My Sweet Audrina (Audrina 1)

He smiled, and for the first time, I realized that Arden wasn’t as upset about Papa’s dying as I thought he should be. He was the head of the household now, and he thought he didn’t need anyone else’s permission to do whatever he wanted.

Then Arden surprised me by getting up to say a few words, honoring Papa for building such a successful business and promising everyone that he would do his best to uphold, protect, and further develop what Papa had begun. The speech ended up being more of an assurance to our customers that he would keep the business successful than it was an homage to Papa.

When he was finished, he walked back to his seat beside me, his eyes searching my face for admiration and obedience, but instead, I turned away.

“You could put aside your grief for a moment and compliment me,” he whispered, “especially in front of these people. I am your husband, the head of the household, dedicated to protecting you and Sylvia. I deserve respect, more respect, now.”

“Today is Papa’s day,” I said. That was all I said, but it was enough.

He turned away and didn’t even hold my hand at the grave site. I had my arm around Sylvia, who finally began to realize what was happening.

“Audrina, we can’t leave Papa down there,” she said, when we were about to leave the cemetery.

The funeral service workers would fill the grave after we all left. It was far too painful for me, and for Sylvia, to watch that. It was meant to be symbolic when Arden had thrown the first shovelful onto Papa’s lowered coffin. It seemed to me he did it eagerly, even joyfully.

I could feel Sylvia’s body tighten. She whispered, “Nooooo,” but I tightened my arm around her and kept her from charging forward to stop him or anyone else from covering the coffin.

I practically had to drag her away and at one point looked to Arden for help, but he was too busy shaking hands with those who had come to the burial. The way he was behaving made it seem he was conducting another business meeting. I even heard him mention some investment to Jonathan Logan, one of Papa’s oldest clients, claiming that before he had died, Papa had told him to tell Jonathan about it.

More people came to our house than to the church or the cemetery. I understood from things I overheard that Arden had Mrs. Crown contact clients to give them the details of the funeral but also to make sure they knew that if the church service conflicted with something they’d rather do, they were more than welcome to come to the house. He was treating it more like a party. I knew that people needed to avoid excessive grief and needed hope more than depression, but the way Arden was organizing everything, I was almost expecting a band and dancing girls to show up.

Arden’s boisterous conversations and continuous laughter stung. The whole thing confused Sylvia, who sometimes looked as if she might attack someone for smiling. I thought it best to get her up to her room, telling her to change and then lie down.

“You don’t realize how tired you are,” I said.

She looked afraid to close her eyes, but eventually, she did and fell asleep quickly.

When I went downstairs, I was confronted again with loud laughter and conversation that had grown more raucous. More people had arrived. Arden had arranged for a bartender and two maids to serve hors d’oeuvres. I was determined to be polite, not festive. Many of the men greeted me with quick condolences, but thinking they had to, moved instantly to assure me that my husband was capable of carrying on.

“After all, he was trained by an expert,” Rolf Nestor, one of Papa’s high-net-worth clients, told me. “You can be very proud of him.”

Others said similar things to me, and when Arden, standing off to the side, overheard them, I could see his pleased, even arrogant glare. Eventually, too physically and emotionally drained to remain, I excused myself.

“Of course, darling Audrina,” Ard

en said, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You’ve done more than enough for any father to be proud of you. He died knowing you would be well cared for, and you will be,” he vowed.

I saw the way the women were looking at him admiringly, and the men were nodding. It was not too different from the way they would look at Papa when he was younger and more energetic. Ironically, Arden was becoming more like the man he had supposedly despised.

I said nothing. My heart was too heavy. When I went upstairs, I checked on Sylvia first. She was still dead asleep. Out of habit, and maybe because I wanted to convince myself that this was not all a terrible nightmare, I opened the door to my father’s bedroom and stood there so full of wishful thinking that I imagined him propped up with two of his oversize pillows, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, reading some economic charts or some company’s profit-and-loss statement. In his final years, although he was working less, he kept up the research and preparation to make sure that Arden made no significant blunders in his absence, the way he had in the beginning. In fact, now that I thought about it more, I could understand why he had wanted to keep Arden from galloping off with the company and thought that perhaps the stock division in my favor would make Arden more cautious. Papa always chose to be more conservative with other people’s money. He hated to be blamed for losses.

Of course, the room was dark, the bed was empty, and the cold reality rushed back at me. I did all that I could to keep from fainting and then made my way quickly to our bedroom, changed into my nightgown, and slipped under the covers. Despite my fatigue, I thought I was going to lie there for hours and hours, breaking into sobs and then just staring at the darkness.

Memories flowed freely around me. I could hear my mother playing the piano. I could see Papa’s look of admiration and love and also jealousy at the way other men looked at her, even when she was pregnant with Sylvia. I saw him reach for me so I would rush to him and sit on his lap when I was very little. We would both listen to Momma play. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aunt Ellsbeth standing in the doorway, holding Vera’s hand. Both looked envious, but for different reasons. Vera was always jealous of the love Papa showered on me, and Ellsbeth was simply jealous of her beautiful sister, who seemed to possess everything any woman would dream of having. She was always angry that Whitefern had been left principally to my mother and not to her.

They tried not to say unpleasant things directly to each other. I recalled how they pretended to be Aunt Mercy Marie and used their imitations of her at their special Tuesday “teatimes” to let loose all the venom toward each other that they usually held back. Aunt Mercy Marie’s picture was on the piano. She looked like a queen, wealthy, with diamonds hanging from her ears. Aunt Ellsbeth would hold the picture up in front of her and change her voice to say nasty things, and Momma would do the same. I was still unsure about what had eventually happened to my great-aunt after she had gone to Africa. The family thought it was possible she had been captured by heathens and eaten by cannibals.

It was all those conflicting memories that finally drove me to the end of exhaustion and pushed me into sleep, a sleep so deep that I didn’t hear Arden come up much later. What woke me was the stench of alcohol. He was being clumsy, too, and quite inconsiderate, banging into chairs, mumbling loudly, slamming a glass down on a shelf in the bathroom, and then practically falling into the bed so that my body bounced as if I were on a trampoline.

“Are you awake?” he asked. “Huh?”

I tried to pretend I somehow was not, but he nudged me. “What?” I grumbled at last.

“You heard them.”

“Heard who?”

“Our clients. You see how important it is that the business be completely under my control now,” he said, sounding sober. “We can’t give anyone the impression that we’re not as solid as ever. If they so much as suspected someone without real knowledge of today’s market was involved in their business, they’d leave us in droves. We have to talk about this, and you must do what I tell you.”