Handle With Care (Shacking Up 5)

“Thanks for going out of your way to come here.” We take a seat in a private corner of the restaurant, and embarrassingly enough the servers address me as Mr. Moorehead.

“This place is pretty swanky,” Hope observes. “You live here?”

“I’m staying at my cousin’s right now, but it’s in this building. They own it. The building, I mean. I’m planning to buy here soon, though. One of the penthouses is supposed to be available in a month or so.” I’m nervous and rambling.

“Pretty convenient to have restaurant right inside your building.”

We fall into a brief awkward silence, which is broken, thankfully, when the server brings us our drinks. I went with scotch and Hope ordered the same.

“You really look a lot like Dad.” She drops her head. “I mean, Fred. You look so much like him.”

“You called him Dad?”

She gives me a tentative smile. “Our relationship was unconventional, but he was very much my father, even if he wasn’t fully present in my life.”

“Can you tell me about him? About your version of him. I get the sense I didn’t really know him very well.”

She tips her head. “But you grew up with him.”

I fill her in on my childhood, on my father’s absence from the family, his long working hours, my years spent in boarding school, and then college out of state, and my job abroad until recently.

Hope’s expression turns sad. “I’m so sorry. I feel like this is my fault, like I took him away from you, and you never got to know all the really great parts of him. He was fun to be around. We went on a lot of trips together, mostly vacations to secluded cabins and places out of state where we wouldn’t be seen by a lot of people, I guess. As a kid, I didn’t understand why he never flew with me and my mom, but as I got older, it started to make more sense. I mean, as much sense as it could.”

It’s difficult to swallow past the lump in my throat. “You went on family vacations?”

She looks almost guilty as she nods. “Did you?”

“I skipped out on things like that. My brother, our brother”—I motion between us—“is an asshole and difficult to deal with.”

She spins her glass between her palms. “I’ve seen the stuff in the news. I wasn’t sure how much of that was real or fabricated to create drama.”

“He’s really that much of an asshole.”

She nods. “Dad seemed to worry about him a lot.”

“He talked about us with you?”

“Not when I was young, but when I was older and I understood better the dynamics of his relationship with my mother, he did. They seemed so in love with each other. It was hard to see my mother so upset every time he went back to you guys, and there was a lot of resentment on my part. But as I got older, we talked about it, how complex it was. He thought the world of you.”

“He said that?”

“He was so proud. I was jealous of you a lot.” She ducks her head, maybe embarrassed.

“I can understand that, from your point of view, anyway. There wasn’t much to be jealous of. There wasn’t any love between my parents, but I’m sure from the outside it looked a lot different.”

“He tried to be a good man and do the right thing. I think he was caught between two hard places with no way to make either work,” Hope says.

We talk until the restaurant closes and move to the bar. Hope runs a small not-for-profit organization that helps provide food and shelter for the local homeless. I tell her all about my sustainable community projects, which she already knew about from discussions with our father.

I discover we like the same sports teams and have similar taste in music. She and our dad even learned how to play guitar together. The more I talk to her, the more I realize the man I thought he was is not the version Hope had. It’s painful to realize I missed the opportunity to understand him, but at least I’m getting a chance to know my sister and a side of him I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

“Hey, I know this is probably a lot, but, uh, there’s some stuff in Fred”—I clear my throat—“Dad’s will that sort of involves you, and I figured I should tell you about it.” I’m on my third scotch, and Hope is on her second. I’m buzzed enough to think this is a good time for this conversation. After everything went down with Gwendolyn, G-mom and I hired a private lawyer to review the will and discovered an interesting clause that could change the entire division of assets.

“What kind of stuff?”

“So the shares in the company are allocated a bunch of ways. My g-mom”—at her confused expression, I elaborate—“our grandmother has twenty-five percent. My mother had ten percent, but I bought her out. You’ll love G-mom, by the way, she’s badass.”