Page 94 of The Husband I Left

He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I’ve resigned from the board.”

I blink. Here I thought we were done with surprises for the day. And then he just casually drops the biggest one of them all. “You—”

“Effective at the end of the quarter. And I’m putting the house on the market.” His hand tightens slightly around the glass. “There’s no reason to keep it. It was always too big. Your mother wanted it.”

The company. My father is leaving the company. Sinclair Pharmaceuticals has been Thomas Sinclair’s morning, noon, and midnight for as long as I’ve been alive. He built me around it, brick by brick, from childhood onward. I’d have bet everything I own that they’d carry him out of that boardroom feet first.

“I’m moving to Chicago,” he says. “To be closer to…” his voice trails off, dying in the middle of the sentence.

“To Ellen,” I finish for him.

He hesitates. Nods.

Then he looks out the window, and he starts talking, and for the first time in my life, I think I might be closer to understanding my father and the forces that made him.

“She wasn’t always around, you know. When you were growing up. She moved to Chicago after I married your mother. She’s an artist. Sculptor.” A slight smile crosses his face. “She’s quite talented. Shows in galleries there, has for years.” He turns the glass. “She stayed away a long time. Years. And then eventually she came back to visit her family here in Boston, and when she did…”

He doesn’t finish. He just sighs.

“After that, she’d visit several times a year. Every year.”

For years, ever since I found out about the affair at eighteen, I’ve carried anger towards my father over it. It had become such a part of me that most of the time I didn’t even realize it was there. I search for that anger now and find it’s gone. What’s left in its place is just sadness, a deep sadness for both my parents. For my father, who loved an artist and instead married someone his family deemed more suitable. For my mother, who spent her whole married life polishing the outside of something that was hollow at the center. Two people who each spent half a lifetime in a beautiful house, being lonely in it together.

My father turns from the window and looks at me directly.

“I admire you,” he says.

The words come out stiff, and I can see that they cost him. Thomas Sinclair does not admire. He approves; sometimes he even respects. Never admire. He doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t say anything else. Just turns back to the window.

Finally, he clears his throat. “I’d like to establish trusts,” he says. “For whatever children you and—” He stops. Catches himself, right on the edge of her name. “For whatever children you have. Nothing extravagant. I know how you feel about—” A small gesture that takes in the room, the house, all of it. “Just enough to give them a good start. Education. A foundation.”

An image of Genny flashes into my mind, sitting at my parents table and growing smaller with each passing day. And then an image of her at her family’s table, loud and laughing with one of her nieces or nephews in her lap. I think about children with her red hair, and what I’d want for them, and what I wouldn’t.

“That would be okay,” I say.

Something in my father eases then. He nods and sets his glass down on the side table, still untouched.

“Will you stay for lunch?” he asks and the hint of uncertainty is back in his expression.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll stay.”

We both stand, and for a moment I think he might do something drastic, like put his hand on my shoulder, but he just nods again and leads the way out of the blue sitting room, down the hall toward the family dining room. And walking through my parents enormous, beautiful, emptying house, I think about what Joe told me. That love doesn’t live in the big moments. It lives in Tuesday.

It’s Tuesday. My father and I are having lunch.

It’s a start.

Chapter 35

Oliver

I should have listened to Genny.

That is the only thing I can think as I watch Will Palmer cut the engine of his rather ancient fishing boat and let us drift to a stop in what I can only assume is the exact center of the lake, as far from every shore as it is possible to be. Genny tried to warn me. She sat on my couch three nights ago with her feet in my lap and said, “Oliver, you don’t have to do this. My dad is going to eat you alive.” And I laughed and told her I’d survived hostile takeovers and congressional hearings and one memorable shareholder revolt, and that a day of fishing with her father was not going to break me.

Even Alice tried to warn me. She’d pulled me aside last Sunday and said, in that gentle voice of hers, “Just remember, dear, whatever Will says out on that boat, he means well underneath it.” Which, in hindsight, was less reassurance and more of a warning.

I was confident. I am, after all, a man who spent most of his adult life negotiating with people whose entire job was to intimidate me. What could a plumber from Quincy possibly throw at me that I hadn’t already faced across a boardroom table?