when he heard the click against the table as Lawrence set a plate of fruit in front of him. "Oh, thanks."
Lawrence didn't need to glance at the time on the wall terminal as he sat across from his son; he knew it wasn't yet eight o'clock. "Have you even slept?" No wonder Leonard seemed so exhausted.
"No, and I won't be able to until tonight. I just came home to shower and get changed before I head back up."
"You do realize that it's Saturday." Lawrence took a sip of his coffee.
Leonard pressed his forehead into his hands for a second before sitting upright and stabbing a piece of melon with his fork. "I lost my administrative assistant the other day, so I have a bunch of extra work to do before Monday."
"You seem to misplace a lot of assistants," Lawrence quipped.
Leonard squeezed his eyes shut, as though conversing with his father were giving him a headache. "You're so corny sometimes."
Lawrence suppressed a smile, then pursed his lips contemplatively as he chewed and swallowed a bite of his fruit. "I have a feeling the reason will sound familiar. Something about how you wouldn't leave him alone to do his job…?"
Leonard picked up his coffee cup and took a drink. "These assistants don't seem to understand that if they make a mistake, I'm the one who has to deal with the consequences. I've only been in business for three years; we're barely off the ground. I can't afford mistakes."
Lawrence speared another bit of his fruit with his fork. "It almost seems pointless to have an assistant if you're just going to double-check everything they do. I bet half of your sleep deprivation comes directly from that habit of yours." He popped the food in his mouth and looked at his son.
"I don't know what else I could possibly do about it," Leonard groused. He kept his eyes trained on his barely-touched plate as his father arose to get his toast. "Running the place is annoying enough without having to keep track of piddly little things."
"But you end up keeping track of those things anyway because you refuse to trust your assistants to do their jobs." Lawrence shook his head as he sat back down. "I thought you were going to hire an administrator so that you could concentrate more on the research end of things."
Leonard paused, his hands wrapped around his coffee cup, and shook his head. "Yeah, I think about it sometimes. But it always feels like something that will happen in the far future. It doesn't seem realistic to turn over the day-to-day operations to someone else right now."
"What timing sounds realistic to you?" Lawrence held out his hand and started to point at his fingers, one by one, as though counting to keep track of his arguments. "Five years; ten years? How many employees will you have before you can't handle it anymore? You have eight techs to keep track of right now, and you're barely able to spend the time to prepare their daily work assignments by the time you've taken care of your administrative duties. You spend more nights in at the office than you spend at home. This is the first time I've seen you in four days." He dropped his hands to the table. "You're going to burn out, Len. Then who's going to keep your business from running off the rails?"
Leonard had made little sounds of protest at various points in his father's speech. Now he shook his head. "I work just as hard as you did when I was a kid. You never burned out."
"I wasn't a control freak. I learned early on how to delegate tasks I didn't need to worry about. I would never have been home to parent you if I had held onto everything as tightly as you do."
Leonard frowned at this; it was unspoken as of now, but he knew what his father thought about the amount of time he managed to dedicate to parenting his own daughter. It was too easy to leave that up to Lawrence, to delegate at home rather than at work. "I'm trying to guide things where I need them to be. These things take time."
"Certainly, they do. They also take being proactive." Lawrence sipped his coffee and watched Leonard eat for a few moments. "What are you hoping to accomplish with this business of yours, Leonard? Why are you working so hard?"
"Well, I want to further research in the field to improve the quality of AI technology in security-related applications," Leonard said.
Lawrence took a sip of his coffee, reflecting on that statement. "I've got to be honest, son, that sounded completely canned. I seem to recall not long after Allison's death you speaking quite passionately about the fact that you needed to contribute toward the war effort. You said you wanted to prevent more deaths like Allison's."
Leonard looked at him blankly for a moment. It seemed to take a few seconds for his addled brain to process the words that had been spoken. Finally, he shook his head slightly and blinked. "Well, yeah, of course. No one else should have to go through what I went through after she died. But there's only so much one person can do."
Lawrence lowered his eyebrows, looking at Leonard with mild consternation. Apparently Leonard no longer believed he could prevent millions of deaths single-handedly, nor that the war could be brought to a simple and clean end. But this change in attitude was disheartening. "You've lost your vision, Leonard," he finally declared.
Leonard scowled. "I don't have time to have any fu…" He glanced at his father. "…to have any 'vision'."
Lawrence cleared his throat. "On the contrary," he replied. He sat back in his chair, having finished his cup of coffee, but holding off on pouring himself a second. "You are taking on so many duties, a number of them being duties that you are not even suited for, and that's driving everything else out. All the ideals you held, all the passion, all the drive… It's all still there, waiting for you to release the mundane details and come back to clear focus."
Leonard didn't respond to this line of reasoning, having suddenly become quite interested in the contents of the dish in front of him.
Lawrence watched him eat. Apparently he had struck a nerve. After giving Leonard a moment to consider it, he stood. "Well, far be it from me to order you around, but I would really advise you to get some sleep before heading back there. Falling asleep at the wheel isn't a good way to assure that everything in your business continues to run smoothly. And I think once you get there, you should spend your time writing up a job posting for an administrator, instead of whatever it is you have planned to do."
"Gee, thanks, Dad," Leonard said dryly.
Lawrence chuckled. "Hey, sometimes us old guys know what we're talking about." He grinned and walked back around the counter to the coffee machine.
"I'll keep that in mind," Leonard said. "I'm not far behind you."
"Actually, I was wondering, Leonard, if you would be willing to take this afternoon off to go out to see a movie with Valerie and me." Lawrence returned with his second cup of coffee and sat down again. "She would really benefit from spending some time with you this weekend."
"What's so special about this weekend?" Leonard asked with a frown.
"It's a weekend," Lawrence said, with a touch of exasperation. "Leonard, you have a child who depends on you and who needs attention from you."
"I know," Leonard said. "But you know, she wasn't that invested when I tried to get her to help out at the office the first couple of years we lived here."
"That's because that was your thing, not hers," Lawrence said. "You only have a couple of years until she graduates. You have so little time left. Hire the administrator and then take the time to be with her. Please."
Leonard pulled his coffee over to himself and took a drink of it. "Look, I know," he said after a moment. "I'll do what I can do, okay?" He stood and stretched. "I'll see you later. I have things to get done at the office."
Lawrence's lip curled wryly as he watched Leonard go. "Have fun."
