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BRIAN
If you’re not home for Mom’s bday, I will have you killed in your sleep.
ME
First I’d have to sleep. I’ll be there.
I click off my phone and wish my body and brain had an off button.
This gig was so much easier in my twenties, being on the road for months at a time. Changing cities every other night after spending all day onstage, full focus, high energy. It was exhilarating back then. I’d get as amped as the crowd.
But the last four years? It’s been exhausting. I dread speaking season.
Unfortunately, these months of my pain pay for a year of Will Power & Bros.’ operations and make my family one of the top hundred richest families in the world—and the wealthiest in Canada. That’s what $30 billion in assets gets you these days.
But a good night’s sleep? I’d pay a billion for a solid month of non-medicated shut-eye. And medicated sleep? You couldn’t pay me enough to take sleeping pills. I know better than anyone the damage they did to Dad—and then to Mother—when a bad combination of booze and pills killed him at forty-two, a year younger than his dad, and the same damn age as his grandfather.
The thought of one more year of this lifestyle is equal parts relief and terror. One more year until I can sleep like the dead.
I raise my empty glass, and like magic, it’s filled again.
Plain tonic water. I close my eyes and think about Paris.
One of the easier international seminars, since I parlez-vous like a pro. But Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland … I know enough to make a connection when I walk onstage, and I’ve memorized my trademark Power mantras in twenty different languages. But all those events hire translators for the non-English speakers. And for me, of course.
Maintaining the fervor while I wait to understand what the aspiring tycoon du jour is saying is no small feat—and no one pulls it off the way I can. Not just no one in my family, no one in the goddamn world.
That’s why I need Horse, my identical twin and CEO and chair of the Power & Bros.’ family board of directors—a.k.a., my boss. I need him to see what this job is doing to me and work with me to make a change before it kills me.
I run through ideas and scenarios for the remainder of the eighty-minute flight between Frankfurt and Paris.
“Mr. Power. Crew. We’re about to start our descent to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Please make sure your seat belt is fastened,” Dave, my personal on-call pilot, announces.
Dave—Uncle Dave when we were kids—has been with the company since before I was born. Mother and Dad always treated him like family. Since Dad died, Dave has spent a great deal of time flying Mother wherever her heart desires during my off-seminar season. We kids have long speculated they have a thing, but Mother denies it. Too bad. He’s good for her. And we trust him.
It’s not easy being widowed or single with a net worth higher than the GDP of most countries. Hard to have faith in people’s true intentions. As a result, not one Power son is anywhere close to giving Mother a grandchild, something she complains about every time there’s a family gathering.
Like her birthday.
We taxi to Arrivals and Dave opens the cockpit door.
“Thanks for the comfortable ride.” I extend my hand.
“Pleasure, Will. See you in two days?”
“About that.” I turn toward Savannah. She nods.
“Dave, take the next seven days off. I’ll text you my departure details after I talk to Colt.”
“Of course, sir.” Dave nods.
“Oh, and don’t forget it’s Mother’s birthday on the twenty-fourth. I hope you can make it.”
“I wouldn’t miss it, sir.”
It’s the last client of the Parisian seminar. My wild card. The one thing that makes the two-day event interesting for me.
The other nineteen people invited onstage were all plants. Of course, they paid the registration fee like everyone else, andtheydidn’t know they were plants, but I did.
