NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

---

The beach at Nantucket is a delight in July. In December it’s something quite different.

Mark Cuban felt the wind cut through the heaviest coat he owned like a hot knife through butter. He stamped his feet, blew on his gloves, adjusted his earmuffs, and pulled the flaps of the coat around his face.

The woman came up from behind him. She surprised him. He looked down on her. She was smiling. She motioned for him to come closer, to become more intimate, so her voice would reach him through the gale. Yet still she had to raise it.

“When I first came here,” she said, in a voice that reminded some commentators of a younger Gabor sister, “I thought I would never learn to bear this cold, the pain of it. But then I did, and gradually I took pride in bearing it. I have even learned to love it. It’s a lesson.

“Come, walk with me toward the dunes. There are hollows where the wind doesn’t blow so fiercely. You can tell me why you came. And we can share this.” Cuban saw that inside her own coat she held a thermos, and inside a pocket two small cups.

They walked a few moments, closer to the house, and now Cuban felt he could bear the cold. A little less cold actually felt warm. A large piece of driftwood in front of them had bulwarked sand behind it, and now she sat down, pulled out her Thermos, poured two cups of it, and handed one to him. He sipped, carefully. It was a strange flavor, like Lipton tea but a bit off.

“It’s called Rooibas,” http://www.africantea.com/About_Rooibos_Tea/about_rooibos_tea.html she said. “The word is Dutch. It means, literally, red bush. Funny, heh?” She tossed her hair but no laugh came with it. The joke was bitter, like the tea.

“Now tell me,” she said.

Cuban tried to remember the pitch Branson had laid out for him. He looked into her eyes, so much older than they had been just a few months before. He was no Richard Branson, just an Internet Billionaire, the biggest winner of the 1990s’ biggest lottery. He would have to use his own words.

“It’s like this,” he said. “We have a plan, to plant a little piece of America, the good part, in the center of Johannesburg, in Africa. Everything is being engineered, as though we were colonizing a remote planet. New laws, a blank slate.

“But if it goes that way it won’t work,” she said. “White men have tried to remake Africa in their image for 500 years and it has never worked. All they have done is strip her assets – her gold, her diamonds, her oil, her people – taken it away across the seas. They have left poverty and distrust.”

“I know,” Cuban said, although he didn’t know, not at all. He felt suddenly as though he’d been conned, talked into something way over his head by the biggest con artist of them all.

“Buyer’s remorse?” she asked, as though reading his mind.

“A little,” he admitted. “More like a problem I know I can’t solve.”

“You need help.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he replied earnestly. “You’re right. I need help. I need your help. I need someone to be our public face, an honest face that both sides will trust. People will suspect our motives, on both sides. Americans will fear being abandoned on the other side of the world. Africans will fear being exploited and left with nothing. All the money in the world won’t change that.”

“I’ve had all the money in the world,” she said. “And for longer than you. Money can change a lot of things, but not all things.

“What changes people, what makes them take a step forward instead of a step back, I think I’ve been studying that all my life. Every one of my late husband’s charities has been about that.” She looked up toward her home, picked up the Thermos again, poured herself some more tea, drank it down at a gulp, and shuddered. Cuban thought he saw a tear in her eye, or was that just the cold?

“He was a great man, your late husband,” Cuban said.

The woman shrugged. Her son had become estranged from her over the last few years, his personality distant, while she pursued what her second husband wanted. Maybe her first husband had just been a dream, a Cinderella story. She hoped now to win her son back, but he was a grown man, to what purpose? That was the other side of the Cinderella tale, the mother’s side…the losing side. But she controlled her breathing, she wasn’t going to be one of those old women from the village. She smiled up at her visitor.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

It was the right question. “We need someone to be our reality check, and someone to be the public face of this project to, well, to our African partners,” Cuban said. “If we have a human face on this, if that face is credible, it won’t seem like we’re coming down from another planet,” he added, his voice growing in emotion, power, volume. “We have to bring the people in, give them a sense of owning this from the start, even though the investors will own it all.”

“It’s a hard job,” she said.

“But for the right person, the most exciting job in the world”

“And you think I’m the right person?”

“Yes I do. Look, when you were a child you were a daughter of Africa. Now…”

“In my old age?” she asked, smiling at last.

“Now you can be a mother of Africa,” Cuban stammered.

“I will look over your papers,” she said, shrugging her shoulders in that way her second husband found so endearing. “I will show them to my husband. But I think, I’m inclined to try. I can’t think of much else worth doing right now, and I need to.” She rose to her feet, slowly, brushed sand off her pants, stretched her back in the wind.

Then Mark Cuban stood as well, his right hand in the sand balancing his left hand holding an empty cup. He brushed the hand on his coat to clean it, grinned like a schoolboy.

And then, finally, he shook the hand of Teresa Heinz Kerry.