Page 76 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“He’s a prick,” Teddy moaned, leaning his head against the window. “I don’t feel good.”

“Then stick your head out the window,” I said. “I’m not paying to have the car detailed because you can’t hold your liquor.”

Grace leaned over and rolled Teddy’s window down for him. The icy spring air filled the car.

“It’s too cold,” Teddy whined, his words sloppy and running together.

“The cold air might do you good,” Grace said, rubbing Teddy’s knee. “Your dad did seem like he was being a little hard on him,” Grace said to me.

“Don’t let Teddy’s sad act fool you,” I said. “He deserved a lot more than a few harsh words.”

Teddy leaned toward Grace and put his head in her lap. His eyes drooped closed. Grace ran her fingers through his hair and hummed a gentle tune I couldn’t place.

I’d never envied my brother anything. But I envied him this.

Teddy mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“Something about a rosebush?” Grace said.

“It’s just like the rosebush,” Teddy said sloppily. After a few minutes, he went still and silent; I think he had fallen asleep.

“What does he mean about the rosebush?” Grace asked me quietly.

My eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. Then I looked away.

“When we were kids, my father told me to go cut down Eugenia’s prized rosebush,” I said. It was Eugenia’s favorite, the one that had won the Hartford Flower and Garden Show three years running. I remembered that day—how hot it was, sweat dripping into my eyes, and the way the thorns bit at my palms as I hacked at the base of the rosebush with the gardener’s shears.

“As I was cutting it down, I looked up, and there was Teddy,” I said, “running toward me, screaming at me to stop. I didn’t, of course—Father had given me a job to do, and I was going to do it. Anyway, we fought.”

I remembered that fight, the two of us rolling around in the dirt, answering a kick to the shin with a swift, hard punch to the gut.

“I cut the rosebush down, and that night at dinner, Teddy wasn’t allowed at the table.”

“Because of the fight?” Grace asked.

“No,” I said. “Because my father had told him to save the rosebush, and he’d failed.”

“I don’t understand,” Grace said. “I thought your father told you to cut it down.”

“He did,” I said. “He told me to cut it down and he told Teddy to save it.”

“But why?”

“I guess he wanted to see which one of us would prevail.”

“That’s cruel.”

I shrugged. I knew Teddy saw it that way, too, but I didn’t.

My great-grandfather had come to this country a penniless tailor. He’d saved his money and bought a factory in the Meatpacking District and built up a sizable fortune. My grandfather, the youngest of his six brothers, had outwitted his brothers to take their inheritance, and with it he had started the Calloway Group. My father had taken that company and built it into one of the largest real estate companies in New York City. He didn’t want Teddy and me to just sit on our asses and carry on what he had done; he wanted us to make more of what we were given, the way his father had, the way he had. To carve out our own legacies.

“Father’s a Darwinist,” I said. “He believes only the strongest survive and the rest will be wiped out.”

“And is that what you believe, too?” Grace asked.

I met her gaze in the rearview mirror again. When I was a child, I looked up to my father. I wanted to be exactly like him. He taught me to be selfish, to go after the things I wanted with a stubborn, unrelenting tenacity. That was the only way to win, to get ahead, to accomplish something close to what he had accomplished. I thought about all the things I’d sacrificed on the altar of that belief. Things I could never undo. Who was I—what was I—if I no longer believed in that?