Leigh Greenwood - Family Merger

“A friend talked them into going drinking instead. They were killed when he lost control of his car trying to outrun the police.”

“I’m sorry.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Don’t be. I don’t think they cared much.”

“Is that why you care so much?”

He turned to face her. “You can’t understand where I’m coming from because you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what drives me because you’ve always had everything—looks, money, acceptance.”

“Try me.”

Ron retrieved an envelope from the glove compartment. He opened it and pulled out a picture. “That’s me at sixteen, fat, glasses and all.” He pulled out a second picture. She was stunned to see it was of her debutante ball.

“Where did you get that picture?”

“Newspaper archives go back years.” He pulled out another picture. “This is what I looked like at eighteen when I worked at Taco Bell.” And another picture. “This is you.” The picture had been taken just before a group of students from her boarding school went to France on an exchange program.

“I won’t apologize for having advantages others don’t.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m just saying you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, to not have proper food, warm clothes, toys at Christmas. Even worse, what it’s like being ignored, realizing nobody knows you exist, wouldn’t care if you didn’t. That really gets to you. You’ve been accepted your whole life just because of who you are. I’ve had to earn recognition, sometimes force people to give it to me. Well, nobody is going to ignore Cynthia. I’ll see to that.”

She was beginning to understand. It really wasn’t about the money. “But Cynthia does feel ignored…by you.”

“I’ve done everything I could for her.”

“You’ve paid someone else to do it. She’d rather it had been you.”

After an uncomfortable silence, she picked up the second picture. “You don’t look like that now. What happened?”

He grinned, and something inside her went all open and tender. She wished he wouldn’t do that. She didn’t like the effect on her.

“I had a late growth spurt, lost my baby fat, took up intramural sports and got contacts.”

“No hormones or steroids?”

“Just decent food and exercise.”

She smiled. “And shoes without holes.”

He smiled back. “And not from the lost and found.”

“Was it hard being a scholarship student?” She didn’t know why she asked that question. All the schools she’d attended had scholarship students. She knew they usually felt left out and unwanted.

“I hated it. I felt I ought to at least be given a chance to prove I could fit in. The other scholarship kids didn’t seem to care, but it ate away at me all the time. From that first day in the fourth grade, I swore one day I’d be so successful nobody could ignore me.”

He’d certainly done that. He’d made the cover of several business magazines during the past year. The Charlotte Observer had run a feature article on him. “I won’t pretend to understand,” Kathryn said, looking at the rusted hulk of the trailer, “but everybody knows who you are now.”

“But they don’t accept me. I went to their schools and played touch football with them. I have the money, but I don’t have the pedigree. I don’t have the family history.”

Kathryn remembered how her friends made comments about people with less money, looks and sophistication. There had always been an unspoken barrier that separated them, that constantly reminded them they weren’t good enough. She’d never really stopped to think how that must have made them feel. Rather than discriminate against them, she should have admired them for having the courage to tackle and overcome obstacles she didn’t have to face. “Not all our families have a history I’d want.”

“It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be well-known. Well, Cynthia’s going to have a history, even if it’s short.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want the same things you want.”

“Maybe not, but she doesn’t want to be a nobody.”

She felt sorry for him. His parents had died without giving him the love and acceptance he needed. His wife had died before he was much more than another Harvard MBA struggling to make a place for himself in the business world. Cynthia was too young to appreciate her father’s accomplishments. He had turned to the public to give him the feeling of acceptance and approval he couldn’t get anywhere else.

Her life hadn’t been perfect, but at least she had a family that loved her. Still, as much as she sympathized with Ron, she couldn’t lose sight of the fact her first concern was Cynthia. Ron was tough. He’d proved he could take care of himself. Cynthia had proved she couldn’t.

“Let’s go,” Ron said. “We’re conspicuous.”

Like a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car in a squalid trailer park wouldn’t be! He pulled to a stop at a boardwalk behind the fish camp that overlooked the lake. They got out. The breeze coming off the lake was refreshingly cool. It smelled of crisp water and honeysuckle.

“I used to watch the boats,” Ron said. “I’d try to imagine what it would be like to roar across the lake in one of those big boats without caring that my wake might capsize some little boat.”

“I always hated people who did that. Did you ever buy a boat?”

“Lake Norman is the place to be now. It wasn’t the same.”

Her father had bought a house at Lake Norman. He said Lake Wylie was for the middle class. “Did you do the other things you dreamed you’d do when you were finally successful?”

“I bought a house in the best neighborhood and sent my daughter to the best school in town. She has the best of everything.”

“What if she considers you the best of everything?”

“Cynthia knows I have to work, or we won’t have the money for all those things.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want them.”

“She would if she didn’t have them.”

“Maybe not so much.”

“Look, I can’t go to a company and say I’ll only do seventy-six thousand dollars worth of work because I need only seventy-six thousand dollars this year. They’d think I was a fool and hire someone else. I have to charge top dollar, or they won’t think I’m good enough to hire.”

“Even if it’s a million dollars?”

“You’re talking companies worth thirty, fifty, a hundred billion dollars. A million is pocket change to them. More than the cost, what’s important is the quality of the service, the expert personal attention to every detail. I have an office of fifteen full-time staff. That can double or triple depending on the job. Then there are bonuses and percentages. I have to get paid well. A lot of people depend on me.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that nothing can replace you in your daughter’s life.”

“Who do you think I’m doing all this for?”

He wasn’t getting the point. “Maybe you’ve reached the point where your success has isolated you from Cynthia.”

“I know it’s kept us apart more than I want, but I have to go where the work takes me.”

Now he was making excuses for doing what he wanted to do. She wouldn’t let him get away with that. “Every decision is yours to make one way or the other. Everything is a choice. Some of the choices you’ve made have hurt Cynthia.”

“I can’t help that.”

“Of course you can. It doesn’t matter that some decisions don’t work out the way you wanted or planned, they’re still your decisions and you’re still responsible for the results, for seeing that something is going wrong and doing something about it.”

She wondered what was going on in his mind as he stared out over the lake. Was he remembering his parents and his childhood here, his progression from school to school, or was he thinking of his wife and daughter? She wondered if his career left him time to think of anything else.