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With that, he walks back to his room and slams the door.
I look up as the sun disappears behind a bank of dark clouds, forming in gigantic looming puffs at the edges of the blue sky.
A storm is coming. I wish the metaphor didn’t feel so damn ominous.
I sigh without meaning to.
Parents.
They really fuck you up.
3
I am not my father.
I am not my father.
I am not my father.
I repeat the mantra every time I step into my office at Maddox Enterprises and take a seat in what used to be my father’s chair.
The look of the place is very old school, like I’ve just time-warped into a 1960s New York gentleman’s club. The office is huge and the expansive windows showcase views of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Symbols, my father used to say, of the kind of power we strive for.
My assistant Esther encourages me on a daily basis to have the place redecorated, but I want the reminder of the legacy this company was built on. I need it. Because if it’s not in my face every fucking day, I might just walk out on a whim and go live a completely different life.
Inheriting a company from your tyrannical mogul of a father is one thing. Inheriting an entire empire that was founded by your great grandfather and then being expected to continue to make the family name proud every day of your life—according to their terms and only their terms—is another thing altogether.
All those voices in my head are dead and gone. But still I’m anchored here. Or chained. Some days it’s hard to tell.
There have always been heavy expectations on me, as the oldest son and heir to the throne as CEO. My father started training me on how to run the company on my seventh birthday. I remember it clearly. He brought me to this very office to sit in this very chair. He told me that, one day, all this would be mine. I was expected to act like the Maddox I was “and not fuck anything up.”
My brothers and I agreed a long time ago that we aren’t and never will be clones of our father. We would have all gone mad by now if we were.
The three of them have managed to remove themselves from under the heaviest of his burdens. For me, it was never going to be that easy.
Our father was a very successful man, but it came at a cost. He was more interested in making money than he was in nurturing any of the relationships in his life, even with his own children.
I respected my father. I still respect him. I recognize his genius. I look like him and I have his name. But I can’t honestly say that I loved him.
And I’ve never aspired to his style of doing business. I prefer not to raze everyone’s self-esteem to the ground in the process of making a buck.
But as much as I might hope that I’m not like my father, I sometimes feel like assholery is baked into my DNA.
Trying like hell not to turn into him while still growing the company at a respectable rate takes a lot of effort. Some days the legacy I’m mired in feels like a pressure cooker. I often think about throwing in the towel, leaving it for someone else to manage and skipping the country to go live anonymously on some secluded beach in the South Pacific.
Sure, this life has its rewards. I have more money than I could ever spend and so will my children. If there are children. I’m about to turn thirty and I can genuinely say I’ve never met anyone I would even consider having children with. Which makes me wonder if it’ll ever happen for me.
Maybe the whole assholery angle means I’m not made for the kind of relationships that would give me a family. Maybe I’m too much like him. Maybe I hate that part of myself so much that I end up self-sabotaging my love life. Who knows.
It’s a very depressing thought.
Which isn’t going to get any less depressing this weekend, I’m reminded by the pink note attached to a certain envelope that’s staring up at me from my great grandfather’s gigantic mahogany desk.
Esther put it there. The wedding invitation from Blake.
It came in the mail over a week ago. I’ve been avoiding it.
Esther has reshuffled my desk so the invitation is front and center. She’s scrawled on the pink note, READ AND REPLY TO THIS REGARDING YOUR PLUS ONE AND YOUR MENU OPTION ASAP!! Leah has called twice! So I can’t pretend I haven’t seen it.
