The Sins of the Mother (33 page)

“She does a good job. She just turned seventy, and I don’t think she’ll ever retire. I hope she doesn’t. I’m not sure I could run the business. It’s a mammoth undertaking now, and it’s entirely family owned and run. My mom will never sell it, and she shouldn’t. But I guess she’s got the genes to be around for a long time. My grandmother is ninety-five and going strong.” He looked pleased as he said it, and his voice softened even when he talked about his mother. In some ways, he was proud of her, and it was all new to Taylor. “Amanda wrote her an ultimatum, demanding that she step down. She accused me of not having the balls to confront her, so she did it herself. It wouldn’t have gotten her anywhere, but that’s pretty much why the house of cards came down. That, and meeting you, of course. It all happened at the same time. And to tell you the truth, I like my job. I dread the day I’ll be in charge. It scares the hell out of me. What if I screw everything up? I don’t have her creative genius or her vision. I’m a numbers man, like my father. A pencil pusher, as Amanda said.” With no balls, he added silently.

“I’m sure you’ll be great at whatever you do,” she said confidently. “You don’t have to worry about it yet. But wow, that’s quite a story about your mom, and even your dad. It sounds like they did it together, even if she was the front man. You have to have the numbers guys to back up the creative, like you and your brother.” It was a lot to wrap her mind around.

He nodded again. “She’s been grooming us to run it since we were kids. She wants to get the grandchildren into it one day. I think two of them might do it. My sister Liz’s daughter Sophie, she’s going to work there when she gets her master’s from MIT this winter. And my brother’s kid, Alex, but he’s still in high school, so who knows. He just knocked his parents on their asses by announcing that he’s gay. My mom was fine with it; my brother, who’s thirty years younger than she is and supposed to be so free thinking, with his college professor wife, nearly had a stroke.”

“It sounds like you’re related to some very interesting people,” she said with admiration, and then asked him an important question. “Are you still mad at your mother for not being around more when you were a kid, even though you know now what it takes to run the business?”

“She was
never
around,” he said for emphasis, and then corrected himself. “Well, she was, but not enough. My sister Cass never forgave her for being in the Philippines ordering furniture when my dad died of a heart attack. It took us a day to find her and two days for her to get back.”

“She must have felt pretty bad about that herself,” Taylor said sensibly, with a degree of sensitivity and intuition. “Does she feel guilty about you guys as kids?”

“I think she does now. But it’s a little late. You don’t get the years back. She makes a lot of effort now to be there for us as adults, and she’s good with the grandchildren, better than she was when we were kids. She’s older, and she has more time, although she still travels constantly. She has lots of energy. She just turned seventy in July. That was the trip I took on the boat.” He had told her about it when they met, in a more modest version than going into detail about the
Lady Luck
. “We do a trip with her every year, on her birthday. This was a big one, the birthday and the trip.”

“At least she makes that effort,” she said quietly. “Do you all get along?”

“Pretty much. Except my sister Cass, who never comes. I haven’t seen her in years. She pretty much divorced herself from all of us, except Granibelle, whom she visits, and she sees my mother a couple of times a year for lunch. I don’t think any of them ever really liked Amanda, although they were polite to her, and she hated them. She just came on the trip because she knew she had to. Our summer trips are a command performance. My mother would go through the roof if we didn’t show up,” or be very hurt, he thought and didn’t say it. Taylor got the picture. They were a strong family, and she could guess easily that their mother was a powerful woman, a force to be reckoned with. He made her sound even tougher than she was. And Taylor couldn’t help wondering if Olivia Grayson was power hungry like Amanda, or actually human. The fact that she’d had four kids and loved her husband was an interesting detail. It sounded like they’d had a solid marriage, and the business kept them all together, in one way or another.

“So why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” Taylor asked him quietly.

“I don’t like to show off,” he said honestly.

“Were you afraid I’d be after the money?”

“No,” he said quickly, too quickly, and then tempered it a little. “Yes … maybe … I don’t know. It’s a lot to hit someone with right away. It’s a very, very big business. We have more than a hundred stores worldwide, factories, production outlets, hundreds of thousands of employees. You add it all up, and it’s pretty impressive. I wanted you to see me, and not The Factory or my mother.”

“That makes sense,” she said pensively. “It must be fun to have all that money,” she said, looking childlike for a minute, and he laughed.

“I guess it is. None of us goes wild with it, although Amanda would have liked to. We live better than the others. John and Sarah live in a little house in Princeton, he drives a six-year-old car, and they love their lifestyle. And Liz lives in an old farmhouse that’s going to come down around her ears one of these days. She never gets around to fixing it up and probably never will. And I don’t know how Cass lives, but she’s made her own money, kind of like my mother. She’s a big success in the music business. She lives with some rock star called Danny Devil or something.” He was not part of Phillip’s world, and Taylor laughed out loud when he said it.

“Danny Hell? Are you kidding? He’s the biggest rock star on the planet.”

“Yeah, if you’re under twenty maybe. Apparently my sister discovered him. She’s good at what she does. I read an article about her last year. I think she has my mother’s head for business, although that’s a pretty crazy world. So this guy Danny is a big deal?” he asked her, with renewed curiosity about his sister. He hardly ever thought of her now. She was no longer on the screen of his life and hadn’t been for a decade, and she wanted it that way.

“The biggest. He’ll be as big as Mick Jagger one day. He’s still just starting out. He’s only been around since I was in college and that’s not very long ago.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said, looking sheepish and then worried. “And you don’t mind being with an old guy like me?” It was never lost on him that he was old enough to be her father. They were eighteen years apart, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“You’re not an old guy, and I love you. You’re young too, Phillip.” He was only in his mid-forties—she just happened to be a lot younger, but she never thought about the age difference when they were together. And he seemed younger every day as he got used to her and relaxed. She gave him a whole new perspective on life. She was the polar opposite of Amanda.

“Taylor, I want to marry you when this is all over, but it may take a while,” he warned her. The financial arrangements with Amanda were going to take time to work out. He had told Taylor that before, and for the moment, the situation was getting worse. It would be a while before it got better, and she settled for something more reasonable than what she was asking for now. She was threatening to try and overturn their pre-nup, which he knew was an empty threat, she was a lawyer, but she was greedy in the extreme, and this was her big chance.

“I’m not in any hurry. I’m not going anywhere,” she said gently, and then she kissed him. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me about all this stuff before. I never want you to think I’m here because of that. I don’t care if we live in a rat hole somewhere. I just want to be with you.” He knew that without a question of a doubt, he wasn’t worried.

“I know that. So do I. I want to have babies with you,” he said softly. It was the second time he had said it to her, and he meant it. “I never wanted kids before, because I was so unhappy as a child. I didn’t want to make someone else unhappy, and I guess I didn’t see it, but Amanda is like my mother, the bad side of her, the busy business side. I think my mom actually liked having kids and she loved us. Amanda is all about her work and her ambitions, and I don’t think she’d be capable of loving a child.” Taylor would be the perfect mother to his children, she was just the right woman for him. Destiny had given him a great gift the day he met her, and another chance. “How many kids would you want, by the way?” He had never thought to ask her, but it was obvious that she would want children. She was that kind of girl, and she loved kids, or she wouldn’t be an elementary school teacher.

“I’ve always wanted four,” she said, looking dreamy for a minute. And with him, they could afford them. She had always thought that in real life she’d have to settle for one or two. Phillip looked startled.

“Could we start with one, and see how it goes?” he said, looking strangled, and she laughed at him and kissed him again.

“They usually come one at a time.”

“Not always. And I’m getting a late start.”

“We’ll make up for lost time. Maybe two sets of twins would do it,” she teased him.

“I think I’m going to faint,” he said, and pretended to collapse on the sand. It was utterly amazing to him that a little over two months before he had been living with Amanda, and now he was here with this remarkable young girl, talking about having four children, and planning their future as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “It’s amazing how life changes, isn’t it?” he said to her seriously. “One minute you think you know exactly what you’re doing and where you’re going, and the next you’re ass over teakettle, and everything has turned around. It’s kind of nice, if you don’t mind the bumps.” He was happier than he’d ever been in his life.

“My brother said strange things happen in New York,” she said, laughing, “and he was right.” She had told her family about Phillip by then. She had explained that he had a good job, was a wonderful man, was forty-six years old and getting a divorce. They were nervous about his age but willing to give him a chance if he was good to her. And they had no idea about his relationship to The Factory because she had known nothing about it, and now that she knew, she didn’t want to tell them yet. She wanted them to be impressed by him, not by what he had, and the magnitude of that would be hard for them to ignore.

They walked down the beach together on Sunday, hand in hand. He said he wanted to take her somewhere for a vacation, maybe the Caribbean that winter for Christmas, and he wanted to introduce her to his grandmother before anyone else. She was the essence of the family for him, and what he loved most about it. He described her to Taylor as this adorable sparkling little old lady who loved to play cards. She had taught him to play poker and liar’s dice. And Taylor said she was dying to meet her. He suggested they go out to Long Island to visit the following weekend. They had nothing but time ahead of them now, and wonderful plans.

They had just walked back into the house on Sunday afternoon, and were talking about packing to go back to New York, when his cell phone rang. It was his mother, and she sounded strange to him. Distant, frozen, shocked. He knew something terrible had happened the minute he heard her voice.

“What’s wrong?” he said, and sat down as Taylor watched his face. She knew what those calls were like. She still remembered what her sister’s face had looked like when they got the call that their parents had been killed. Without knowing it, she held her breath, and so did he. He listened for a long time, and she saw tears spring into his eyes and roll down his cheeks. She went to rub his shoulders, and laid her face against his back, so he would feel her love for him, and her support.

The conversation with his mother was brief. All Taylor heard him say was that he would go back to the city immediately, and he’d come right out to Bedford as soon as he could, and then he hung up. He turned to look at Taylor then, and he was crying openly. His voice caught on a sob.

“My grandmother,” he explained in two words. “She was playing cards this afternoon, and she went to take a nap. They came to check on her two hours later, and she was gone. She died in her sleep. You’re never going to meet her now,” he said, sounding like a brokenhearted child, and for now he was. She was the grandmother he had adored all his life and she had adored him. Taylor put her arms around him making gentle sounds as she cried too, and Phillip sobbed in her arms. He sounded like his heart was torn in half, and for now it was. Granibelle was gone.

Chapter 22

T
hey packed quickly and closed the house, and Taylor offered to drive them back to the city. Phillip let her, which was unlike him, but he was distraught. He said almost nothing on the way back, and whenever she looked at him, she saw that he was crying, and she reached over and touched his face or his hand. She didn’t know what else to do. She was glad that she was with him when he heard the news. She remembered as though it was yesterday how devastated she had been when her parents died. And his grandmother had been like a third parent to him. He was crying all the tears of his childhood, and for all the times he had been brave. Forty years of pain and disappointment were flowing out of him like a flood that engulfed everything as Taylor drove.

“I can’t imagine life without her,” he said miserably. “I was going to visit her this week, but I didn’t have time.” But Taylor was aware that he had seen her two weeks before. One always regrets the last time one missed, but she knew how attentive he was to her. He went out to see her at least twice a month, sometimes more.

“You’re lucky you had her for so long,” Taylor said quietly, “and that she enjoyed her life right to the end. It’s hard for all of you now, but it’s a nice way for her to go.” She reminded him, “She didn’t suffer, she was happy. She played cards with her friends and she went to sleep.” It was a perfect death, but it had shocked them all. They had all believed Granibelle would live forever because they loved her so much. “How was your mom?” Granibelle was her mother after all.