One for the Money

“Orange juice?” she suggests. “Or how about a glass of milk?” We’re both going along with the morning routine, because it’s easier than arguing. There’s only one tough thing about mornings—

“I want coffee.”

“Mr. Hughes,” she says, soothing.

“No, make it a flat white. I need a pick-me-up to face the day.”

Even if it were morning, we wouldn’t give him coffee. And definitely not espresso. Caffeine makes him more querulous. We don’t even keep a Keurig in the house. If I want to drink coffee, I do it at the office so he doesn’t see.

I slide a plate with two pancakes toward him. “Extra syrup. The way you like it.”

He frowns down at the plate. Then he looks outside, where it’s shadowed. Like the dawn, I suppose, but there’s a heavier quality to it that speaks of evening in summer.

“What time is it, Phineas?” he demands, his eyes huge, sorrowful.

“It’s morning, Dad,” I say, handing him the syrup pitcher. It’s an antique piece from the eighteen hundreds, ceramic with a profusion of red and orange flowers hand-painted across. We once had a set of two. A memory comes to me—Dad throwing the other one. A crash of white ceramic and bold paint against the wall, right where the spaghetti Jennifer cooked remains.

“What do you have planned today?” I ask.

“A lot of meetings.” He sighs. “I swear some days are all meetings, and no work.”

He starts listing names, but they’re not anyone who works at the family company now. They’re not his business partners from the present. They’re all old business partners from twenty years ago, when he was a young man, just starting out. His first business partners.

Some of them are friends he has at the golf club.

“That sounds good, Dad. Real good.”

“I might sign a deal. Now that’s a good meeting, when you sign a deal. Ink on paper. Makes the world go round, son.”

This is the game that I play with my father. It’s the act we repeat over and over again. He tells me about a fictional life, and I pretend it’s real. One of his doctors told me to do that early on. I was trying to tell my dad the facts. Trying to make him understand.

The doctor took me aside and said, “Don’t. It’s stressful for you, and it’s stressful for him. Whatever he says, agree with it.”

I had been upset. “So I should pretend?”

“It’s not really pretending, because it’s real for him,” she said.

“Where are the properties?” I ask him now.

He proceeds to tell me about a new development near the Palisades, a small collection of private homes. “Not as lucrative as condos, of course. But they’ll keep the view clean.”

Dad cares about things like clean views. And clean air. It’s a form of noblesse oblige for him. Despite his rigorous work schedule and his social commitments, every few weekends we’d go down to Bear Mountain. We’d take a dusty Range Rover and fishing poles as props. These people depend on you, he’d say, gesturing to the families packed in the public parks. Even more than the politicians they vote for. It’s not only our employees who rely on Hughes Industries. The entire economy depends on what we do.

Then we’d return home to the billion-dollar Hughes estate.

“I have to check on a few things,” I tell him. “Will you be all right?”

“Of course.” He waves me off. “Go finish your homework.”

I was only eight years old when we’d have those talks, but he had to start early. Because that’s what the disease does. Even then it was eating away at his brain.

By the time I was sixteen I was running Hughes Industries.

I manage the empire my father’s father passed down to him.

And I do it well.

It’s not pride that makes me say that. There’s proof. There are profits and expanding companies. Mergers. Celebrations. Retirement parties in the conference room. It doesn’t really matter if I would have wanted something different. I’ve been groomed for this role since I was in preschool. Even then, my father knew what his fate would be.

He knew that he’d forget everything.

His knowledge of business. The company of friends. His wife. All of them, gone by the time he was thirty. Oh, he’s still the CEO publicly. He just works from home. I’m the one who goes into the office. I have access to both of our email addresses. I can forge his signature as well as mine. I bring him into the office every six months to shake hands and wave, as proof of life.

That same fate awaits me. Early onset dementia has run in the family for generations. Awareness of my downfall is never far from my mind.

Of course, I wasn’t only taught to run the business.

I was taught that I needed to marry and produce an heir. Someone who I could train from their toddler years to take over the Hughes empire. Our entire extended family depends on it. Tens of thousands of employees depend on it. The economy depends on it.