by Julia London
It was the determination in her stride that unnerved Robin. She felt a small panic in the pit of her belly—she wasn’t ready to do this, or to hear it, or to feel it, and realized with surprise that her hands were shaking. God, this was so unlike her. She was always the one who was so put together, so sure of herself. Everyone said that of all of them, she most resembled Dad.
“Hey,” Robin said lamely as Rebecca came around the side of the car.
Rebecca responded by taking Robin into her arms and hugging her tight. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
She let go, grabbed a bag from Robin’s hand, and stepped aside.
Rachel dropped her smoke and ground it out with the heel of her boot. “Hey, Robbie,” she said.
Robin picked up her purse and put her arm around Rachel’s shoulders, giving her a gentle squeeze as they followed Rebecca up the flagstone path to the house. “Rach, you’re still smoking?” she asked, as the house loomed larger and larger before her.
“Sometimes,” Rachel answered sheepishly.
“Oh yeah?” Robin stopped, looked up at the windows of the master suite. “Then give me one.”
Rachel obediently fished a smoke from her pocket and handed it to her, then offered up a light. Robin grimaced at the taste, but welcomed the soothing race of smoke through her blood. In front of them, Rebecca dropped Robin’s bag at her feet, looked up at the master suite, too, and shook her head. “I can’t believe this,” she said, gesturing for Rachel to give her a cigarette, too. “This just all seems so unreal.”
Robin glanced at Rebecca, who shrugged as she inhaled, then daintily let the smoke escape her lips. It was a fact that Rebecca could, just by breathing, be the most elegant woman on the planet. She had that special air about her, as if she walked on spun gold—unlike Robin, who marched through life in army boots, kicking her way to clear a path, and Rachel, who pretty much floated along, barefoot and picking flowers.
“So how are Mom and Dad? I mean . . . is everything okay?” Robin asked.
Rebecca settled her pale blue gaze on her. “They are doing remarkably well. It’s weird. It’s like the last fifteen years didn’t happen.”
“That is so weird,” Rachel murmured.
Robin’s sentiments exactly. She took another drag from her smoke. “So has he told you anything? Like what his doctors are saying? H-how . . . long?” she forced herself to ask.
The question silenced them all; Rachel looked nervously at the ground. Rebecca, the rock, calmly shook her head. “He wanted to wait for you. He hasn’t said any more than what he told us on the phone—just that it’s bad.”
“Maybe he’s exaggerating. You know how some people are—they think things are a lot worse than they really are?” Rachel said, her hopeful expression dissolving with Rebecca and Robin’s pointed looks. “I mean, how bad can it be?” she asked no one in particular, tossing the cigarette aside. “God, is there any liquor out here? A beer at least?”
The three women looked up at the second-story windows of the master suite, none of them having the guts to take the next step forward.
From the sitting room of the master suit, Aaron watched as his three beautiful daughters gathered on the drive below him. “Since when do my children smoke?” he demanded gruffly as Rachel handed Robin a cigarette.
Seated in a comfortable armchair, Bonnie lowered the book she was quietly reading. “They don’t. At least not usually. Rachel can’t seem to kick the habit completely. When she feels stressed, she smokes.”
“I didn’t know Rachel smoked.”
Bonnie shot him a sidelong glance. Aaron knew that look; it was the there’s-a-lot-you-don’t-know look she had perfected in the last couple of weeks. He sighed, sat in a chair next to Bonnie, and closed his eyes, unable to shake the ill effects of the aggressive drug therapy.
“Why don’t you rest a bit? I’ll go see about the girls, then bring you some tea in a while.”
Bonnie, ah, Bonnie. How I’ve let you down. Aaron felt her hand on his forehead, opened his eyes, and took her hand, pressing his lips to her palm. “Thanks, but I’m good.”
Bonnie smiled; it was the same, sweetly beatific smile that had captivated him more than thirty years ago on that dirt football field in West Texas. No matter what had gone on between them—and the Lord God knew there had been a lot—he still loved her, and in moments like these, desperately so. It was just like her, Aaron thought, as he watched her put her book away, that in spite of their estrangement, she had come when he’d called. Her life in California had taken her down a new and different path, but they had never lost touch, neither of them able to completely let go, the bond between them amazingly resilient. She had, instinctively, felt his horror when he’d made that pathetic call to her, and had come to New York immediately to be with him through the surgery and first rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. She’d put the many years of discord and strife aside and had stepped into the old role of partner and soul mate. She had consulted with his doctors, had gotten up in the night to make sure he was okay, had filled him with comfort foods that he could not keep down, and memories and kindness that he could.
He would never have made it this far without her.
When the shock and trauma of aggressive treatment to his body had begun to wear him thin, it had been Aaron’s request that they come to the ranch to recuperate. Both of them had wanted some detachment from the world at large to put their minds and arms and hearts around the devastation of a sentence of six months to two years, and while they had not been at the ranch together for many years, it seemed the place to be. Aaron in particular needed to be in a place where he could be silent, in solitude, where he could think of all things that could not be left undone before he was gone.
And Bonnie, resolute, had come with him, her mouth set in determination as she gripped his hand on that interminably long flight from New York where he had, for the first time in his life, made use of the barf bag. Twice.
Fortunately, at the ranch, he had begun to improve, regaining some strength. They began every day as if it were his last. They did not call for the usual staff members to join them, preferring to spend the days alone. They took walks in the morning as far as Aaron could go, looked through old family albums and letters in the afternoon, drank from his cellar of very fine wines, and spent their evenings on the porch swing looking at the stars.
More importantly, they talked like they hadn’t talked in years. About all of it, their lives, their daughters. About all the things that they had seen grow and blossom between them, then wilt and die, and how exactly it had all happened, beginning with a clear and calm night on the Texas caprock. That was the night of the spring dance of their junior year at Ralls High, when Bonnie had willingly given herself to his wandering hands and neither of them had ever been the same again.
In fact, that night, and all its discoveries, had sparked the struggle within Aaron to be a man—he could still remember how fiercely he wanted to take Bonnie and all that she was, run away with her, find some place where the world did not exist except for the two of them.
Aaron’s father, however, saw a different vision for him. There was no one else to leave the family farm to, save Aaron’s sister and whomever she might eventually marry. The more Aaron struggled with that plan, the less anyone in his family seemed to understand why or how he could leave generations of farming behind. Only Bonnie had understood his need to see the world, to make his way by himself and escape the drudgery of cotton farming.
So in the weeks that followed their graduation from high school, when Bonnie had impulsively packed a bag and run off with him to Dallas to help him make their fortune, they had sealed their bond and their fate for the rest of their lives.
His father had died a bitter man and his sister’s husband, a no-account dirt farmer from Crosby, had reaped the reward of Aaron’s decision. It was, nevertheless, a decision Aaron never regretted.
At first, it had been very hard. Yet at the same time, it had been very good
between him and Bonnie—they had been held together by young love and poverty. It was by chance that a foreman at Grantham Engines had taken a look at Aaron’s application, saw that he knew how to operate a cotton gin, and put him behind the wheel of a semi, driving line-haul between Dallas and San Antonio. With a little money, Aaron and Bonnie had found a tiny one-bedroom clapboard house on the east side of Dallas, and they were happy.
When Robin came along, Aaron immediately fell in love with her dark blue eyes and dark curls. He had worshipped that baby doll, had taken her everywhere he could, doting on her. Two years later, the same year Aaron bought his first truck, Rebecca had joined them, another beautiful baby girl with crystalline blue eyes. By the time Rachel was born three years after that, laughing and gurgling beneath a head full of black fuzz, he had a dozen of his own trucks running between Dallas and San Antonio.
Lear Transport had been born along with his daughters, but grew much faster. Aaron intuitively understood the fundamentals of a success in the business, and he quickly earned a reputation for delivering freight fast and cheap. As the business grew, so did his ambition. He moved the family to Houston to take advantage of the transatlantic shipping lanes that ended there, successfully bidding on several over the-road contracts to move a substantial amount of ocean cargo that did not end up on the rails. By the time he moved to New York and added air transport to LTI, Bonnie had long gone.
At what point, exactly, the arguments had started, he could no longer remember, but it seemed that was all there was in those last few years together. According to Bonnie, he was never home, never interested in them, had left the raising of their daughters to her. She never understood that building an empire for those three girls took all his energy. Bonnie was right about one thing, however—both of them had left the girls flailing about, throwing wealth and more wealth at them as they tried to sort out the mess of their marriage. The result? In spite of all outward appearances to the contrary, they had managed to raise three daughters who each carried the burden of their parents’ failure in their own way.
For Robin, as Bonnie had so brilliantly pointed out, it was the need for his acceptance and approval. She’d flailed about until Aaron took her on at LTI. Except that he didn’t really take her on. He didn’t teach her the business like he should have, but had given her a cushy position that had nothing to do with the running of company. She was a pretty woman, eye candy with a powerful name, and she made a great asset for entertaining his bigger accounts around the world. But in the last couple of years, as Robin had sought more influence and responsibility at LTI, he had found her business decisions to lack the maturity that solid experience would have given her. She was, in a word, a management disaster.
Rebecca, on the other hand, had, for reasons Aaron would never understand, latched on to the first loser to pay her compliments. It was mind-boggling to him, for Rebecca was the most beautiful and refined of his daughters. She could have had any man with the mere crook of a finger, but she had chosen Bud Reynolds. Bud wasn’t all bad—he was perhaps one of the best high school wide receivers Houston had ever seen—but he was a sorry excuse for a man. When Aaron had left Bonnie, Rebecca had latched on to him and held tight all the way to college, foregoing what had all the markings of a promising career in the arts to be the bastard’s doormat. Now, Bonnie said, Rebecca drifted from one social event to the next, miserable in a marriage to a man who would fuck his neighbor’s wife in the garage while she was inside, nursing their son.
And of course there was Rachel, sweet Rachel, the most hapless child a man might hope to have. She was still in some nebulous graduate program at Brown University, the same graduate program in which she had been enrolled four years now. The subject of her study? Ancient British languages. He had to shake his head in wonder every time he thought of it. The one time he had asked her what she intended to do with her graduate degree in languages—ancient British languages at that, the poor girl had blinked and looking very bewildered. “Well . . . research,” she’d said. She seemed to have no direction, no ambition, other than to poke around musty old manuscripts.
Yet Aaron continued to bankroll her.
It astounded him in an odd way, because his three daughters had grown up in the lap of luxury, had never wanted for a damn thing. But each of them was as forlorn in their own private way as if he had abandoned them at birth. If the goddamned doctors were right, he had precious little time left to right that wrong.
That knowledge had created in him a desperate sense of urgency like he had never felt in his life. If there was one thing he had to do before he left this earth, it was to make them face the voids in their lives, make them understand what was truly precious. Teach them to stand up to life and meet it head-on.
Aaron could hear the girls downstairs now, a wisp of nervous laughter floating up to him. He stood, pausing a moment to make sure nothing in him was going to object, his gaze falling to a picture of a younger Bonnie hanging on the wall of the bedroom study. It might be too late for them, but it wasn’t too late for his girls.
Determined, Aaron grit his teeth and walked slowly out of the room to tell his daughters that he didn’t have long to live.
Telling his daughters he was dying was the hardest thing Aaron had ever had to do. Judging by Bonnie’s drawn expression, it hadn’t been any easier for her. The girls had each received the news in characteristic form—Rachel disbelieving, waiting for a punch line that would never come; Rebecca, unobtrusive, off to one side, softly crying; and Robin, defiant, angrily insisting that he seek another opinion, hire the best doctors—fight it, Dad!
If only they knew. If only he could impart to them how hard he fought the battle being waged within him, how he begged for his life from a God whom he had not addressed in years. And then one night, the enormity of his fate had descended upon him and he had, miraculously and calmly, accepted what he must. Not that he intended to go down without a fight, no sir, and in fact, he and Bonnie were looking into alternative treatments. But something was different now. His thoughts had turned from himself to those around him.
“I am worried about them,” he said to Bonnie. They were sitting in silence in the dining room, both of them lost in thought.
Bonnie smiled sadly. “Me, too. Especially Robbie. She’s so headstrong. I worry how she’ll do . . . you know, after.”
Aaron paled.
“It’s just that she is so angry, so full of frustration. And I don’t know how to help her, I have never really known how, because I’m just not . . . you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that—ever since she was a little girl, Robbie has wanted to be just like you. And then Rebecca and Rachel . . .” Bonnie sighed, looked away.
Aaron could almost hear what she was thinking—how would she manage after he was gone? Frankly, he had wondered the same thing. Not that Bonnie wasn’t a good mother, but there was so much those three women had to learn, so much from which they had been sheltered. Not one of them seemed to be in control of their own lives, but why should he expect them to be? After all, he had controlled it for them from the moment of their birth.
And over the course of the next two days, Aaron became increasingly convinced that he had to do something drastic, had to break the pattern of their dependence on him. They were spoiled, unrealistic about life in some ways, self-indulgent in their own ways, and at times, self-centered.
Robbie was definitely the ringleader of their little band, and Aaron couldn’t help but think of the old adage, the blind leading the blind. When she wasn’t glued to her cell phone, she was stomping about, insisting to Bonnie that she couldn’t leave the office unattended for a few days, because they wouldn’t know what to do. What she obviously did not realize was that her office, the little four-member team he had allowed her to set up in Houston, was, in the greater scheme of things, so inconsequential to LTI that it was almost laughable. Her operation was window dressing, nothing more. Evan Iverson ran the Texas operation
in addition to the corporate company. Robbie hardly knew how the company operated, no thanks to Aaron. It was something Evan had pointed out to him on more than one occasion, and something he had patently ignored . . . until now. Wasn’t Robbie the logical one to carry on in his stead? Had he thought himself so invincible that he would never need a successor? Worse, what sort of disservice had he done his own daughter?
And there was Rebecca, so like her mother, who called home every hour, or so it seemed, to check on her son, Grayson, and to see if Bud the Bastard had left a message for her. Of course he hadn’t. Yet she continued to call, continued to hope for the affection of a man so far beneath her that it made Aaron cringe every time she picked up the phone.
And his baby, Rachel. She had gained a few pounds since he’d last seen her. He pictured her in some stuffy library room, a package of Oreos on her lap as she leafed through some ancient manuscript. Rachel had always been the dreamer, and while he loved that about her, the girl was her own worst enemy. Yet she was quick to point to her boyfriend when she felt challenged—another winner, Aaron thought disgustedly. Myron was a professor at Brown, who encouraged her study of ancient British literature with an absurd enthusiasm.
Aaron listened to his daughters over those two days, observed them, felt their attention returning to their own lives, away from his fleeting mortality. The more he glimpsed their lives, devoid of any meaningful relationships, the less he could bear it. As sick and tired as he was, his patience had worn very thin. By the time dinner was served on Wednesday night, Aaron was feeling a sort of panic that only a dying man can feel. Something had to be done. The chicks needed to be pushed from their feathered nests and taught to fly, or be eaten by stronger predators.
His idea was drastic and perhaps cold, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Chapter Three