The Light of Hidden Flowers (15 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

JOE

Frank Fletcher was dead.

I opened a search engine and combed through the pages until I found his obituary.

Frank Fletcher passed away on May 29. Frank was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1945, though he spent most of his life in Alexandria, Virginia. He graduated from West Potomac High School, earned a BS in finance from George Washington University, and served in the United States Army. He was married to his high school sweetheart and loving wife, Charlene Hayes.

Frank had a distinguished career at his own firm, Fletcher Financial, for forty-five years. Frank was an active member and past president of the Association for Financial Professionals, and was selected as one of the Top Ten Businessmen of the Year by the
Alexandria Times
. He was also a member of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, and was honored by FINRA for his excellence in service.

He is survived by his daughter, Melissa, two brothers, and other fond relatives and friends. In lieu of flowers, expressions of sympathy can be made on Frank’s behalf to the Wounded Warriors, a charity he supported and believed in.

At the end it gave me the information I needed. Services would be held at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday at one o’clock, with a reception following at Christ Church in Alexandria.

I would go for just the night, to pay my condolences, to attend the funeral. I owed that to Missy and to Frank, a guy who treated me like a son. I needed to see Missy, to tell her again how instrumental her father was in my life. I would assure her she’d be okay, even if it might not seem that way—she could believe me, I knew this was how it worked. It was true: she would go on. She was strong enough to live without her father.

I called my mom and told her I needed to go to DC this coming weekend. Just for the night. Could she watch the kids? After Lucy and I were married and had kids, Ma and Dad moved up north to be near us. Her kitchen in New Jersey was a replica of our kitchen when I was growing up: flowered wallpaper dotted with her collection of old-fashioned kitchen implements. I’d been staring at the handheld mixer and potato masher my entire life.

“Where’s Lucy?” Ma wanted to know.

“Out of town on business,” I said. “You know that, Ma.”

Ma harrumphed, and I imagined her pacing in the kitchen, wiping down an already clean counter. “In my day, a mother didn’t up and leave just because she was tired of it.”

“I know, Ma, I know,” I told her. “What about the kids, Ma? Could you watch them?”

“Of course I can watch them,” she said indignantly. “I’d never turn my back on my precious angels.”

That night, I told the kids I had a funeral to attend this weekend. I’d be gone for about twenty-four hours.

“Unless you decide to stay longer,” Kate said in the sulky thirteen-year-old voice I never thought I’d hear from her. This was my kid who used to love everything, my daughter who couldn’t wait for tomorrow, the light of my life who would decorate our house with streamers and balloons and homemade posters for every occasion, even Arbor Day and Chinese New Year.

“Kate,” I said, raising my eyebrows at her. “I’ll be back on Sunday morning.”

“Whose funeral is it, anyway?” she asked. “Which of your buddies stepped on an IED this time?”

“Enough, Kate,” I snapped, because her moping about her own life was one thing, but talking flippantly about the guys who put their lives on the line for our freedom was another.

“Sorry,” she said. She looked up through her mop of hair, then pulled it back and twisted it into a bun. Through the click of my eye’s shutter, I saw her when she was five years old, all eyebrows and cherry lips, before her heart registered pain.

“This guy was a soldier,” I said. “But not in this war. Vietnam, years ago. I went to school with his daughter. He was very nice to me back in high school. He helped me figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

“Do you mind if I say war sucks?” Kate looked up at me, smiled just a bit. “All of them.”

We were all casualties of war, and she knew it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

On the seventh day of my life in a world without Dad, I rose and showered and met Jenny for lunch. At Ellie’s, we ordered soup and salad.

“Lucas has been calling the office,” Jenny said. “He said it’s been hard to get through to you.”

“I don’t know what to say to him,” I said. I dipped my spoon into the mulligatawny and watched the steam bellow upward.

“He’s concerned.”

“I know,” I said, “but he’s pushing me too hard.” I returned the spoonful of soup to its container.

“He’s just trying to help, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure.”

“I like him,” Jenny said. “You two are so much alike.”

My eyes stung. My cheeks burned.

“Oh, honey, what did I say?” Jenny reached for my hand, curled hers around my palm.

“We
are
a lot alike,” I said, dabbing at my eyes. “But I don’t know if that’s such a good thing. Is it best to be the same?”

“Don’t overthink it, honey,” she said. “There’s no math involved in this. You either like him or you don’t. You either love him or you don’t. I’m just saying the two of you are peas in a pod. He doesn’t push you to be anything you’re not . . . and that’s good, because you’re perfect just how you are.”

I blew my nose into the scratchy napkin. “Being with Lucas is like looking at my reflection. For as paralyzed as I am to go outside of my comfort zone, seeing him nestled safely in his irritates me. I want to shout: Eat the oysters! Travel across the border! Invest in something other than munis!”

Jenny smiled. “For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve sought the calm amidst the chaos.”

“True enough,” I said, picking up my spoon again.

“Maybe it’s time for you to revise your understanding of yourself.”

I took a small sip of soup, just big enough to scorch my tongue. “Meaning?”

Jenny looked at me as if I already knew the answer. “Meaning . . . perhaps the problem lies in the fact that you’re not really the ‘safety girl’ I always hear you say you are. Inside there is a real tiger. After all, you’re Frank Fletcher’s daughter.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

JOE

On Saturday morning, Ma was at our house by six. By six thirty, bacon was already sizzling on the cast iron, and pancake batter was being whisked in a mixing bowl. A bag of mini-marshmallows slumped over her handbag, ready to float atop the kids’ hot cocoa.

Instead of driving my work-issued van to the airport, I called for a cab. When the driver honked in front of the house, I wheeled out my small suitcase. At the sight of me in full dress uniform, the cabbie leapt up the steps to retrieve my bag. Nice guy. Like most people do, he mentioned his connection to the military, to the war. “My brother was in Fallujah,” he told me.

An hour later, I had made it through the TSA checkpoint, where I’d explained preemptively that I would most assuredly set off their metal detectors—I patted my leg, explained the prosthetic, the titanium joints in my knee, and they moved me along. I found my gate and boarded on time, and when the plane landed at Reagan, I made my way to the cab line. When it was my turn, I slid into the back and directed the cabbie to Arlington National Cemetery.

Once there, I ducked into the welcome center and looked up on the wall at a computerized schedule of funerals for the day. More than twenty-five of them. Frank Fletcher, Section 66, Grave 7708. I pulled open a map and located the spot. In no time, I was working my way down the walkway, along the Women in Military Service Memorial, wending my way by President Taft and then heading north and then east.

I arrived just as the inimitable sounds of “Taps” issued from the bugle. I slipped in behind a stand of mourners and saw Missy seated in the front row. At the sight of her, my heart cannonballed. She was beautiful. She was exactly the same. I fought the urge to rush toward her, to hug her, to touch her shiny, coconut-scented hair. I wanted to hold her and look into her eyes and launch into a string of sentences that all began with “Remember when we . . .”: Remember when we walked down by the lake? Remember when we read
Macbeth
together every night for a month straight? Remember when we rode the Ferris wheel at the carnival and ate fried dough until we were sick?

Good God, was that Jenny next to her? She was Frank’s assistant way back when, too. She had her arm around Missy, consoling her. Jenny always loved Missy.

A guy holding a stack of programs slid in next to Missy. Tall, Nordic. He leaned toward Missy, whispered something to her, kissed the side of her head. Then he glanced around and looked at his watch.
What a jerk. Who the hell was this guy and why was he in such a hurry?

The service proceeded. Each speaker gushed on about Frank’s service, his generosity, his loyalty. There were CEOs and ministers and community leaders, all who knew Frank personally. There were army buddies and neighbors and a much older brother. I watched as Missy accepted comfort from her boyfriend. Occasionally she’d bury her face into his shoulder. Once he cradled her head. He was caring for her. She was accepting his care. Okay, maybe he wasn’t a total jerk.

The service ended and guests rose from their seating. Missy stood, turned around, and wiped her eyes. She scanned the crowd. Instinctively, I ducked, shielded my face with my hand, punched on my cell phone that was turned off. All of a sudden, the idea of Missy seeing me made me nervous as hell.

My heart hammered as if I had just been cornered by a group of insurgents with machine guns. I shouldn’t be here. I had no reason to be here. I felt entirely out of place, woozy and disoriented, like I had been air-dropped into a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs.

Missy and I were old friends from high school, Facebook buddies. She had a boyfriend and a life, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see the point in my interrupting it . . . if even just to pay my condolences. Not long ago I was a guy with a story to tell: wife, kids, service. I was someone who could have offered Missy support. But who was I now? How could I even explain my situation to someone else when it was still a mystery to me? My wife, gone and traveling all of the time. Our marriage on the way out. My oldest daughter, depressed and struggling. Me, a guy who had spent his life “in the field,” now a desk jockey with one leg and a chronically achy knee.

If I went to Missy, if I offered my condolences, what would be the upside? It was nice of me to come? It showed how much I cared for her and for Frank? But what was the downside? An ex-boyfriend showing up could possibly be an issue for Missy’s current boyfriend. I’d hate to think of landing any unpleasantness in her lap. Talking to Missy could have the effect of taking our friendship to a new level. Perhaps we’d message more on Facebook. What good would that do, for her? For me? And what would it do to me to see her up close, to hold her . . . even just her hand? It would make me love her all over again, and since I was a married/separated guy with more issues than most, how could that be a good thing?

I turned and headed in the direction of the visitors’ center, but this time I exited in the opposite direction, the long way—via the Kennedys, by way of the Civil War Unknowns, ending up back at the parking lot. A row of at least five cabs sat at the curb.

I slipped into the first one. “To Clarendon,” I told the driver. I gave him my cousin’s address.

That night, in my cousin Frankie’s basement, I drank more beer than normal and played video games that I would never buy for my kids—
Grand Theft Auto
and
Call of Duty
. When I could no longer see straight—from the beer, from the games, from the enormity of the day—I crashed on his sofa.

“We have a guest bedroom,” Frankie said. “Janet made it up for you.”

“If you don’t mind, I’m fine right here.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and tossed me a water bottle. “Looks like you’re going to need this.”

In the night I awoke disoriented and covered in sweat. My eyes darted wildly around the room. I gasped for breath, felt the hammering of my heart. I pulled off my sopping T-shirt and wiped my face, grabbed at my hair. It was the same dark and dusty dream: I had stumbled upon a Taliban—two shots to the chest, one to the head. When the dust cleared, I watched as his children—presumably—tumbled out through a doorway and stormed his fallen body. Two girls—one maybe ten years old, the other probably seven—and a toddler boy on the hip of the older one. Kate, Olivia, and Jake. I told myself it wasn’t the same; that those kids weren’t Kate and Olivia and Jake. That those kids had grown up in this war zone and had seen horror on a daily basis. But still, three kids crouched over their dead father. The awfulness in their eyes. I would play that tape for the rest of my life.

Waking up feeling pure terror was normal—thank you very much, Afghanistan—but the frequency of the nightmares’ visits did nothing to dilute the sheer shock of them. They were always the same—an instant replay of horrific events I’d seen, over and over. As if my mind could never move beyond them. As if a few seconds on the front line reigned over every other memory, past or future. I knew better than to give in to the bad guys, but damn it, in my sleep, they always seemed to win.

I sat up and worked on my breathing, a technique I’d learned along the way to deal with the night terrors: Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Touching something real helped, too. I looked around, found one of Frankie’s son’s teddy bears. I reached for it, held it against my chest. Squeezed it like I was a little kid. God, it felt good to burrow my chin into something soft.

I peered around the room—at the posters on the wall, the black and chrome of Frankie’s media room—and pretended I was sixteen again, a teenager who hadn’t yet been to war, hadn’t yet been married. Who knew only two things: the taste of Missy Fletcher’s lips, and that the future was going to be awesome.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A week after Dad’s service, I prepared to face the task I had been dreading. I gathered the stack of legal documents, printed off Dad’s most current investment statements, looked up values for his defined benefit and defined contribution plans, pulled from the file cabinets his life insurance policies, and spread it all out on the conference room table.

It was time to do the work I had done for so many other clients. It was time to file the claims, contact Social Security, request a tax identification number for the estate. It was time to take inventory.

I dug into the papers. When there is a married couple, and the first one dies, not much happens by way of estate planning. Because of the unlimited marital deduction, the majority of the assets pass from one spouse to the next—easily, no tax due. Where there are qualified assets—IRAs, 401(k)s—there is a beneficiary designation, and they too, pass seamlessly to the surviving spouse, and he/she assumes the contracts as his/her own. But at the death of the second spouse—as was the case with my father—there is work to be done. Unless every single asset has been placed in trust, or transferred via a beneficiary designation, the estate needs to be probated. Probate: the legal process to verify a will. Because of this, we always tried to get our clients to title as many assets as possible in their revocable trusts.

In my methodical way, I began to chart Dad’s financial life, as I would with any other client. First on my yellow legal pad, and then transferred into my spreadsheet, I began to build Dad’s net worth. None of this was a surprise to me; Dad and I talked openly about his finances, and of course, the bulk of his investable dollars was with our firm, and thus, under my management. Four hours later, as the sun began to set, and the conference room had grown shades darker, I had completed my task. Dad was a wealthy man.

Jenny leaned in. “Honey, take a break.”

“I’m wrapping up for tonight,” I assured her.

Tomorrow I would look through the legal documents, even though I was with Dad in his meetings with Roger when they were drawn up and knew, for the most part, what they instructed. A large portion of his assets would be given to a variety of charities, those causes that Dad held so dear. He left money to the “locals,” as Dad called them: the county library, the Rotary Club, the hospital, the Boys and Girls Club. He left money to the veterans: the Wounded Warrior Project, the Fisher House, the Paralyzed Veterans of America. He left money to my alma maters and to his: George Washington University, William & Mary, the Wharton School.

And a large chunk would go to me, outright. Dad and I cautioned every client against giving money unreservedly to their children. “Put it in a trust,” Dad would say. “Give it to them in thirds; that way they have multiple chances to learn some ‘life lessons’ before getting it right. Just in case.” Even so, Dad never worried about me. “No one has her head screwed on tighter than you, Missy,” he’d say. “My money is your money. Do what you want with it.”

As I stacked up the volumes of paperwork, my hand paused on the life insurance policies. I knew the New York Life policy would be paid to Dad’s irrevocable trust, to pay for the estate taxes. The Colonial Penn life policy was for me. The Principal policy was for the Milton Hershey School for underprivileged children he supported so fervently. The last one, the John Hancock, I couldn’t remember. I flipped to the back of the policy, to the copy of the handwritten application, and saw that my father had named Paul Sullivan as its beneficiary. My mind was short on a ready answer as to why Dad had a policy with Paul as beneficiary, but my mind was also spent, and grieving, and ready to crawl into bed with a plate of leftover pasta and a carton of pistachio gelato. If I saw Paul on my way out, I’d ask him. Otherwise, I was too weary to ponder, and would look into it tomorrow.

As I packed my bags, I saw that Paul was still in, but busy listening in on a conference call. I waved good-bye.

At home, I found Lucas sitting on my front steps, reading the
WSJ
. When he saw me, he glanced up over the rim of the paper. “Hi there.”

“Have you been sitting here long?”

Lucas folded the paper neatly in half. “I called Jenny a while ago. She said you were on your way home.”

I found my key and let us in. “I’m starving,” I said, opening the refrigerator and pulling out a Tupperware dish of casserole.

Lucas took the Tupperware from my hands. “Let me take you to dinner. Your favorite—Pier 6. Soup, bread, a nice fish dinner, a few glasses of wine. Dessert and coffee.”

“You don’t like any of that,” I said. “I don’t mind eating here.”

He pushed the hair from my face, traced his finger along my cheek. “I want to take you out,” he said. “I want to see you happy.”

“What about you, Lucas?” I asked. “What would make you happy?”

“If you accepted my proposal,” he said. “If you agreed to marry me.”

I could marry Lucas. Why was I putting him off, anyway? If not for Lucas, I would be utterly alone. I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

“I do,” I said, reaching up and kissing his cheek. “I accept.”

Lucas kissed me and I let him, closing my eyes and melting into the idea of being married. And then I grabbed my purse and allowed Lucas to take me to dinner.

Later, after Lucas drove me home, I brewed a cup of decaf and carried it to my desk. I logged on to Facebook and stared at Joe’s photo. I needed to remember that he left me.

One night—after a wintery January day of my college sophomore year—Joe showed up at my school. We had been officially broken up for at least six months by then, so seeing him in the lobby of my dorm was an apparition no less painful than seeing my deceased mother. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I can’t stand that you’re mad at me.”

“I’m sorry that breaking my heart has been so tough on you,” I said snidely, though my insides were simmering.

Joe dug his hands into his pockets—his Levi’s 501s that fit him so perfectly. “I guess I deserve that.”

“You didn’t sign a contract,” I said, hearing the unusual cutting tone to my voice. “You promised that you’d love me forever—‘Never not,’ remember? But I suppose it wasn’t in writing. Just talk.”

“It wasn’t just talk,” he said. “I meant it.”

“But . . .”

“But I don’t see how it could work.”

“Why are you here?” I asked wearily.

“I don’t want you to be upset. I don’t want you to be mad at me. I want us to be friends.”

“Fair enough,” I said tersely. “Let me let you off the hook.” I held my hand out for Joe to shake. “Friends.”

“Missy,” Joe pleaded.

“We’ll ‘never not’ be friends,” I said. “I’ve got to go.” Back in my dorm room, I stared out my window and watched as Joe walked away.