More Than Words(47)
Nina massaged her forehead. “I don’t know, Les,” she said. “I just feel like the whole world is changing and I don’t like it.”
They kept talking, and while nothing was worked out, nothing changed, it made Nina feel better knowing Leslie was there, listening, on the other end of the phone.
46
A few nights later, Nina was placing the water glasses on the table when the elevator door opened into her living room, revealing Tim.
Tim had gotten busy with work the last few days, so she’d spent her time looking at balance sheets on her own, calling the heads of the different departments, catching herself up on the business, starting with the most recent year’s results and working backward. She did call Irv, but just to get a rundown of the business from his perspective. She knew a lot just from growing up around the hotels, living with her dad, having conversations with Caro and TJ, all those classes at business school. But there was more to learn—more than she’d let herself believe. Now she was learning it. She was doing it for her father, while at the same time wondering if she’d ever really known him at all. She wasn’t sure if she’d found the thing he’d wanted to talk about, but she was discovering a lot about the company that made her question him even more. The marketing seemed like it was from a different decade. The decisions didn’t quite make sense. Was he really the brilliant businessman everyone made him out to be? And what about TJ? Where was he in all of this?
“Hey,” Tim said. “That smells delicious.” Nina smiled. For the last few hours she’d been cooking. Chicken sautéed with apples, onions, garlic, and thyme. She’d paired it with an autumn salad and a freshly baked loaf of bread.
There really was something rewarding about putting a meal together. About following a recipe, measuring ingredients, chopping and dicing, and then ending up with exactly what you’d planned. Nina never made up recipes as she went, adding this, switching out that. For her, the joy was in the rules and the result of following those rules to the letter. Today, though, she’d thrown some hot pepper flakes into the bread. She’d added some pomegranate seeds to the autumn salad. And was embarrassed by how satisfying it felt to see them there, nestled in with all the other ingredients.
Tim helped Nina bring the dishes of food to the table, then served her before he served himself.
“Thanks,” Nina said.
“Thank you,” he said. “For making me such a fantastic dinner. Though you’ve never put pomegranate seeds in salad before. New recipe?”
“Old recipe,” Nina said, “with new flair.”
Tim looked surprised but didn’t say anything more.
Nina picked up a forkful of salad, her mind still on the conversation she’d had with the head of marketing. Jeff had told her he’d been hoping to increase their social media presence and their ad buys in a handful of key markets, but his request had been denied. She wasn’t going to suggest any changes to TJ yet but wanted to know what each department would want, if they could have anything. Some of the items seemed easy to provide. But she knew that nothing in business was ever as simple as it seemed at first glance. Changing the soap in the bathrooms, for example, meant negotiating a whole new partnership, perhaps new costs. Research into that company to make sure they weren’t using child labor to make their soap into the shape of hearts or donating to lobbyists who were working to deregulate waste management. And even as she was trying to think about that, in the back of her mind she kept seeing her father, cheating on her mother. Indirectly causing her death. She couldn’t get it out of her head.
“So how was your day?” Tim asked.
Nina shrugged. “Busy. Interesting. Vaguely destabilizing.”
“Destabilizing how?” Tim asked, getting up and taking a bottle of Cabernet out of Nina’s wine rack.
“I guess . . . I don’t know,” Nina said, trying to get her feelings to cohere into sentences. “I realized today that there are business decisions my dad made that I might’ve made differently. And when things like that happened in the past, especially when it had to do with the company, I’d just assumed he was right and I was looking at things the wrong way. But I think . . . I think there are some things he could have done better. And I’m not sure why he didn’t see that. I would have expected him to.” Nina took a sip of the wine Tim had poured her.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Tim said. “But your dad was great. He took what his father started and made it even more successful. Do you know how many people in your father’s position would’ve just coasted on what already existed—or even worse, run it into the ground? You see it all the time.”
Nina took another sip, letting the flavor settle on her tongue. “That might be true,” she said. “But it’s about more than his business success. It’s what we found out up in the country, too. And now I feel like—I was anchoring myself, my life, to a rock that wasn’t as solid as I thought it was.”
That was really what had been bothering her most. Her father wasn’t the man she’d thought he was. She had created a version of him that, in this moment, felt imaginary. Like the Great and Powerful Oz. Or the Emperor without any clothes. And not only had the “real” Joseph Gregory, the one who was so much more flawed than she ever knew, been hidden from her, but now she’d never have the chance to know him.