Ron: A Splendid Fellow
(I am not even pretending to know how accurate this is, but Ron really needed a moment of truth, so there you go. More info about the adoption case in question may be found here)
"I will be saying this with a sigh/ somewhere ages and ages hence./ Two roads diverged in a wood and I/ took the one less traveled by/ and that has made all the difference."
Two numbers were lying in Ron’s apartment next to his phone, but Ron was trying to pretend they weren’t there, and had been doing so for at least a week and a half now.
The piece of paper that each of the numbers was written on was as distinctly different as the people waiting on the other end of the line for Mr. Ronald Corwell, recent graduate of New York University Law School, to call them.
The first, written in raised red-and-gold script on a parchment colored business card, had arrived from the mail from Ron’s father, attached to a word processed note that smugly but proudly encouraged him to call the corporation advertised on the card. They’re old friends of ours, Mr. Corwell had assured his son, just say your name and you’ll have a job before you can blink.
Ours? Ron couldn’t help but think sardonically. Since when do we have friends in common?
The second was a simple phone number scrawled in Ron’s handwriting across the torn-off corner of a piece of notebook paper, marred by a coffee stain. It was to a small, struggling firm, the one who had taken up that hopeless adoption case no one else had wanted with which Ron had interned on a whim. It was a firm known for taking up such lost causes, though not always with as successful results.
One evening in the middle of May when Ron was home alone, he suddenly found himself staring at both phone numbers, almost examining each paper as if it were a test subject, seemingly attempting to find answers from within the lettering itself.
The business card, he finally decided, was what he was expected to choose. Ron knew nothing about the corporation itself, except that that it was successful, situated in Van Nuys, California, and had an opening for a corporate lawyer. In theory, the choice was simple. Calling that number would take him home, would set him up for life, would give him a job with which he could live his life not giving a damn about anything except his paycheck, with which his biggest dilemma would be whether or not to suggest his company buy out another. It was the job his degree, the degree his parents were paying for, was supposed to go towards, the job that he had packed his bags for, laughing while his best friend, Drew, asked him what the hell he was going to do in his free time in New York. After all, you couldn’t surf in New York.
Of course, Ron hadn’t spoken to Drew since last summer.
In theory, it was an easy choice. But theory didn’t take into consideration how much had changed since that late summer day two years ago. September Eleventh. The hopeless adoption case that had somehow been won. The war. Lina.
Ron suddenly wondered what Drew would think if he were to tell him that he’d been with the same girl for nearly a year now.
So then there was the second phone number. Back in California Ron, he was forced to admit to himself, had cared little about anything in the world around him. He was determined just to have fun, and to get by on his boyish smile when necessary. He didn’t think like that anymore, not entirely at least. Maybe it had been that case he had interned for, when he had realized that what really mattered to him was getting that kid the home she wanted and deserved, no matter what the system said. Or perhaps it had been watching the twin towers fall from him apartment window, and seeing the world rise up (in one way or another) because of it, realizing that money may not last, but ideas, they go on. Or it could have even been Lina, the girl he adored who refused to put up with his cockiness until it had, at least partially, been beaten out of him. Maybe it had been it all.
But for whatever reason, now he wanted to do something, to change the world for the better, to, and it even sounded corny to his own ears, fight the good fight for those that couldn’t do it themselves. Knight in shining armor and all that. Sort of. The second piece of paper, with all its lack of glamour and prestige, might just lead him in that direction.
Ron stood there, staring at the papers for almost a quarter of an hour. Then, before he could stop to think it through, he grabbed the scrap of paper, picked up his phone, and began dialing.