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Mother shakes her head. “But it looks like I ended up losing you in a different way. And I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
We sit quietly. The minutes pass. We drink our beers. My mind returns to that photo of our happy family on her desktop in her office. I was so young when Dad died. I never gave much thought to how Mother processed his death. I guess I assumed she scheduled in grieving with her assistant and then moved on to more pressing things. Maybe there is a reason Mother has thrown herself into the bank. Maybe it isn’t greed. Maybe it’s grief.
“Losing him was my life’s greatest tragedy,” Mother finally says softly. “There’s not a day that goes by in which I don’t think of him, miss him. God knows we had nothing in common, but he brought out sides of me that no one has since. I was kinder with him. I worked less. And I was happier. As happy as I expect I’ll ever be.”
There’s something very familiar about her words.
“If he hadn’t died,” I ask haltingly, “do you think you two would have worked out? In the long run, I mean.”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“If you were so different, I mean.”
Mother chuckles ruefully. “We were superficially different, but deep down we had the same values. And we loved each other for our differences, not in spite of them. Could you imagine how boring it would be to live with your carbon copy? God, that would mean I’d have to marry Paul Morgan and you can imagine how that would turn out.”
“Homicide,” I say honestly.
“And who would you put your money on?”
I smirk. “After Chicago, I don’t get how you haven’t completely crushed him. You need to step up your game.”
“Like I’d take banking notes from you,” she grumbles. But there’s a smile behind her words.
I exhale deeply. A brief conversation. A bit of honest. It doesn’t quite wipe away a lifetime of resentments, but it’s a start. Already I feel a lightness in my chest. And, despite everything, a sense of hope. Maybe it’s not too late after all. For any of us.
A question occurs to me suddenly.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
Mother actually laughs aloud, something I haven’t heard in a long, long time.
“It was not easy,” she says. “I fired three different PIs. I personally went to each of your rather obnoxious friends’ houses, and then called just about every garage in the tristate area. No one had any clue. Nobody had seen hide nor hair.”
“So what changed?”
“Well,” she says slowly, “I was on the Generations Bank’s website, scrolling through their new hires. You know, scoping out the enemy.”
“As one does,” I agree.
“And I saw a familiar face.”
“Liz.”
She nods. “And I remembered that websites track IP addresses that visit any particular page. It was a long shot, but I got in touch with IT. As it turned out, a single IP address from South Carolina had visited her page on the Westing Bank website dozens of times before it was taken down.”
I exhale through my nose. What a rather embarrassing way to get busted.
“Listen, Rhett,” Mother says. “I’m not going to ask you to come back to New York with me. As… unfathomable as this set up is to me, you seem to be happy enough here. And I’ll respect that. But—”
“There’s always a ‘but’,” I say.
“But take it from me. In this life you never know how the next day will go. Say everything you need to say before it’s too late. And once you get things worked out then you can go back to mud racing and line dancing or whatever it is people do out here in the middle of nowhere.”
I don’t agree or disagree. I can’t just yet. There’s still so much I need to think through. But for now, I just smile and say, “Don’t be shitty.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LIZ
