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“You don’t have to apologize for anything.” Brennan wished he’d left before his grandfather had come downstairs. He hated arriving at events early so had settled in for a drink, leaving himself open to a dose of his grandfather’s sentimentality before meeting his date.
“No, I must say it, Brennan. You deserve as much.”
“I don’t deserve anything, and all this craziness you’re going through, I don’t understand it. You’ve changed so much I don’t recognize you sometimes.”
“Good. I don’t want to be recognized as the man I once was. Was I all bad? No. But there was so much of me I didn’t access. So much of me that lived without feeling. Places in my heart filled with…with rot. I’ve spent the past few months trying to cull the weeds and seed the flowers of something better.”
Brennan didn’t know what to say to his grandfather’s proclamation. “Well, I never thought you anything but admirable.”
“No, you didn’t.” Malcolm sighed, heavy and resigned. “In many people’s eyes I was a success. Have you ever thought about what true success is?”
“I’m guessing it’s not having money or influence.”
Malcolm sank onto the couch, a smile twitching at his lips, the blinking nose absurd. “You’ve always been a bright boy, taking to business like a duck to a pond, navigating treacherous waters, ignoring what could distract, and spreading your wings quite commendably.”
Those words filled him with equal parts pleasure and pride. He had worked hard to get to where he was. Malcolm had laid down a decree long ago that no positions in the company would be given without merit. If Brennan did work worthy of the mail room, there he’d stay. The position Brennan held had been earned through hard work, late nights, and concrete results.
“But you have no comfort, my boy. You’ve no true friends, no feathers to support your head. I know, for I discovered much the same not so long ago. An epiphany washed over me, and I haven’t the time this evening to share all I’ve learned, but Iwillsay I’m sorry for being less of a man, for being unavailable to you when you needed me most, for leaving you in that godforsaken boarding school to grieve alone for all you’d lost. I was callous and shortsighted.”
Like a bandage ripped from a wound, the pain of the memories waded through only yesterday with Mary Paige came roaring back. The smell of the couch he’d cried himself to sleep upon, the rawness of his nose from the sobs, the empty room lit only be a garish Victorian Christmas tree…and the days that followed. Black suit, lemon polish, and red carpets of the funeral home. Waxy flowers, hushed whispers, and empty platitudes to remember the man and woman who’d chaired the tennis social, donated generously to the campaign fund, and mixed the best dirty martinis. Empty. Numb. Grief.
And here, over twenty-five years later, his grandfather wanted to apologize to the boy he’d left behind? Too little, too late. Brennan didn’t want an apology, and he damned sure didn’t want to remember how shitty he’d felt. How absolutely alone he’d been.
“You know, I turned out okay,” Brennan said, trying to keep emotion at bay. That agony had knitted together into a tough determination to succeed, to grab control, and to never feel like that young, bewildered boy again.
And he hadn’t.
Until yesterday.
“Yes, you’re a good man even if you hide it beneath that very businesslike, busy facade. Don’t be afraid to find some softness, to reach for more pleasure than making profit, to take some time to remember what the most important parts of life should be—loving, laughing and sharing.”
“For what reason?” So, he could feel that same pain he’d felt as a child studying the way the funeral home lights fell on the patina of his mother’s coffin? To again know he had no control over anything? He’d promised himself he’d never allow himself to feel that way again.
Malcolm looked down at the carpet. “Ah, vulnerability is a weakness for you, eh? I seek it now because it reminds me I’m human.”
“I’m not making light of your apology or your advice. I just fail to see how I’m a bad person because I work hard, because I don’t fly kites, play with dogs in the park, or because I don’t put up a Christmas tree or light a menorah.”
“You’re not Jewish.”
“That’s not the point. The point is the sound of ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ gives me hives. What’s wrong with cutting through the do-gooder crap and getting down to the meat of life—which is eat or be eaten?”
The doorbell rang, causing Malcolm to snap to attention and hop to his feet at a speed belying his seventy-two years. “I do believe that’s Judy. Let’s continue this talk another time.”
So much for his deep philosophies. Brennan couldn’t help but notice how quickly the arrival of his date distracted Malcolm. Or that the woman’s name on his grandfather’s lips was an endearment.
“You’re not picking her up?” Brennan asked as Gator passed to answer the door.
“She wouldn’t allow it. Said she lived only four blocks away and her two legs were perfectly capable of walking. I argued, but she’s a stubborn sort.”
Gator appeared, using a flourish never witnessed before as he waved Judy Poche into the enormous room.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes taking in the over-the-top grandeur inspired by 19th-century plantation owners and 1970s drugged-out abstract artists. “Wow, this is…breathtaking.”
“Come in, my dear,” Malcolm crowed with more enthusiasm than a midway carnival hawker, the color in his face high, his blue eyes twinkling with a pleasure Brennan had never before seen. So strange.
She was small, brown-haired, and very underdressed for a formal gala. Her coffee-colored hair lay straight and unadorned against the almost matronly black sweater set with little pebblelike pearl buttons. A long plain black skirt almost touched the tips of the black flats. A schoolmarm would have been pleased with Judy’s outfit. New Orleans’s society, however, would make her chum and feed her to the fashion sharks.
He saw this realization dawn in Judy’s eyes as she took in the tuxedos and something inside him flickered at the embarrassment he saw in her eyes. Her discomfiture would do neither here, nor at the pavilion in City Park.
