by Boo Walker
Claire didn’t find him funny. “I’m not a random fan begging you to write my story.” More tears came, and she struggled to get her words out. “I’m asking you to preserve my husband’s legacy. And to get paid doing it.”
He sat back and crossed his arms. “You’re asking me to write another man’s story, to climb into someone else’s head. I’m sorry, Claire. If I’m able to finally tap into some creative energy, I’m going to put it into my own work. Not to finish what your husband started.”
Claire leaned toward him, sitting at the edge of her seat. Her ice water sat untouched on the brick wall next to her. “Will you please just read it? I’ll pay you.”
Though he was tempted—for the money and to get a bit closer to her—he knew agreeing to read it wouldn’t be right. He’d be leading this poor woman on. “If I agreed to read it, I’d still tell you no. And it would hurt you much worse. So no, I will not read it.” He sliced his hand through the air. “Not even for money. Writing is a very personal thing . . . at least for me. I can’t pick up where some random guy left off—no offense to your husband.”
Claire wiped her eyes and looked up with new resolve. “What if you haven’t been able to write because this story has been working its way to you? What if you telling me no right now is the same as spitting on your destiny?”
How could he possibly answer those questions? He wasn’t a ghostwriter, dammit. Who had enough creative juice to share it in the name of charity? Besides, what if he let her down? If this project were truly meant to be, he’d feel it more. It would be calling him. Right now, he just wanted Claire to take those composition books and leave.
With finality, he said, “I’m sorry, Claire. I think it’s a noble idea, and I hope you find someone. But it’s not me.” He stood. “Can I walk you to your car?”
Claire’s face had changed from hope and determination to anger. He could see that she wanted to say more, to perhaps even cut him down with harsh words. Something about being selfish. After she stood, she didn’t make eye contact with him again.
As the widow descended the steps of the porch, she said with her back to him, “Thanks for listening.”
He started to say something else and opened his mouth. The words—all lame and pointless—died on his tongue.
Chapter 6
FATHER AND SON
Though Claire hadn’t left his mind, and he felt terribly conflicted and even ripped apart by letting the young widow down, Whitaker’s impending meeting with his family dominated his inner dialogue. No more words were written that Sunday. All the typist had done was slay zombies and pass out on the sofa. An alarm woke him, and a headache set in as he realized it was time to get ready. He showered and shaved but kept the mustache. There was something rather artistic and rebellious about it that appealed to him, and he fit in wonderfully with the vibrant array of outcasts living in Gulfport.
Whitaker’s body was tensed to the point of pain as he drove his geriatric Land Rover toward his parents’ expensive waterfront property north of downtown. What could go wrong this time? The possibilities were endless. As a loose belt slapped the engine, he couldn’t help but marvel at the absurdity of life.
If it wasn’t he and his father bickering, one of his siblings would bring some drama to the table. Somehow the Grants had missed the memo that, during family get-togethers, it was best to avoid topics of a sensitive persuasion, such as politics, religion, or dietary preferences. Whitaker had witnessed a disaster several months ago when his sister, with her heavy-left-leaning beliefs, had preached to Jack until the arteries in his neck had nearly burst.
There was always one dedicated member of a family—one brave soul—who tried to hold everyone together. In the Grant family, that dubious charge was taken up by Whitaker’s mother, Sadie, the loyal and fearless Floridian matriarch, mother of three and wife to a pain in the ass. It was she who had intervened only seconds before Jack dropped to the floor from a heart attack.
Unlike a family tree sprouting branches, Whitaker’s take on the Grant genealogy was that the Grants worked their way through the generations like cracked glass spidering outward . . . until it one day would shatter.
Using the logic that the worst part about getting a shot from the doctor was the agonizing anticipation leading up to it, Whitaker cranked up a Miles Davis album and let the loud music take him away from the impending birthday party.
His thoughts forced him to miss his right turn, so he took Central Avenue instead. Always promising a spectacle, Central would be a more distracting drive anyway. As he’d described in Napalm Trees, the upper crust of St. Pete had been infiltrated by young blood that pushed hard against the conservative values that had built this city years ago, and the result was a beautiful mix—or mess, depending on who was talking—of Republican and Democrat, native and snowbird, young and old, straight, gay, brown, black, white, or whatever, all working together to make this city one with which to be reckoned. It was a city as receptive to impressive graffiti as it was to the next high-rise.
Due to the disproportionate number of retirees that had once filled the Sunshine City, people had called St. Pete “God’s Waiting Room.” With the surge of youth the city was experiencing, God would have to wait a lot longer than usual to collect his souls.
Whitaker drove by an army of construction workers assembling yet another expensive, LEED-certified building under one of the many cranes that hovered over the city. A giant white sign read: GRANT CONSTRUCTION. BUILDING ST. PETE FOR GENERATIONS. His father was indeed the third generation of Grant Construction, and unless his sister—a feminist attorney—decided to don a hard hat, their father would be the last. His brother had already gone down his own path.
With the family’s latest project in the rearview, Whitaker passed a glass-blowing studio where he’d once taken a date, a New Age center where he’d had his palms read, and a CBD store that he surely would have visited in his teens if it had been there. He then drove by a tattoo parlor where a seventeen-year-old, Emory-bound Whitaker had gotten his first and only tattoo—a quill pen in all black ink up high on his right arm—for no other reason than his father had forbidden him from doing so.
Below the tall, skinny palm trees that reached higher than many of the taller buildings—though not as high as the cranes—the happy citizens of St. Pete (some of them certainly as high as the cranes) moved along the sidewalks with great pride. Proud they lived down here and not in the Midwest or Northeast, both of which were currently suffering from winter blizzards. And proud because something special was happening here in St. Pete: the artists, the refugees of all kinds, the aura readers, the coffee shops, the breweries, the museums, the festivals, the cultural diversity. Whitaker knew exactly how they felt, because he shared the same feelings.
He wound his way through the intricate streets that led to the fingers of land sticking out into Tampa Bay, eventually reaching his parents’ house. The mansion was the exact monstrosity one might picture when wondering what type of home an extremely successful construction company owner might own. A six-thousand-square-foot beast on deep water with more bedrooms and bathrooms than some small colonies could put to use. Whitaker wasn’t opposed to money by any means, but sometimes seeing this house made him wince.
Since there wasn’t room at his brother’s house for a bouncy castle, Sadie had offered to host the birthday party here. Sure enough, a giant bouncy castle bubbling over with happy kids, like a popcorn machine popping corn, stood in the middle of the immaculate front lawn. Apparently, his mother had neglected to mention that the party was dinosaur themed. A banner hanging from the house read: LET’S HAVE A DINO-MITE PARTY! Several of the kids and even a few parents wore dinosaur tails. Someone had carved a watermelon into an impressive T. rex opening its mouth. Clusters of adults stood nearby, munching on catered finger foods and pounding rosé and cold beer and probably talking about the best private schools, or the stock market, or the next coach for the Bucs. Whitaker was already wondering where they’d h
idden the liquor.
He parked close by and grabbed his nephew’s present, which—for purposes of environmental concern and a lack of supplies—was wrapped in a Trader Joe’s paper bag turned inside out. Present under arm, Whitaker forced a smile and moved toward his family.
“Uncle Whitaker!” his five-year-old nephew screamed from the top of the bouncy castle.
Whitaker gave a big wave. “Happy birthday, old man!”
“What’s the present?”
“I’ll stick it on the pile. You’ll see soon enough.”
The typist worked his way through the crowd, saying hello to people he’d known most of his life. Four generations of Grants. No one had more cousins and uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. To his dismay, nearly all of them mentioned something about his writing career. After hugging and kissing and making small talk with half of them, he finally made it to his mother.
Sadie was not born a Grant, but to marry one was to cut your roots low and be replanted into dangerous Grant soil. He saw his mother as a brave yet aloof southern equestrienne riding the white flag of surrender into a bloodbath of familial dysfunction, the female Don Quixote of Florida.
Sadie was a doll. Born a doll and had always been a doll. A southern belle without the accent—at least without much of one. As southern belle as you can be growing up in Florida. For every native of Florida who had shucked an oyster, cracked open a boiled peanut, or polished off a bowl of grits, there was a snowbird’s child next to them saying, “What in the world are gator bites?” No, you couldn’t really be a southerner, not with all the northern and midwestern influence. But Sadie was a doll, as innocent as a flower, and everyone in St. Pete loved her. How could you not love someone who couldn’t stop smiling?
“I’m so glad you came,” she said loud enough to be heard over the kids screaming in the castle twenty feet away.
“Me too.” Whitaker kissed her cheek and detected the familiar hints of gardenia from the perfume she’d worn for as long as he could remember. He was careful not to mess up her hair, which she’d kept the same way for forty years, a sort of bulbous helmet hardened by hair spray. The only change over the years was from brown to gray. Whitaker appreciated that his mom had let her hair gray without hiding behind dye. This devil-may-care attitude carried over to much of her life. She wasn’t afraid to show her gray hair, and she damn sure wasn’t afraid to show the scars and weaknesses of her family. In her aloof, high-pitched tone, she would ask, “Why be ashamed of being human, Whitaker?”
If only that insouciance had rubbed off on him. If he looked back, maybe it had, but years of fighting an artist’s battles had made him start to overthink things and worry too much.
Doña Quixote looked down at the present in his hand. “Do I need to inspect it? No more fireworks, right? And you know Miles can’t have dairy.”
Whitaker sipped the beer someone had handed him. “No dairy. No gunpowder.” She didn’t say a word about anything sharp.
Sadie moved in and whispered into his ear. “Be nice to your father. He wants to talk to you about something.”
“What did I do now?”
“Nothing, honey. Just hear him out.”
What in the world could that mean? Whitaker wondered.
When he finally ran into his dad, Whitaker’s clenched teeth compromised his fake smile. He could feel the rest of his family watching this encounter, as if Whitaker were part of a bomb squad approaching a man in a suicide vest. Or was Whitaker the one in the vest?
Both men were known to fly off the handle. The last time they’d been together, Whitaker had unleashed a rant that had cut to the core of his father. Though he thought the man deserved his fair share of harsh words, even Whitaker knew he’d stepped over the line, and he’d even gone as far as apologizing the next day. Somewhere down there, deep into the sludge, his father was a good man. It was a lot of sludge, though. Epic quantities of thick, PTSD-riddled sludge.
Jack stood two inches shorter than Whitaker, but he always looked down on him. Even if Jack were four feet tall, he’d still look down on his son. Though he’d been as strapping as Whitaker in his early years, according to Sadie, Jack had aged rapidly after the war. He had lost most of his hair and walked with a slight limp from a helicopter crash in the Mekong Delta. The hardhead that he was, he refused to use a cane. When the army had shipped him home from Saigon with his broken leg, he’d also brought back an unknown stomach worm that ran his immune system into the ground and nearly killed him.
Though the man had some rough edges, he’d been a good father. Perhaps overly stern, but certainly better than many others out there.
Staff Sergeant Jack Grant reached up and tugged at Whitaker’s longish hair. His mane was by no means of ponytail length, but he’d let it go wild since the divorce. “I’d forgotten I had another daughter. Should I call you Whitney? You haven’t seen your brother, have you?”
“Off to a good start, aren’t you?” Whitaker said. “I’d forgotten where my humor came from.”
Jack adjusted his VIETNAM VET hat. “Just pulling your chain, son.” He offered a hand, and the men shook.
“Mom says you want to talk about something?”
Jack looked around and nodded. “Why don’t we talk on the boat?”
Before he could say no, Whitaker found himself following his limping father around the side of the house. The landscaping could have won awards. They entered the backyard through a white vinyl gate, passed the saltwater pool, and walked down the short dock to Jack’s pride and joy, a forty-one-foot Regulator sport fisher with four 425 engines hanging off the transom. Climbing aboard, Whitaker took a seat on the bow, and his father dug two cold beers out of the cooler.
He tossed one to Whitaker. “Finally got our first sailfish of the year yesterday.”
Catching the can, Whitaker said, “Nice.”
“She was a big one. Almost worth mounting. Pulled in a couple hog snappers too. It’s that time of year.”
Whitaker hated talking about fishing with his dad. Though he’d inherited his father’s sense of humor, he’d not acquired his father’s love of fishing. In fact, much to Jack’s disappointment, Whitaker was prone to seasickness and had only once dared to go deep-sea fishing with Jack. With his father’s Poseidon eyes on him, Whitaker had spent the majority of the day heaving over the rail.
Jack took a seat on the bow cushion across from Whitaker and cracked open his own beer. “I’ve been thinking.” He paused, waving at a stand-up paddleboarder cutting through the channel.
“That’s good to hear, Dad. I was worried you were going senile.”
“No, the hamster’s still spinning the wheel up there. At least for now.” Jack smiled, confirmation that somewhere deep within his father’s grim reaper shell was the slightest bit of light. What was funny and sad at the same time was that little light was what Whitaker wanted most in the world. To see that light, to feel a bit of love and approval from his father, was up there or even beyond the importance of writing another book.
They both watched a sailboat maneuver the narrow inlet and then Jack asked, “What would you think about coming to work for me?”
There it was. Forty years in the making. Between the grind of managing construction workers and the potential agony of working for Jack Grant, Whitaker and his other siblings had never taken to the idea.
Jack looked proud, like he’d just offered Whitaker a kidney. “I want one of you to take over this business, and I think you have what it takes. You’d have to learn a lot, and I’d make you work from the ground up. But I’d pay you well . . . and you’d take over the company one day. There’s a lot of money to be had.”
Whitaker considered the best way to say no. But he wasn’t very good at walking on eggshells. “I’d rather you sell the company and leave me some money.”
Jack shook his head. “Sorry, Whit. I don’t feel right giving you a bunch of money to sit around and keep pretending you’re writing.”
Ah, the sting of Jack Gran
t.
“I am writing, Dad. And I have a job too.”
“You and I both know that’s temporary. You were never cut out for the corporate world. And wait until the bear market comes. You might second-guess this new career.”
Whitaker couldn’t argue with him.
“Come work with me,” Jack said.
“Dad, I couldn’t build a birdhouse.”
“That’s fine. You’ll learn. You could finally put all those languages you learned to work. Well, Spanish, at least. Besides, when’s the last time you think I picked up a hammer? You’re good with people, and that’s what matters.” Jack adjusted his hat. “We’d need to clean you up some. Nothing a decent barber can’t fix.”
Whitaker appreciated the job offer, and it was kind of his father to come to his aid. But there was no way in hell he would join the family business. “The truth is that I’m writing again. I know I hit a dry spell, but I’m coming out of it. If I took a job with you, I’d be saying goodbye to writing forever.”
“Can I be honest back with you?”
“That’s one thing you always are.”
Jack nodded. “You’re a good writer, and I’m proud of you for what you’ve done. Even if you don’t write another book, you’ve done more than most writers alive. There’s something to be said for that. But there comes a point where you have to take life a bit more seriously. Time to start thinking about a new family again. Time to let go of these childhood dreams and . . . become an adult.”
“Don’t go there, Dad. Who says we all have to raise a family? I’m forty. I’m not sure that’s even in the cards anymore. Lisa was the one pushing me. Without her, I’m not sure I’m father material.”
“I think you’d be a great father, but fair enough. You don’t need to force it if you’re not interested. But behind every good man is a good woman.”