I turned in my chair and looked out my office window. The nice thing about being on the thirtieth floor was the expansive view of the city. There were certainly worse nights a man could have than one where he ate a nice slice of pie while being able to watch the glorious lights of an evening in Nashville.
A weathered but still lovely woman sat across from me, watching for my reaction—my dear mother.
“How does it taste, Logan?” she asked, an expectant look on her face.
I hesitated for a moment and then swallowed a forkful of her cherry pie. Okay, maybe not such a nice slice of pie. Too tart, not that I’d ever tell my mother that. There were some things a good son just did not do, and that included insulting his mother’s cooking, even if it wasn’t good.
She’d taken up baking after my father died as a way of coping. She’d been terrible at first, though she’d improved a lot in the last few months. My mother did fine in a kitchen normally, even without her cook’s help, but she’d not been into baking before, especially sweet things, if only because of my father’s diabetes.
Then, a heart attack took him, and it was almost like her way of dealing with remembering him, baking things that he wouldn’t have been able to eat a lot of. Weird, I guess, but it made her happy.
“Tastes great, Mother,” I lied.
Munching down on the pie, I eyed my mother as she sat in a chair across from my huge glass desk, her hands folded in her lap and a smile on her face. I couldn’t help but be suspicious. She almost never came to my office. At least, she hadn’t much since my father died.
That didn’t bother me. I ran a financial management company, and our offices were far away from her home. She told me after my father’s funeral that she didn’t like coming to offices anymore. Even though he was in health-care services and not financial management, the office environment reminded her too much of him.
So that only raised the question of what brought her to my office a little after dinner in the middle of the week. Not exactly prim
e family time. I had more than a few theories in that regard, but it’d be rude to broach the subject until my mother brought it up.
“Logan, you work too hard,” she said. “It makes me worry about you.”
I finished my pie, put the plate down on my desk, and shrugged. “You don’t become successful by not working hard. This is my first year on Forbes’ billionaire list. You and Dad didn’t raise me to be lazy.”
“I’m not saying I want a lazy son.” She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
I let myself chuckle. I did know, but I’d make her say it. “Oh? What do you mean, Mother?”
“You’re thirty-nine years old, Logan.” She gestured with her hands as to suggest the implications were obvious. “You’ll be forty in not too long.”
“Last time I checked. But that’s not exactly old.” I folded my hands in front of me on my desk and smirked. Just because I loved my mother, it didn’t mean I couldn’t take a little joy from ribbing her.
“You really don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Maybe.”
My mother narrowed her eyes, likely sensing I was messing with her. “Your father married me when he was twenty-five.”
A light chuckle left my mouth. “And you’re worried that I’m not married?”
My mother nodded. “I’m worried that you’ll never get married at this point. You barely even date anymore. I don’t think I’ve met a woman you’ve been dating for at least a year.”
“Well, most of my relationships haven’t gotten that far. No reason to waste your time with a woman I’m not interested in a long-term future with.”
“But a man needs a wife to help him see many things about the world, to civilize him.”
I shot her a mock glare. “You don’t think I’m civilized? What does that say about how I was raised?”
“Don’t try to joke your way out of this. This is a serious matter.”
“Oh, yes, life and death.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I think I want grandchildren before I die, and that’ll require you to have a wife, Logan. You don’t even have a girlfriend right now.”
I didn’t say anything to that. We had this discussion every few weeks. It’d only stopped for a couple months because my father died.
I leaned back in my chair. “Mother, you have to understand my situation.”