Tyler
The board room falls quiet as our final applicant of the day leaves, and then I look over at my father. I’m already shaking my head.
“No chance in hell are we hiring that guy.”
Dad releases a frustrated sigh and rests his elbows on the table. In front of us, we each have a stack of applications for the role of our new financial analyst. We have yet to find a promising candidate, despite a long and grueling morning of back-to-back interviews. Dad looks as though he’s losing the will to live. “Well, we’ve interviewed everyone, so who’s your pick?”
“I’ll let you know first thing on Monday. Now,” I say, rising from my chair and gathering up the pile of resumés, “I need to get out of here. I’m already late.” The white marble clock on the wall is staring me in the face. That’s how I know I’m already seventeen minutes late.
“Tyler.”
I don’t even look up from my haphazard stack of papers. I’m too busy trying to get out of here as quickly as I can. “What?”
“Enjoy the party,” Dad says, his voice quiet. I pause and glance up at him, surprised the conversation has turned personal. Dad nervously fumbles with a binder, opening and closing the latch. He turns his eyes down to his lap when he adds, “I wish I could be there.”
Yeah, well, you can’t,I think. And I immediately feel like a dick for doing so.
Dad’s shoulders slump with guilt and his expression pools with remorse the same way they always do whenever he remembers that his actions have caused him to miss out on a lifetime of moments with the family he once had.
We rarely talk about this stuff. We mostly just talk about business, and sometimes he’ll ask how my mom is doing these days, and it’s unbearably awkward whenever he attempts to ask about my brothers. It’s easier to keep the family stuff off-limits, because Dadisn’ta part of my family. To this day, my mom still can’t bring herself to acknowledge him when she passes him in the street. My youngest brother, Chase, doesn’t evenrememberhim. My other brother, Jamie, has made several attempts over the years to restart his relationship with Dad too, but it never works out.
All Dad has is this company and me. He has never remarried – the one woman hediddate for a couple months left him when she found out he’d spent seven years in prison – and now he lives alone in his luxury apartment over in Burbank.
“Sorry,” is all I say. I give a feeble shrug, because there’s nothing I can do to change anything. What’s done is done, and Dad deserves the isolation.
I head back to my office, dump the applications on my desk to deal with on Monday, then grab my keys. The building is quiet today, because no one usually works Saturdays, and I yell one final goodbye to Dad before I head out the front door. And every time, every damn time, I glance over my shoulder at the sign as I leave.
GRAYSON’S.
Still kind of unbelievable. When I was a kid, I couldn’t think of anything worse than following in Dad’s footsteps. I didn’t want to be involved with his civil engineering firm in any way, but yet here I am, because when you’re a guy with no college degree and your father offers you a job, you would be stupid to decline. I took some courses and now I’ve been the HR manager for the past five years. Dad believes I understand people better than he does, and he’s definitely right about that. It gets tense sometimes working so closely with my father and being around him almost every day, but I enjoy the job. My plan is to stick around for a few more years and then branch out into a new venture, but my life is a little too crazy right now to worry too much about advancing my career.
I cross the street to the parking garage and jump into my truck, eyeballing the digital clock on my dashboard. Twenty-two minutes late now. Typical. The one Saturday I actually have somewhere important to be is the one Saturday Dad decides to conduct interviews, but I already gave Chase the heads-up that I might be late. I doubt he’s even noticed that I’m not there yet – he’ll be too swept up in the celebrations to care.
I drive across the city too fast, the late spring sunshine blazing through my windshield, and I already have my tie torn off and half my shirt unbuttoned when I pull up on my driveway. Sometimes I hate living on the outskirts of Santa Monica, but you can’t find nice neighborhoods like ours downtown. Mr. Presley is rocking back and forth on a chair on his porch – he’s too old to mow his own lawn these days, so I usually do it for him in exchange for a cold beer. We’ve grown quite friendly – and I give him a wave as I climb out of my truck. The driveway is missing our SUV, which only means one thing – I’m so late she couldn’t wait for me any longer.
Our lawn is freshly cut, but I zip across it anyway, leaving footprints in the grass, and jangle my keys into the front door of our two-story house. It still feels weird coming home here, mostly because I grew up two streets over, and I never thought I’d find myself back in this city. Like, ever. I always imagined myself living in New York again, but it doesn’t feel like the right place to settle down. Too fast. And I even imagined myself living a suburban lifestyle too, but it wasn’t for us, either. Too boring.
So, Santa Monica became a no-brainer when Dad offered me that job down here. It made sense for a lot of different reasons. And it’sreallynice to step outside to sunshine every day, rather than the doom and gloom of Portland. I don’t miss that place all that much. Maybe just the coffee.
I trip over a toy fire truck as I open the front door, curse at it, then nudge it to one side. The house is silent now, but usually when I walk in I’m greeted by the sound of her voice. But today . . . Today she’s had to leave without me. We can’tbothbe late to such an occasion. At least one of us has to turn up on time so that we don’t become the self-appointed slackers of the family.
When I get upstairs, I find our bed perfectly made, as always, but with a fresh set of clothes laid out for me. It makes me smile, always grateful, as though she hasn’t done this for me a thousand times over the years. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d function these days if it weren’t for her. She keeps my life in perfect order, all the way down to the finer details.
Our room smells of the perfume she always wears, and I inhale the sweet scent of orange blossom as I change into the more casual dress pants and shirt she’s picked out for me. I’m thirty-nine minutes late by now. I stumble back downstairs while pulling on shoes, then lock up and jump back into my truck.
I head downtown, but the Saturday traffic around the oceanfront is ridiculously crazy. The beach is packed and there’s a wave of pedestrians heading toward the pier. I don’t come downtown often, but whenever I do, it brings back so many memories of partying on that beach, of hanging out on the boardwalk, of strolling down Third Street Promenade. It reminds me of when I was young. The world felt so different then.
For the first time in my life, I easily find a parking spot around the corner from the venue. I grab a bottle of cologne from my glovebox and spray myself, then make a hurried dash down to the cocktail bar that has been hired for this afternoon’s celebrations. It’s an intimate venue on Broadway, just off Third Street and smack in the middle of downtown.
My brother, Jamie, is lingering in the alley next to the building, smoking a cigarette. He raises it into the air to greet me as I pass. “How come you’re an hour late when you only need to drive across town? I flew in from Atlanta this morning andstillmade it here on time.” He shakes his head at me and takes another drag of his cigarette. His jaw is thick with unruly stubble that he hasn’t bothered to shave for the occasion.
“I got held up at work,” I say, though my cheeks feel hot when I say it. I know what Jamie is thinking – that I’m an idiot for letting Dad’s company impact my life all over again. But he just nods in understanding, most likely because we haven’t seen each other in months and it would be a real shame to get off on the wrong foot. “It’s good to see you. I bet Mom’s happy to have you home.”
Jamie rolls his eyes and tosses his cigarette butt to the ground, mashing it into the concrete with his foot. “Yeah, I have to escape out here just to get a break from all her hugging.”
We share a laugh and handshake. Jamie moved to Atlanta three years ago to pursue a career in IT, but he still makes the effort to fly home for any special occasions. The distance only seems to make our relationship more strained, though. For as long as I can remember, Jamie has never agreed with any of the choices I’ve made in life. But we’re brothers, and we remain civil. We head into the bar together, like two old friends who are catching up, and I am now fifty-eight minutes late to Chase’s engagement party.
Eden
