by Hazel Parker
“It would ruin so much!” my mother yelled.
I bit my lip. I was not nearly as volcanic as yesterday, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a lot of anger and tension that needed release. It just meant it would come out in a more scathing manner.
“You came from a family of lies and secrets,” I sneered. “And you hated it. You hated that your father pushed you away and thought he could buy you and your mother’s silence. And now look at you. You’re just perpetuating the trend. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
“Brad!” my mother said, on the verge of tears.
But her refusal to accept this was making this supposedly dormant anger boil to the surface again.
“No! Don’t tell me off like this. You lied to Dad your entire marriage. You probably would have kept lying to me if you hadn’t blurted out everything last night! And now I know something Eddie went to his grave not knowing? How fucking disrespectful is that?”
My mother’s lack of response said it all.
“For someone who got burned so badly by being a family secret, you sure do seem to like keeping them. All this fucking time!”
“Brad!”
But I’d said my bit, and if I stayed any longer, the rest of this complex was going to have a very painful and awkward Saturday morning. I stormed out of the room, slammed the door shut behind me, and kept walking, ignoring my mother’s painful cries for me to return. I sure didn’t want to hear her bawling her eyes out, but I also had had enough of family secrets.
I pulled out my phone. Uncle Gio’s name popped up from the most recent dials. Wait, correction. Daddy Gio’s name popped up.
What a fucking ugly sound to it.
He was as responsible for this shit as my mother. I dialed his number, fully aware that at this hour, he probably was asleep. Tough shit. I’d had my fair share of rude awakenings over the last dozen or so hours. It was time for Gio to have a literal one of his own.
He didn’t answer on the first call, but I wasn’t willing to give up so easily on that. I called him a second time. Again, it was ignored. I called him a third time. This time, he finally picked up the damn phone.
“Brad, this better be an emergency—”
“Hi, Dad.”
The line went silent. Gio sighed.
“Your mother told you?”
“Only by a fucking miracle,” I said. “I spent all night hoping it wasn’t true, and I went over this morning to hear otherwise. But no, now I just learn that my father has no blood relation to me and my uncle is actually my father. Care the fuck to explain that one?”
“Fuck, Brad, it’s so early—”
“Do not try and wiggle yourself out of this one, Gio,” I growled. “This isn’t a backdoor deal where you can handshake your way out of some shit. You need to explain to me why the fuck this happened.”
Gio sighed.
“All right. Give me a minute.”
I did. I’d give him an hour if I had to. I wasn’t going to let him off the phone until he gave me an answer. And if he hung up, I was on the first flight out to Las Vegas to confront him in person. Nothing was going to fucking stop me now.
Fortunately, just a minute or two later of background coffee making, I heard him come back to the phone.
“All right, kid,” he said, sounding as kind and gentle as I’d ever heard him in my life. “I don’t know what your mother told you, so I’m just going to tell you my side of the story. I was visiting Eddie in New York when we went out one night. We got separated, and I met your mother. We hit it off. I didn’t think anything of it. I went back to the city and learned a month later that my brother was dating a beautiful woman. Back then, there was no internet or mobile pictures, but I had a small suspicion by the way he described her it might have been the same woman. But hey, the city’s a big place; there’s bound to be plenty of women that look like her.”
He took what sounded like a sip of his coffee.
“Maybe a week later, your mother calls me. Says she’s pregnant and she knows it’s mine. She also knows that the guy she’s dating now is my brother. Here’s the thing about Eddie, Brad. Eddie has a big, big heart. But he’d also gotten burned so many times in the past by our father, who was a ruthless businessman and entity in Vegas. Our father took no shit and gave no emotion. Me? I followed in his footsteps. Eddie? He felt unloved. And it showed.”
The things I never knew about my father…
What other fucked-up secrets are going to come out now?
“When this happened, I thought about all the times that your father had gotten screwed over by being too nice,” he said. “How he’d get himself in good spots and get fucked over by people who didn’t have his happiness at heart. I knew that if he found out I’d gotten your mother pregnant, it would shatter him. He’d pick up the pieces, sure, but it would just be another loss in his life. He deserved to have some wins. And so…we lied by omission. Your mother and I decided to not say a word.”
I bit my lip. I’d always seen my father as a hard-nosed businessman at Nimico Waste Services, but perhaps that was just a function of him trying to be like his father, to impress him somehow. I was no fucking psychologist, but it was no secret that boys tried to be like their fathers.
Maybe that lie had propelled my father to become the businessman he was and to elevate the company from a local establishment into one of the biggest of its kind in the Northeast.
“Fuck it, fine,” I said. “But that still doesn’t answer one question. My father died years ago, Gio. This didn’t happen last week. Why did no one bother to sit me down and tell the truth?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that, Brad,” he said.
God fucking dammit.
“We’d been telling you the story that Eddie was your biological father for so long that we just didn’t think anything of it.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought something of it.”
“Watch it, Brad,” Gio snapped. “I told you to treat your mother well. Did you give her this kind of attitude too?”
“This kind of attitude?” I said.
I’d maintained control for so long on this call, much longer than I would have anticipated. It wasn’t just fading away; it had snapped.
“I was lied to for my entire fucking life!” I said. “OK, fine, I get it. At first, it was for Eddie and not for me. But you don’t think I can handle my shit? You don’t think I would have liked to have known?”
“Brad—”
“No, shut the fuck up, Gio. You fucking lied to me. You’ve been fucking lying for a decade now.”
“Brad!”
“I’ll take a fucking apology at some point, but right now, you can kiss my ass, Gio. You and my mom are just repeating the ugly fucking cycle, and maybe I just need to break away from it entirely!”
I hung up on him as he was continuing to yell at me to calm down. Why the fuck would I do that? How the fuck would anyone react upon finding out their parents weren’t actually their parents?
God, how I wanted to just vent and have someone to talk to, someone to explain how fucked up of a situation this was.
Of course…there was one person I could speak to. There was one person that I knew I could lay out everything, and they’d understand. There was just one problem.
I’d pushed Megan so far away, I couldn’t even see her anymore.
I’d fucked up big time with her. If I didn’t know any better, I almost would have assumed that I’d continued this ugly cycle of keeping loved ones away without even realizing it. I thought about texting her right there, but I was honestly a little worried about how she’d respond. And I would deserve every last bit of it.
At least we were still married and I hadn’t asked Ricci to send the annulment papers. I was not going to do that until I knew one hundred percent what the best route was, no matter what the women in my family said. I was going to reach out to Megan…
At the appropriate time.
When I sort my thoughts out.
<
br /> Because right now, the only thing I want to sort through is who I’m going to murder first.
Chapter 20: Megan
It was now Monday morning, and it was the moment that I’d dreaded all weekend long.
The CFO of the company had asked me to do a town hall to discuss everything that would happen now, and while I never feared public speaking, I’d never had to give a public presentation before about the death of a family member. The stakes of that were just a smidge higher than normal.
All weekend long, I thought about calling Brad and just asking him to come over. In an ideal world, at least up through my father’s funeral, we could put aside whatever weird bullshit had come over us since our return to New York and he could console me. Too bad we didn’t live in an ideal world.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
I got to the office, and once again, the secretary just nodded to me, letting me pass without any trouble. I still had another hour to go before the town hall, but already, I could feel the eyes of all the white-collar employees on me. The curious looks—the judgmental looks too—they all seemed to follow me wherever I went.
I could practically hear their thoughts. Here’s the daughter of the CEO. We’re screwed. She didn’t even graduate college.
I fought the urge to say something right there and rode the elevator to the top floor. Waiting for me by my office was the firm’s CFO, Roger Thatcher. Roger had known my father for years now, and it worked in my favor that he was near retirement age. The last thing I needed was a hot-shot young stud who was bitter and angry that nepotism had worked its flavor.
“Are you ready today?” he asked.
“Is it even possible?” I said, unlocking the office with my key—feeling like I was barging in on my father without warning.
“You’ve got no choice but to,” he said, though he said it in the most sympathetic manner possible. “Believe me, we’re all understanding of the current situation. But you’ve got to give them reason to believe that things will go back to normal in the near future. Fake it if you have to. Not just for them, but for yourself.”
I nodded dismissively, but as the words hung in the air, I couldn’t help but see the value in them. And I wasn’t referring only to the job at hand.
* * *
An hour later, I stood in a large conference room with about three dozen other employees, with everyone ranging from the executive team to analysts to IT people and everything in between. The only employees not here were the actual garbage collectors, but I would address them later.
“I suppose the best way to handle this speech is with honesty,” I said.
Which seems to be a rare commodity these days. Say you like someone, ghost them. Say you want to make this last…
“I know that I do not have the experience that my father had. I know that I am young. But what I do know is that I have a set of skills that I believe will make us viable and successful. I will listen to you. I will heed your advice. I know what I do well, but there are lots of things I don’t know how to do well, but I am willing to learn.”
As if to make the point, I called out individual people by name, people whom I’d gotten to know well over the years, and showed skills that they had. I figured that highlighting other people’s accomplishments would garner some goodwill, maybe even take attention off of myself.
And in doing so, maybe I could just be a bit humble and accept I didn’t have control over everything.
“For right now, we will remain status quo as far as new projects and current plans go,” I said. “The next three months were supposed to be a transition period where my father showed me the nuts and bolts of the job. Obviously, that will no longer happen, but I can still treat these next three months as a chance to learn all that I can from him. So if you have anything that you’re doing right now that you fear might be cut, don’t worry about it coming from me.”
I thought that seemed to ease a lot of the fears and concerns in the room. Shoulders relaxed a bit, a few smiles came, and most of the audience nodded their head in approval at some point. Even I smiled just a bit. It wasn’t much, but compared to a weekend of puffy eyes, red noses, and tissues all over the ground, it was a major victory.
After the town hall ended, a few people applauded me. It wasn’t much, it was certainly no standing ovation, but I had done what CFO Thatcher had suggested I do. I gave people reason to believe that things would return to normal.
So now the question was, could I do the same?
I headed back to my office and got to the front door when the secretary who had served my father, who now worked for me, ran up to me.
“This came for you this morning.”
“Mail already?”
“Seems like a rush delivery.”
I looked down. It said it was from “Ricci Family Litigation.” Oh, fuck…
I went back inside the office and locked it from the inside. For once, though, I wished I didn’t have such an enormous office. It felt like I was in a cavern of bad news, rather than just in a much smaller space where I had much greater control over what happened. I looked at the envelope and saw the return address was to a Las Vegas address. As if the signs couldn’t get any worse.
But, nevertheless, I opened it. And sure enough, it was the annulment papers.
I collapsed onto the desk and buried my head in my hands. At this point, it really just felt like salt on the wound. First, confusion. Then, silence. Then, tragedy. And now, the final twist of the knife, the one that went from a painful injury to death.
A part of me felt like I was going to cry, but I really didn’t have any tears left to shed. I’d spent them all on my father. I was just so over this whole fuck-up of a situation. I would have really killed to have the last ten days completely erased from history and from my memory, to make it as if this had never fucking happened. Was that too much to ask?
I recovered just enough to take a closer look at the papers. It looked like the order had not been requested by Brad Nimico, but a woman named Laura Russo. For the briefest of moments, I wondered if it was a horribly coincidental mistake. But then I kept reading, and I could see my name appear multiple times. Someone in Brad’s family pulled the trigger for him.
So he’s too much of a fucking coward to even break up with me to my face.
It was a good thing I had no tears left, because I would have looked utterly ridiculous going from intense crying to intense rage like I was right now. My hands were shaking, and I felt so angry I was sure my blood pressure was off the charts. The man that prided himself on being a badass, a free speaker, the CEO of a major company, couldn’t even have the fucking balls to request the annulment papers himself.
What a fucking joke. What a fucking pile of shit. What a fucking lie.
I crumpled the papers up and tossed them as far away as I could. I understood it didn’t eradicate the legal proceedings, but I didn’t care. I just…I just…
I needed to move forward and stop letting the Brad situation affect me so much.
Jesus, just thinking that brought a huge weight from my shoulders that I didn’t think I could lift off so easily. I suddenly felt fifty pounds lighter, as if I’d stumbled in the dark for ten days looking for the right answer, and only now, only in one of my greatest moments of grief, had I found it.
Just let Brad go.
I could only control what I could control. If he was going to be a dick, it would hurt, but I couldn’t control him. I had to let go.
“You got this, Megan.”
It was a bit of empty bravado, sure. But I thought about what Roger had said. Fake it if I had to. Do whatever it took to get back to the present.
I went to my phone and downloaded Tinder and Bumble. There was no law, after all, mandating that I couldn’t be on those apps if I had a wedding ring on my finger. Which reminded me…
I looked at that ring and put my thumb and index finger from my other hand on it. But just as I moved to yank it, I paused. I knew some people remov
ed it regularly for working out and such, but this…my father had never taken his off, even after my mother died. If I took this off, it felt as final as my father’s death.
But was I going to say I was going to move forward, or was I going to actually move forward?
I…
I left it on.
For now.
I could take it off later when I went on a date with someone else. It just didn’t feel right at the moment. Hey, I was married still, and until that annulment went through, wouldn’t it be disingenuous to act like something I was not?
You know the truth, Megan.
I sighed. Faking it was so much easier said than done.
Chapter 21: Brad
A couple feet away from me, my phone was ringing off the hook, as it had been now for several minutes. I had ignored all the calls, instructing my secretary to say I would not be available until later that afternoon. It didn’t happen very often where I had something from my family life interfering with my work life, but here it was.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. This whole drama with Mom…with Megan…with Uncle Gio…
Some fucking trip in Vegas. All because I got black-out drunk one night. All because I finally decided to take what was mine.
The whole “center myself” bullshit lasted for about five seconds before I knew I couldn’t keep acting like this. I had a fucking company to run. I tuned out problems of the world and instead went back to reading financial reports and new pitches from our R&D department about ways to improve our company.
And then a knock came at the door. It was our CTO, a guy named Henry Ibanez. Henry had worked in California for years in the tech industry. A younger guy with hair much grayer than his age would suggest, Henry wasn’t the most attuned to how office politics or unwritten rules worked—for example, not fucking knocking on my door when it was shut—but in general, he was an acceptable guy.
“Yeah,” I said gruffly.
“Hey boss, some of the people in the office were wondering if you were going to the funeral this week? The day shifts will need to take a few hours off to attend.”