Page 4 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

The work here asks other questions. It asks who let the boy hold the wheel this long, knowing what he was. There’s one honest answer, and it’s wearing my shoes.

Klaus was willful as a child. I’ve never held that against him. Willful can be forged into something if a father stands close enough to forge it.

But I stood an ocean away and sent money and instructions instead. There were other concerns at the time, and now, I pay for it with humiliation and resentment.

There’s a distance between a boy who was given too little guidance and a man of twenty-nine who was given everything after, every title, every allowance, every second chance the staff could invent for him. There’s a distance between willful and… this. Bleeding accounts. A reputation hemorrhaging so publicly that a rival now prices our piers over lunch. A CEO, interim, self-styled permanent, who cannot cross a ballroom to shake the one hand in it that matters, because both of his are occupied.

Willful, I could work with. But this is inexcusable.

The woman in his arms laughs at the ceiling. Klaus doesn’t watch her laugh. He watches the crowd watching them, checking who has noticed her, and there it is, the whole man in one glance. My son doesn’t look at what he holds. He looks at the audience.

His insecurity is on full display for everyone to see.

I came down from the suite tonight, telling myself the trip was reconnaissance. Assess the operation, count the room, and measure the damage in person before the work of correcting it begins. Standing here with an untouched drink while my son performs dominance for the crowd, I cannot focus. The disappointment gnaws at me.

I wanted to see him. A man wants to lay eyes on his own son, even a son who believes his father is a cold bastard on a permanent business trip. Perhaps especially that son. I wanted to see whether time had made anything of him that distance could not. Fathers are optimists in the last unlit corner of themselves, whatever else the world has burned out of the rest.

The quartet finishes a waltz and begins another. The second one is a better choice than the first, which tells me the playlist was built by someone who expected the room to fill and settle in stages, and it did. Well done to him.

Or rather, her.

Somewhere behind the service doors, the operation that actually functions in this family hums along, plates moving, glasses filled. The Aertsen rescue was conducted so smoothly that the old man is now seated, refreshed, and lecturing a captive vice president about barge tonnage in front of his wife, laughing and enjoying himself. Finally.

Whoever the dark-haired woman is, she’s done more for this company tonight than its interim chief executive.

3

THEA

I’m two glasses past sensible, and I know it, because I’ve started narrating my own approach.

Target acquired, says the narrator. Silver fox, terrace doors, still hasn’t touched his drink. Past the quartet, around the shrimp cocktail ice boat display, through the gap by the dessert table. You’ve crossed this floor a hundred times tonight. Go handle the man, get him a drink or a cab, and then you can take your shoes off in a service corridor where no one can see you cry about it.

The fifth glass was a mistake. I stand by the first two.

I set off. Past the quartet, no incident. Around the boat, where the senior VP tells his tale about a storm off Montauk. I’m six steps from the dessert table gap when Sofiya materializes in front of me, walking backward, laughing over her shoulder, a champagne flute in each hand, and zero awareness that other humans exist on her flight path.

Or at all, apparently.

I turn hard to miss her, and the cabernet leaves my glass like a tiny red tidal wave. There’s no stopping it as it lands exactly where the crowd’s parting has aimed it, onto the chest of my assignment, who has somehow crossed forty feet of the ballroom during my transit and now stands directly in the splash zone.

The stain blooms across his white shirt and up one lapel. Somehow, I feel it land on my chest even though it doesn’t.

My career makes a small whimper and lies down.

This is it. This is the end. No more Manhattan. Back to Pennsylvania. I always knew this day would come. Just didn’t know wine would be the reason.

The man does not jump back, does not swear, does not do any of the things a normal person would. He studies the wine as it soaks through probably two thousand dollars’ worth of shirt.

Then he raises his eyes to me. Glacier-water pale irises consume me.

Being looked at by them is a full-body experience, and I would like to be excused. Any escape will do.

“I’m so sorry.” My voice comes out at vendor-crisis pitch. “There’s a seam in the floor. I flagged it, there’s an email thread about the trip hazard, not that that helps your shirt. Club soda helps. Salt, maybe. Peroxide… the hotel keeps a valet with a steamer, I know because I stationed him there myself, and I’ll pay for the cleaning, or the shirt, or the suit. Whichever. All of them.”

He says nothing. The stain spreads another inch in the silence.

Is it possible to die from an internal wince? Bet I’ll find out tonight. “I’m going to stop offering things now and let you pick one.” Please, for the love of God, pick an easy one. A not-fired one.