All We Ever Wanted(53)

“Okay,” he said with a shrug.

“Your father and I have had some differences lately, but we need to be a united front. Especially when it comes to you.”

   Finch glanced at me knowingly, then nodded, as if he, too, had noticed the sea change in our home and marriage—which seemed to have begun when Kirk sold his business.

I thought about that time now. At first, the three of us were thrilled—giddy. But things quickly turned tense, even ugly, during the winding-down period, which included parting ways with his top executive, Chuck Wilder. Chuck had no real piece of the business, as Kirk had put up all the capital and had one hundred percent ownership, but Chuck put in a lot of sweat equity over the years, giving up more lucrative jobs because he believed so much in Kirk’s vision. I think he’d also had an expectation of being included in the massive payout, and in my view, it wasn’t an unwarranted one.

But Kirk flatly refused, even after Chuck’s wife, Donna, showed up on our doorstep, confiding that she was extremely worried about her husband’s “mental state.”

“It’s not personal,” Kirk had said. “It’s just business.”

“But it is personal,” Donna had said. “Y’all are friends.”

“I know we’re friends, Donna. But I have to separate that from my business decisions,” Kirk had replied calmly and coldly.

I remember feeling shocked, but also not. It was in keeping with Kirk’s attitudes toward tips. He was perfectly capable of leaving a paltry amount, and in extreme cases nothing, if he deemed the service bad. And effort didn’t count; ineptitude was ineptitude. In any event, Donna, just like a waitress or two along the way, ended up in tears. Kirk was unyielding.

In the hours and days that followed, I had searched for signs of remorse, but Kirk’s only reaction was indignation. How dare Chuck put Donna up to this shameless attempt at manipulation? He’d paid Chuck a great salary for years and owed him nothing further.

   “But we made so much money,” I remember saying. “Why can’t we just throw him a bone? A hundred thousand dollars or something?”

“Hell, no. Why would I do that? That’s not the way things work. It was my capital.”

His use of the word my instead of our made me uneasy, as I’d noticed that the more money Kirk made, the more likely he was to call it his. But I also remember telling myself that it really didn’t matter. Because he always had the best interests of Finch and me at heart.

I compared our current situation to that one, and at first blush, they felt similar. Our family was still first.

But as Finch stopped at another traffic light, I thought of a rather significant difference. With Chuck, Kirk had operated under a completely rational set of rules. Fair was fair. Rules were rules. But those same reasoned principles went out the window when they conflicted with Kirk’s best interest. Suddenly things weren’t so clear-cut; his black-and-white world had turned gray. In Kirk’s mind, Finch was a “good kid” who had saved up enough points to be given some leeway. He had essentially earned one free pass—or more precisely, a fifteen-thousand-dollar pass.

“So what time is Dad coming home?” Finch asked now, clearly thinking about Kirk, too.

“Sometime this afternoon,” I said, pulling my phone out of my purse to check the flight information, just as a text came in from him that read: Hey, do we have anything on the calendar tonight?

No. Why? I wrote back.

   Thinking about staying another night. Getting a migraine and just want to lie down. Will take an early flight tomorrow.

Okay. Feel better, I wrote back, relieved that I could put off our conversation about Tom and the money a little longer. I gave Finch the update on his father’s return, and he just nodded.

“Does Dad know you and Polly broke up?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think I mentioned it.”

“Have you talked to her?

“Not much….She’s nuts, Mom.”

I felt myself tense up, having long noticed that this was something men (and boys, obviously) did after any breakup. Dub their exes “crazy.” Discredit them, make it seem as if the men were lucky to have gotten out of the relationship. In fact, Julie had once told me it was the most common narrative in the aftermath of a divorce—the justification men used for their own misconduct. A form of misogyny.

“Don’t say that, Finch,” I said.

“Sorry, Mom. But there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know….She really can be a bitch—”

“Finch!” I said. “Don’t ever call girls names like that. It’s so incredibly demeaning.” I wanted to add, Have you learned nothing from all of this?—but I stopped myself. It was the most we’d talked in such a long time, and I didn’t want it to end on a sour note.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said again as he turned onto our street. “I just lost a lot of respect for her recently. Ya know?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I know how that can be.”



* * *



—

A SHORT TIME after we arrived home, Finch found me in my office.

“Hey, Mom? What do you think of me going out tonight? There’s a pop-up show at Twelfth and Porter,” he said. “Luke Bryan’s playing. I know I’m grounded—but after that conversation with Lyla and all the drama with Polly, I could really use a night out. Please, Mom?”