The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

  Dad wore a conciliatory expression today. As if he felt sorry for the stress he had caused by suggesting they might not be a good fit, Dad now worked extra hard to demonstrate his pleasure in seeing them again. He wanted his new clients to know that they were on the same side.

  “I gathered everything you asked for,” Mr. Longworth said cautiously, sliding the mountain of papers in our direction. “Tax returns, net worth statements, investment summaries, estate planning documents, retirement reports . . .”

  “Thank you,” I said, accepting the pile of papers. This stack alone would keep me busy for the next few days. I would pick through each document, input numbers and values into my software programs. I’d calculate and run scenarios. I’d assign projected returns, and then I’d spend a day or so reading through their legal documents, confirming that all bases were covered: revocable trusts, wills, medical directives, powers of attorney. I’d verify that their irrevocable trusts were funded properly, that gifts made to fund the insurance policies were “arm’s length,” that no impropriety could be detected by the IRS. Then I’d start in on my PowerPoint of recommendations.

  And Mrs. Longworth brought her own stack of work, also gathered at our request: photo albums and a yellow pad with the title “Goals” etched in pencil at the top center. She opened the album. “These are our granddaughters—Loralie is six, and plays soccer. Emma is ten and is a real theater bug. I’d really like to be closer to them. They’re in North Carolina. We have a condo there.” Mrs. Longfellow turned the page and showed us a picture of their lovely waterfront home. From their veranda they could watch the pelicans slice through the horizon, and the sun plunge into the infinite sea.

  “And I serve on the board of the One by One,” she said, “a 403(b) foundation that works to improve the lives of marginalized children in Third World countries. I focus on issues of sanitation and infrastructure.”

  “That’s fascinating,” I said. “I have to admit that I looked you up and read all about the work you had done in India. I think that’s admirable and so brave. How did you get involved?”

  Mrs. Longworth pointed to her brown-faced granddaughter, Emma. “Emma was adopted from there,” she said. “She lost most of her family due to poor sanitation.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “But it’s wonderful that you’re so involved in helping others.”

  Mrs. Longworth beamed. “Those are my goals: the granddaughters, North Carolina, charity.” She sat stick-straight in her chair, folded her hands atop her stack of papers, and looked across at her husband. “Tell them, Charles. Tell them your goals.”

  Mr. Longworth hesitated—fidgeted in his chair, turned his Montblanc open and closed—clearly uncomfortable with our style of money management. His desires were private, and vocalizing them was like inviting us into his bedroom.

  “Think of it from a business standpoint,” Dad said. “If we were sitting here five years from now, what would you like to look back on in order to say, ‘That’s been a good five years.’”

  Slowly, Mr. Longworth warmed, and when Dad was responsive to his every disclosure, he began to soften. By the end of the meeting, Mr. Longworth had morphed into a retiree who liked to golf, who wanted to spend time with his two sons, to whom he hadn’t always been the most demonstrative father. “I was a bit distant, if you know what I mean,” he said, his voice catching. “They’re good sons, though. They’ve turned out good. Despite me.”

  “I’m sure you did just fine,” Dad said.

  “I’ve worked hard,” Mr. Longworth said. “Damn hard. I worked long hours, at the expense of my family. But I’ve also been a lucky son of a bitch. My business—wires, technology—it was the right place at the right time. I acknowledge that I had the goods that were needed. Another place, another time—things would’ve been different.”

  Charles wasn’t nearly the pompous, self-serving guy he presented to us at our first meeting. He saw himself as fortunate, comprehended that he had a responsibility to give back, to pass along his good fortune. Dad had exposed the better person inside Mr. Longworth, and now that momentum was building. By the time Mr. and Mrs. Longworth were ready to leave our offices, they were holding hands and Mrs. Longworth was glowing. How many years, I wondered, had it been since he’d held her hand?

  As we stood in the hallway saying our good-byes, Mrs. Longworth admired a piece of artwork hanging on our wall. “What a beautiful painting,” she said, pointing to the coral sunset descending on the ocean. “Reminds me of North Carolina.”

  “Beautiful place, North Carolina,” Dad said. “Have you spent much time there?”

  My stomach knotted. The Longworths’ eyes begged for explanation. There was no way Dad had just said that. We needed a “Rewind” button to bring us back ten seconds.

  “You’re thinking of Myrtle Beach, Dad,” I said, clutching his bicep with considerable force. “This painting was from Myrtle Beach. The Longworths have a house in North Carolina, right?” I forced my face to remain calm as I squeezed Dad’s arm even harder. He would find nail marks on his skin later.

  “Of course!” Dad said. “Sorry! I was looking at the painting and thinking South Carolina. My buddy who lives in Myrtle Beach painted this. He’s a watercolorist in his retirement.”

  The Longworths softened a bit, but I could still see Mr. Longworth no doubt wondering if he’d just turned over his $10 million to a guy who couldn’t remember basic facts. When the Longworths left, I pulled Dad into his office, closed the door, and said, “Dad, are you okay? You forgot they had a house in North Carolina. That’s kind of big.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  In my Subaru Outback, Rosetta Stone played. Una macchina rossa. A red car. Un batello rosso. A red boat. Car was feminine, boat masculine. I hit “Eject” and squeezed the steering wheel because something was wrong with Dad and the repercussions of that were twentyfold. For his own sake, what would it mean if his aging was accelerating, if he became increasingly forgetful? For the sake of the business, what would it signify to Fletcher Financial? And as for me—wouldn’t I get burned without the shade of Dad’s shadow?

  I had aced every test I had ever taken, but I had also failed to grow up, and of that fact, I was now suddenly keenly aware. I was smart, but I wasn’t wise. I had clung to my role as my father’s child. How had it not occurred to me—strategic-planning, spreadsheet-producing, goal-focused me—that our roles might someday change?

  Maybe he was just tired, overworked. Maybe he was just preoccupied, not thinking clearly. Maybe he just needed some green tea and supplements to give his brain a boost.

  “Dad, are you okay?” I had asked him in his office.

  “Missy, I didn’t for a second forget they had a place in North Carolina,” Dad assured me. “I was just thinking about Myrtle Beach, I promise. A simple mistake.”

  There was nothing simple about this.

  We had one client, Tom Mercer, who suffered from dementia. Another, Ed Bailey, had early-onset Alzheimer’s. Still another, Alfred King, had recently suffered a stroke. Were any of these a diagnosis for Dad? My father, who had never once faltered?

  When I was little and Dad and I headed to his office every Saturday morning, he’d say, “You know the routine, Missy,” and set me up at Jenny’s desk, spreading out my McDonald’s breakfast like a royal flush. I’d eat my pancakes and sausage and drink my orange juice from the hole Dad poked through the tinfoil lid, while he puttered around in his office, sorting and stacking files, speaking into his Dictaphone. How he loved his clients, his friends, his work. How he loved me. My father, who could draw joy from an empty bag, who found a silver lining in the most tattered scrap of fabric, who could find an honest man among a band of thieves.

  Dad’s life had meaning because he was meaningful to the clients he treasured like family. If he continued to blunder—because he was tired, overworked, or just getting older, or, God forbid, because there was someth
ing else happening to him—what would it mean to him to see his clients lose faith? It would decimate him.

  Once home, I toasted a few slices of leftover focaccia and poured some olive oil into a dish. I took a bite of buttery Fontina, letting the nutty cheese melt in my mouth. I dredged a piece of bread through the oil. I savored a mouthful of fruity Pinot Noir. After I repeated these steps a few times, I called it dinner, deciding to cook the piece of chicken tomorrow.

  With my carton of pistachio gelato, I sat at my computer and logged on to Facebook. When I clicked on Joe’s page, I saw that he had added a few new posts. Katherine, the oldest daughter, was reading for a poetry event at school. The middle daughter, Olivia, was in a play. The little guy, Jake—the spitting image of Joe—had lost another tooth, and had the proud, wide-mouthed grin to prove it.

  From the night of the snowball dance of sophomore year, Joe and I went on to date for three years. Dad loved Joe. Dad and I—just the two of us—led a quiet life. With Joe around, there was more life. Joe’s house was chaotic and noisy with four loud boys, two parents, and a grandmother, all living under one roof. Joe sought refuge with Dad and me because it was peaceful at our house, a place where he could study, read. A place where he could tell someone about his day and someone would actually listen, ask questions. And for the exactly opposite reason, we loved having Joe with us: to increase the decibels, to multiply our house population by 50 percent.

  During our junior year of high school, Dad started talking to Joe and me about colleges.

  “Tell me, Joseph,” Dad would say. “Tell me about your brilliant future.”

  “Mr. LeFey sent away for college packets for me,” he said. “I’m really considering a military college.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s strong about that choice,” Dad said. “The network after you graduate. You graduate from West Point or VMI and you’ll have connections in every field of industry for the rest of your life.”

  “The world is changing,” Joe said solemnly. “Globally, economically. If I could somehow be part of that change, I think I would have a good job.”

  “That’s right, my friend,” Dad said. “Go to where the puck will be. Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player who ever lived, wasn’t the strongest, wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t the biggest. And because of that, he knew he couldn’t get right into the scuffle—where the puck was. He had to go to where the puck was going to be.”

  Joe’s dreams varied widely. One day he wanted to go to law school; the next day he wanted to join the Marines Corp. The day after, he was considering a career as an EMT, and the day after that he wondered whether he would like to do what Dad did, advising clients on money matters. Listening to Joe weigh his options had a visceral effect on me. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I didn’t want him to go.

  “You know, Joe,” I would say. “I just read about the number of lawyers being graduated—there just aren’t enough jobs for them all. Plus, do you really think that you’d be able to sit at a desk all day?”

  Joe would calmly answer, “I’m sure the market’s as tight for lawyers as it is for just about any other profession, but I’d find a job. And I could always exercise during my lunch break or play soccer after work.”

  And then, because my obsession with his future, and disinterest in mine, was so apparent, he’d ask his own questions. “How about you? Any path that you’re being pulled down?”

  “I don’t know.” I would hem and haw, nervous to say what I really wanted for fear that my dreams would mean being away from him for a year. “It’s hard to say. I mean . . . I’d like to help people, somehow. Maybe work for a nonprofit organization.”

  “Didn’t you tell me once that you wanted to join the Peace Corps?”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” I admitted. “I’ve always thought that that would be amazing.”

  “You should do it,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Well, you, for one. Dad, for another. I don’t want to leave either one of you.”

  “Four years from now, Missy. Who knows what we’ll be doing? You can’t say no to your dreams when we haven’t even started college.”

  While I wasn’t necessarily the maternal type, pulled toward setting up a household and being a wife and mother, it still hurt me that Joe spoke like this of our separation, of everyone’s eventual separation. Constancy was my safety: Dad and Joe, our life in Alexandria. The idea of scattering made me nervous.

  Ultimately, Joe ended up at Virginia Military Institute. It offered a strong liberal arts education with a top-notch engineering program, all in a military academy setting. As Joe put it, “This way I’ll get a real taste of the military life. I’ll know for sure if I want to go that route.”

  I studied hard and earned perfect marks, and while I was thriving at William & Mary, what I looked forward to the most was coming home on long weekends to see Joe and Dad. It became evident to me that my happiness was rooted in them. The thought that joy and satisfaction could be achieved without them never occurred to me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  JOE

  Tuesdays were my toughest days, but they were also my best days. No longer just the second day of the workweek, the nondescript twenty-four hours following Monday, Tuesdays had become like a tough workout: some dread beforehand and suffering during, but usually a great feeling afterward. It was worth it.

  The day usually started at work for a half day, trying to get a full day’s work done in five hours. I medically retired from the Marines four years ago following my injury, and went to work for a global security and aerospace company—basically a government contractor in business with the Defense Department. The job title they gave me was intel analyst, which meant that I took everything I knew about Afghanistan and Pakistan to help develop intelligence collection networks to defeat violent extremist organizations. Sometimes I felt like I was playing the game of war, rather than helping our government actually plan missions. Some guys from my old unit couldn’t stand that their lives now meant sitting at a desk all day. I was fine with it. I would be happy to never see the real deal again. At my desk, playing war games, I could convince myself there was a point to it. Over there, after a while, day after day of getting IED’d, it all seemed hopeless. Like the only way out was to raze the entire city or to die trying. I hated feeling purposeless.

  From there, I rushed to my volunteer work at the National Military Medical Center, a veterans’ hospital just outside of Newark. I met with my group in the lounge, a group of six who had all lost either a leg or an arm while fighting in Afghanistan. This was a “post-rehab group,” meaning they had already endured months of therapy at Walter Reed in Bethesda, learning how to sit, walk, and function on their own. I’d been in their exact spot. Now they had been sent home to New Jersey, where each of them once resided. It was recommended that these guys would meet in a group for at least a year.

  Most wounded warriors were resilient and determined, but this group in particular had yet to find the Zen in being an amputee. None of them was ready to commemorate the day he was wounded, his “Alive Day,” as a way of refocusing on the life ahead. These guys were in the pits, still struggling with what had happened to them, miles away from accepting that there was any good to being half-whole. They sneaked smokes outside, drank buckets of coffee, looked down at their laps and, for the most part, acted like teenagers who had been forced into therapy, only because their parents wanted them to.

  Over fifteen hundred soldiers had lost a limb in Iraq or Afghanistan; over 20 percent had lost more than one. In the physical therapy rooms of Walter Reed, the attitude as a whole was encouraging, uplifting. These were our country’s finest men and women, and what brought them to dedicate their lives to fighting for our freedom was the same vigor and determination that drove them to walk again, to do the work necessary, to push themselves. They fed off each other, cheering one another on, a band of brothers. Many guys worked for five hou
rs a day. There were a few remarkable guys: double and triple amputees with interminably positive attitudes. Indefatigable when it came to therapy, these guys were able to say “at least I’m alive.”

  Compared to many, I was lucky and I knew it. I was an amputee, too, but just below the knee. A lot of these guys looked at me like I had it easy. And when I thought about some of them—a lost arm, two lost legs, eyelids singed off, faces burned—I couldn’t argue. With my prosthetic, I could walk. I had arms and hands to work and feed myself. I wasn’t confined to a wheelchair. A mosquito bite compared to many of these guys.

  I poured myself a cup of black coffee. When I signed up to volunteer, I had no idea that I’d end up here, with this bunch. I was more thinking that I could help guys secure jobs in the private sector after coming home. After all, I had done pretty well, getting hooked up with my job at a Fortune 500 company. But I got assigned to this group, like I had the qualifications to administer therapy to guys who were this far down in the dumps.

  The coffee was sludge and instantly stained the sides of the Styrofoam. I added a few creams and a few sugars. I didn’t trust drinking it straight.

  I sat down and asked the guys to come to order, then initiated some chitchat that fell flat. No one wanted to talk about the Yankees, or major league baseball at all, for that matter. I opened my notebook, and called on my first guy. Tony was an above-knee amputee who lost his leg while on patrol, and had had a tougher time than most, having to endure over thirty surgeries, while battling grueling headaches, almost daily.

  “How’s your week been, Tony?”

  Tony grumbled then proceeded to report in short, angry sentences how the week was crap, how physical therapy was a joke, how he couldn’t sleep, the Ambien no longer worked, how the food sucked, and how he woke up in the night and felt like his leg was there, but when he reached for it, it wasn’t. “It’s like a goddamned prank, every night.” At that, his voice cracked and he had to wipe at his eyes. “It’s not fair.”