Page 98 of Try Me
“I look like a dwarf next to you. Trust me when I say you’re not the ideal wingman when one’s huntingmanthers.I’d be better off—”His eyes went wide. “Hold on.Hold. On.What do we have here? Well dressed, definitely under sixty-five. Nothing in his teeth and not wearing loafers or Dockers. I might be hallucinating.”
I twisted a look over my shoulder and lifted my hand to John as he approached, then turned back to Jesse. “I worked with John this summer, want me to introduce you? He’s awesome.”
“Fuck yes,” Jesse said in an awestruck whisper.
While I was making introductions, I caught sight of my dad crossing the lawn toward his office. I offered my chair to John and excused myself. Chet winked at me and smacked my ass lightly as I passed.
When I stepped into my dad’s study, his back was to me. He had his old, overstuffed rolodex out, slotting a card inside. He’d had the thing since I was a baby. It was literally one of my first memories: twisting the wheel around and around on the floor of his office, listening to the fan of paperboard. I remembered thinking it was a hamster wheel and asking him where the hamster was, once. He’d told me that it was a wheel of fortune. I hadn’t gotten the joke at the time, obviously. Nor had I gotten a hamster.
He’d joined the modern age and kept contacts in his phone, but he still collected cards.
“I’m surprised that there’s anything left to put in there. I figured you’d have the whole city by now.”
His shoulders tensed, and he ran a finger over the edge of the card before pushing the rolodex back to the corner of his desk where it lived. When he turned to face me, his expression was stormy and foreboding.
“So I was putting away files the other day—did you know Preston, Beasley, and Waring still keep paper copies of everything? They’ll have to move to warehouse storage soon, the file room is getting so cramped. But yeah, it’s a treasure trove.” I soldiered on before he could reply. “Jemison versus Farrow Capital. Sound familiar?”
My father didn’t pale. He didn’t give signals like that. His tell was in the way his face remained absolutely neutral.
“It explains a lot about your friendship with Mr. Waring, him handling the case and all.”
“There was no case.”
“I know. You settled out of court. An undisclosed sum to a Finley Jemison, who accused you of wrongful termination. I sat in the file room for two hours reading through the documents. He didn’t have a case that I could see, judging by Farrow Capital’s bylaws. But you still settled with him anyway—and I’m going to assume the settlement was quite large—then had him sign a nondisclosure agreement along with everyone else involved.” My dad kept quiet because he was actually smart. Very smart. “You wouldn’t have settled out of court unless youreallyneeded him to be quiet, though. I couldn’t figure it out. I puzzled over it for days. Then I remembered who Mr. Jemison was. You didn’t keep him on as an accountant for long, did you? We had a really good year that year. You surprised mom with that huge garden renovation and remodel, and I remember thinkingwowat the time, because the year before, you’d been so stressed.” My dad folded his arms over his chest, and I knew I had him. “What were you doing? Front-running stock orders?” It was my best guess, a simple but effective method where a broker bought shares for his own account ahead of placing the customer’s order, thereby driving up the price of the stock and generating a quick profit. It would explain a whole fucking lot about that year. It was also just as illegal as cooking the books. “I’m betting that’s what Jemison had on you.“
My dad ran a hand over his forehead and back through the elegant sweep of his hair. “I couldn’t continue with it. It was a single year. I stopped after that.”
“Why?”
“Combination of fear, ethics, and the likelihood that I’d get caught. The cost-benefit ratio wasn’t favorable. Your mother would’ve divorced me. And you…you’d have probably looked at me the way you are right now. It wasn’t worth it in the end.”
“And you don’t think any of that makes you a giant fucking hypocrite?”
He sighed. “Adulthood always involves some level of hypocrisy, son, it just depends on where we choose to exercise it. Do as I say, not as I do—isn’t that the old adage? Not all hypocrisy is driven by good intentions, but some is, especially as a parent.” He locked eyes with me. “My intentions for you have always been good.”
“I understand, I think,” I said, and his brows went up, genuine surprise filtering through the firm lines on his face. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen it on him before.
“You do?”
“I understand the hypocrisy thing, yeah.” I nodded. “I told myself I’d never use any of your tactics, never do anything that I thought you would do to gain the upper hand. But I’m about to, and you’re right, I can live with it. Because my intentions are also good.” I glanced out the open door to the table where Chet and my friends were laughing together. I rested my hand lightly atop the rolodex, felt the hard paper edges of the cards against my fingertips. Somewhere along the way my dad, like Alan Pynchon, had gotten confused about what real fortune was. It wasn’t made or broken by names in a rolodex. Chet was living proof of that. In a way, it made me sad for my father. But not enough to keep me from finishing what I’d started. “If you ever make anything remotely close to a threat against Chet again, if you interfere with his attempts to get into law school, if you try to have him arrested on some bullshit charge for selling weed in the past, if you in any way involve him in any trial that would negatively affect his career, if you so much as fuckingexhalein a manner that negatively affects him, I will call the papers myself, send them everything I’ve got, tell them everything I know, and answer every single question they ask. I will dedicate the same level of effort I’ve poured into trying to make you proud of me over the years toward taking down the thing you love most so you’ll remember how it feels. Because Chet Pynchon is the one thing I love most, and that’s not changing.”
My chest buzzed with nervous energy, and I had to ball my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, but I made it through the whole thing without my voice wavering even once.
My father didn’t speak for a long time. And while he didn’t look particularly shocked, or even troubled by anything I’d said, a deep furrow appeared between his brows that he rubbed at slowly, speculatively before finally nodding with resignation. “Understood. You think you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t,” I admitted, “not with a lot of my life, at least, so I’m working on figuring that out this coming year. Whether you and Mom choose to support me through that is up to you. I don’t expect it. I don’t think I even need it. You did it yourself. Chet did, too. So can I. But I amabsolutelycertain about Chet.”
Dad closed his eyes briefly and touched the mahogany top of his desk like he needed an anchor.
“Mom told me about how you met. How you took care of each other, supported each other. How her parents said essentially the same thing you’ve been saying to me. What if she’d listened?”
His gaze shifted to the gallery wall my mom had made for him on Father’s Day after my freshman year of college. In the center was a photograph of the three of us, professionally shot by some photographer my mom had hired. It was a candid taken between the staged shots, and it’d always been her favorite because of that. I was staring at something off camera with a lopsided smile on my face. My mom had her head thrown back, eyes closed, captured in the middle of laughing, and my dad was looking sideways at her, mouth open in the middle of saying something. The adoration in his gaze was evident.
I wasn’t expecting some miracle of acceptance at that moment, or for my little speech to somehow make him see the light and we’d walk back outside and he’d embrace Chet with open arms.
That wasn’t the kind of man my dad was.
But I didn’t miss the shift in his expression that formed deep wrinkles in his forehead and softened the corners of his eyes.