Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  “Suzy, I’m sorry. I said I wouldn’t fail you, and I have. This is a disaster.”

  With tears burning my eyes, I tramped across the driveway and minced out onto the lawn, my heels poking through the soggy Saint Augustine grass as I made my way out onto the field to pick up the trashed decorations. Mud sucked at my white pumps with every step. Every time I stooped to retrieve a piece of wet bunting, dots spattered my suit. It didn’t matter now. Thunder growled, and I started weeping.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Suzy and I were supposed to do it together.

  Every once in a while, especially during the first few years she was gone, the loss of my sister hit me with a fresh vengeance, pulled a string deep in my chest, and unraveled me from the inside out. I stood there on the polo field and sobbed hard, wrenching sobs.

  “I’m sorry, Suzy, I’m sorry.…”

  When I could breathe again, I straightened my shoulders and cleared my throat. It was time to go in, thank people, and send them home with plastic bags and foil packets of petit fours and crudités. My ruined shoes made a slurping sound when I tried to move my feet. Suzy would have been hysterical at that, but because I couldn’t hear her laughter, I started crying again, and then I was laughing, because Suzy would have known anything this tragic had to be hilarious.

  I waded a few yards across the field, just to smell the wet grass and storm clouds.

  A spark caught my eye on the horizon. What looked like a firefly. And then another and another, flickering, appearing and disappearing at the smudged hemline where the meadow met the glowering sky.

  Headlights, I realized. Lots of them.

  Pickup trucks and town cars, mom-style minivans, a small but steady trickle of vehicles wound its way up the country lane and through the gate, dropping passengers at the clubhouse, then wallowing out to the muddy parking area, sliding into crooked rows, wheels spinning in the mire. Dozens of cars turned into hundreds, a steady stream of headlights emerging from the mist. It reminded me of the stream of firefly headlights wending their way to our front porch in search of Suzy. Just like that bevy of boys, they came because they loved her. Maybe not my Suzy; none of these people had known her. They each had their own Suzy—or they were the Suzy for someone else.

  I hurried back to the clubhouse, pausing to stuff the soggy bunting in a trash can as I dashed up to the porch. A pretty young girl from the local paper stood there.

  “Looks like you struck a chord.”

  “I guess we did,” I said, dabbing at my eye makeup, scuffing my ruined shoes on a welcome mat.

  “My only personal experience with breast cancer was with my mother’s best friend. She lived a block away, and no one knew she had breast cancer until she died. You just didn’t speak of it. This is amazing.” She nodded toward the wallowed parking lot. “You do know this is amazing, right?”

  “Yes. I’m—I’m definitely amazed. I’m just so grateful they came.”

  And they kept coming.

  I Hope You Dance

  JUST SIXTEEN and already talking about majoring in business, Brooks Byers was about to learn one of Norman’s prime Brinker Principles: “Be persistent. Keep knocking on doors.”

  I first learned this lesson from my father. Even as a child, when someone told me no, all I heard was the first two letters of “not yet.” But Daddy, along with Boppie and my industrious uncles, also taught me that this is a good quality only when used for good instead of greed. In the ethical practice of business, the why of a deal is more important than the how much. The most powerful lesson every mentee learns is how to care for others. What you get is vanishingly unimportant compared with who you bring along.

  In the fall of 2009, Brooks approached department stores in his hometown, Flower Mound, Texas, requesting permission to set up a table and wrap gifts during the Christmas season as a way to raise money for breast cancer research. He organized a list of stores, called around and collected the names of all the managers, typed up neatly addressed business letters, got into his church clothes, and went out to hand-deliver the polite requests.

  “One just said no without a reason, one never responded, some said it was against store policy, somebody said a group in the past ruined it for everybody. The manager at the Christian bookstore was pretty nasty. That one was a surprise.”

  Brooks’s dad, a marketing executive, told him, “When you’re pitching, if you get five out of a hundred, that’s successful.”

  “I only needed one,” says Brooks. “I didn’t expect it to be that hard.”

  He got his yes from Susan Held, manager of a local Belk Department Store.

  “She was really excited,” says Brooks. “Came down two or three times to check on us on Black Friday. The people who worked there were a lot more customer service-oriented in general. And a lot happier. To me, that says she’s a great manager.”

  He roped in a few friends, and they wrapped gifts every weekend from Thanksgiving until Christmas, raising about $500 for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, about the same amount he’d raised for SGK that summer with a tennis clinic for neighborhood kids. Susan Held speculated that perhaps he got the negative responses initially because breast cancer seems like an unusual interest for a teenage boy. She suspected Brooks had a pretty solid why.

  His great-grandmother died of breast cancer when he was two, but Brooks was seven when his grandmother died. He remembers. “Even when she was in chemo, she’d walk with me when I rode my bike or get down on the floor and play.”

  Brooks was fifteen when his mother was diagnosed.

  His little sister, Annemarie, was eight, a blossoming ballerina.

  “I didn’t want to tell him right away,” says Christy Baily-Byers, a communications teacher at Southern Methodist University. “Brooks was born going on forty. He’s so responsible, such a caretaker by nature, I didn’t want him to take too much of this on himself. I was determined the disease wouldn’t define me. I kept teaching through it all—tamoxifen, Lupron, Taxotere, Cytoxin. Sometimes my back hurt so badly, Annemarie had to dress me, but I went to work. We ate a lot of takeout. I was too fatigued to do errands, so Brooks drove me around with his learner’s permit.”

  Christy scheduled chemo around the family vacation to Europe that summer.

  “We’d been planning it for a long time, and I wasn’t sure how many more family trips there’d be,” Christy says, but then she rushes to qualify, “because the kids grow up so fast.”

  She lost her hair in Paris. Annemarie went with her to the wig shop and charmed the French salesladies, dancing around in a bouffant do.

  With a strong family history of breast cancer, Christy had done her homework. One of the regular guest speakers in her classroom was SGK communications specialist Melissa Anderson. Christy had herself tested for the BRCA genes, and the results were negative, but her oncologist cautioned that we’ve only just begun to understand other genetic factors. Some scientists think the age at diagnosis may drop with each generation in some families with hereditary cancer, and there does seem to be a pattern in Christy’s family.

  “My grandmother was in her seventies. My mom was fifty-six. I was forty-three.…” Christy looks over her shoulder at Annemarie. “I try not to go there in my head. I don’t want her to grow up with a cloud over her, so I won’t talk to her about it until some point in the future. Meanwhile, we do every little thing that might help. I’ve read and read. I’m careful to avoid hormones in meat or poultry. She’s in ballet. They say exercise might help. Brooks is determined to do whatever he can to help find the answer before she gets there.”

  It’s possible, if not probable, that Christy has passed on to Annemarie a genetic predisposition for breast cancer. But it’s a solid certainty that she and her husband have also passed to their children life lessons in perseverance, grace under pressure, pragmatic optimism, and vigilance when it comes to caring for themselves and each other. Looking back, I see my father’s guiding wisdom in every pivotal decision of my life. When he
was living, he was always there, nudging me to ask the right questions instead of handing me the answers. His belief in me was unshakable, and the example he set guides me still.

  LaSalle Leff all, another towering mentor in my life—and the lives of thousands of others—likes to quote Henry Brooks Adams: “A teacher affects an eternity.”

  As LaSalle was growing up in the segregated South, his godmother’s husband was the only black physician in his hometown, but his parents and teachers instilled in him potent messages of purpose and possibility. As a black student in the 1940s, Howard University was one of only two medical schools open to him, but he graduated first in his class in 1952 and went on to become president of the American Cancer Society, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Society of Surgical Oncologists. He’s taught 5,000 of the 7,500 physicians who’ve graduated from Howard.

  When LaSalle was about the age Annemarie Byers is now, he found a bird with a broken wing.

  “Why don’t you try to put a splint on it?” his father suggested.

  With shades of the exactitude that would one day make him a great surgeon, LaSalle carefully splinted the bird’s wing and fed it bread crumbs and drops of water for several days. His eyes still shine when he tells how it eventually grew strong and flew away.

  A beautiful metaphor for both medicine and mentoring.

  Brooks Byers, with his innate sixteen-going-on-forty understanding of all this, will prosper in business school, I predict. But more than I enjoy imagining how far he’ll fly, I relish the thought of those he’ll take with him. He’ll go out into the world and build on the lessons he’s learned from his father and mother and other mentors who’ve shown him the way. And if all our vigilant prayers are heard, his little sister will grow up, grow old, and teach her granddaughters to dance.

  ∼ 12 ∼

  Follow the Leader

  Response to our soggy maiden voyage event was immediate and astounding, and it grew with every event we did that first year.

  Susan Carter, the young reporter I met that rainy day at Willow Bend, worked for a group of community newspapers in the Dallas area, covering local events and human-interest stories. That day, she hurried back to the newspaper office with a raft of hastily scratched notes and a roll of great photos.

  “My editor and I sat there trying to figure out how we were going to report this story,” she told me later. “We could call it ‘female cancer’ or ‘a woman’s cancer’ but you made it clear you wanted us to say ‘breast cancer.’ And the name of the organization made it impossible for us to avoid it.”

  Susan had graduated with a degree in journalism from Texas Christian University in the late 1970s, part of that forward-thinking Our Bodies, Ourselves generation, who grew up in jeans and tie-dye instead of girdles and crinoline. The lexicon was changing, and it was time for genteel Southern sensibilities to catch up. Susan pushed the story through and kept an eye on other SGK events over the next few years, making sure we got our share of column inches and volunteering whenever she could. She landed a job at a top PR firm in Dallas, eventually launched her own PR firm, and became Susan Carter Johns. Her major meat-and-potato accounts included Coors and Strohs, and on the side, she helped us define and refine branding for our events, including Race for the Cure and our annual awards luncheon. (It’s been years since she came to work for us full-time, and we still tease her about the fact that her whole career has been beer and breasts.)

  Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers and the generosity of our donors, in our very first year we were able to award two research grants, totaling $30,000, to M. D. Anderson and Baylor University. There was no question in my mind now; that groundswell I’d been certain of came from an aching need. So many women had been silent for so long, questions unanswered, stories untold. They wanted their voices to be heard and needed to know that someone would listen. Some came to honor a loved one they’d lost, others to fight for the life of a loved one who was still hanging on. Some were fighting for their own lives and were desperate for any kind of handhold. Some had lived with the specter of breast cancer in their family and were hungry for hard information about how to protect themselves and their daughters.

  Armed with information and resources, we went to groups of professional women, PTA moms, proactive movers and shakers in churches and synagogues—those lionesses who get so much done—and we went to the media with a simple mandate: Shine a light on this disease. We wanted people to see the faces and know the numbers that summed up the real and alarming scope of emotional, physical, and financial damage being wreaked by breast cancer. During the early years of SGK, this work was tremendously time-consuming—almost like having another child who needed constant nurturing—but during that time, Norman and I were forging our small, ironclad family unit. He felt strongly that success in business was pointless, improbable even, if you weren’t successful as a human being. To Norman, that meant being fully engaged in family life, active in the community, and willing to take a political stand. He did all that, along with ski trips and long afternoon rides, and still managed to fit in his passion for polo.

  I have to back up for a moment and talk about Norman and Eric.

  The two of them formed a bond all their own. They were the guys. Eric had been through a lot in his short years. Norman was strict but endlessly patient. He had high expectations for Eric, the way my father had for me, and that scared me a little because I’d begun to suspect that Eric saw the same tangled hieroglyphics I’d seen as a child. I couldn’t bear the thought of this bright, motivated little boy growing up feeling like he’d always have his nose pressed to the glass. Early in his school years, we had him tested, and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. It had a name. It was real. And it could be dealt with. We expected no less from him; there were no excuses, no lowering of the bar. But we were determined to provide him with the tools he needed, not only to deal with this challenge but to turn it into the same backhanded blessing it ultimately was for me.

  In the spring of 1983, while my friends and I were putting together our next event, Norman was getting restless with his job at Pillsbury. He’d headed up a restructuring of Burger King, which was a lot of fun for him, but now the chain was firmly on course in its new direction, and he was dealing with the ongoing operations (read “lumbering bureaucracy”) and traveling 150,000 miles a year. He started looking around for something new, something challenging, and got into an interesting conversation with Larry Lavine, the founder of Chili’s, which at that time was just a small burger chain. Norman tried hard to steer Pillsbury toward acquiring it. He wanted to grow the chain by sharpening the concept and incentivizing managers with stock and profit sharing. He called me, as he always did on his way out of a board meeting, and I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  “They decided not to go for it.”

  “Oh, Norm, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, well,” he sighed. “Onward and upward. No use dwelling. I just can’t help feeling we’re missing a real opportunity.”

  “Norman …” I hated to tell him, but I had to. “He sold it to Saga. It was in the paper today.”

  Norman was not a cussing man, but he gritted his teeth and groaned.

  “Maybe you can salvage it,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly be a done deal yet. They’re undoubtedly still working it out. You could call Larry Lavine and … Norman, you could do the deal yourself, if you wanted to.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “Norm, you should do it. Call him right now. I’ll get everything ready for a meeting. Just bring him right here to the living room. No boardroom, just friends sitting around talking.”

  “It’s a risk.”

  “If it wasn’t a risk,” I said, “what fun would it be?”

  Fast-forward past all the horse trading; Norman ended up buying a large share of the company, with plans to take it public. He resigned from Pillsbury. I thought my father was going to have a stroke.

  “He did what?
Nancy, a marriage is a financial partnership. You’re jointly responsible for any …”

  “Daddy, calm down.”

  He pressed his palms together. “Help me understand. How did he finance this?”

  Truthfully, I was cloudy on the finances of the whole thing. All I knew was that Norman would do whatever it took to make it work, and I’d do whatever I could to help him.

  “Norman is brilliant,” I said. “I trust him. It’ll be a tremendous success.”

  “If something happens to him,” said Daddy, “you and I are in the restaurant business, and I don’t know anything about the restaurant business.”

  I waved that aside. “Daddy, relax. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Something promptly happened. My dad was no fool.

  Over the Fourth of July weekend, Norm was playing in a polo tournament at Willow Bend. Tuesday was to be the first day of the new era at Chili’s. All the managers were convening for a big meeting so Norm could set them on fire with his bold new strategy for the company. Saturday afternoon, tearing down the polo field, his horse’s leg got nicked by another player’s mount. The poor animal buckled and went down, hurling Norman out of the saddle and onto the hard ground. That night he lay in the hospital with broken ribs and a cracked pelvis.

  “I don’t have time for this,” he told me.

  “Tell me how I can help. Mom and Daddy are here, so Eric’s covered. What can I do?”

  “We need to gather the team together as planned. And I need to helm that. They need to see they can depend on me.”

  We decided to bring the mountain to Muhammad, as they say.

  Norman called Ducky-Bob’s party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable event, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili’s team jammed into Norman’s room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn’t want his people to see him lying down, so I’d helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.