Chapter 5
Chapter Five
I n Gabe’s opinion, ride-sharing apps were one of the greatest inventions ever. And Pick Up Grandma, a startup by a couple of Ohio State grads, was his favorite. He didn’t have to bum rides from his cousin Brandon anymore—couldn’t, anyway, since he’d moved to Chicago—and his not-driving wasn’t as glaringly obvious when he rode up in a Ford Ranger driven by a sixty-something woman instead of a bright-yellow taxi. The best part was that the drivers, almost all of them women, didn’t question his request to take side roads instead of the interstate out to Aunt Pat’s home in the suburbs. They drove the speed limit and filled the cab with distracting chatter.
His driver pulled away with a wave, leaving Gabe standing in front of Aunt Pat’s suburban mini-mansion. It was familiar and yet somehow not, considering the papers he’d hidden in his bedside table like a dirty secret. They’d left a permanent impression on his eyeballs, warping the familiar like a funhouse mirror.
Michael Forza - age 38 - Las Vegas, NV
Mary Forza - age 35 - Las Vegas, NV
Raphael Forza - age 31- Las Vegas, NV
Somehow, the fact that his brother Raphael was only a year older than he was made it worse. What made his birth parents keep Raphael? What had Gabe done or been to be discarded? Had he stuck out from the Forza family the way he had from the Armstrongs, a cuckoo in a crow’s nest?
He curled his hand around Aunt Pat’s door handle, hesitating. Should he ring the doorbell? If he did, she’d know something was wrong. And he wasn’t ready to reveal what he’d learned. Not until he knew it was true.
Given the erratic behavior of DN-YAY’s former employee, he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he believed it. Though Sunny Lafortune herself seemed to be what she’d claimed. Yesterday in the office, he’d looked up her personnel record. She’d passed the background check they ran on all employees, including employment verification at DN-YAY. Her résumé showed a background in acting, though, not genetics or psychology, which seemed to reflect more poorly on DN-YAY for hiring her than on Sunny herself.
The skin on the back of his neck itched as he opened the door and headed to the kitchen. He’d been coming here since he was a kid and knew the rooms and hallways as well as the ones in his own townhouse. Did he still belong here? Had he ever?
“Gabe.” In the cheery yellow kitchen, Aunt Pat held out her arms to him, and Gabe leaned into her embrace.
“Hi,” he mumbled.
“What’s wrong, sweetie? You’re all stiff.” Pat released him and stepped back, craning her neck at him. She always made him feel like a giant child. “You didn’t take the freeway here, did you?”
“No, I’m fine. Just—just a lot going on.”
“Not at the park. It’s winter. You should be coasting now.”
“Coasting?” He snorted. “We’ll be doing maintenance right up to opening day, triple-checking the safety systems, making everything shine.”
“Of course, of course. We’ll talk about it in the meeting. Coffee?”
“I’ll get it.”
He walked to the coffeemaker and opened the cabinet above it. But today, the rows of matching mugs, all lined up, didn’t welcome him to choose. Instead, they were a barrier telling him, You don’t belong here. Not your mugs. Not your family.
An arm reached past him and grabbed a mug. “Hey, Gabe. Forgot what you were doing?”
Brandon smirked at Gabe before he poured himself a cup and set the carafe back on the warming plate. He belonged. As far as Gabe knew, he was Aunt Pat’s biological son. Though, since his cousin was just a few months younger than Gabe, Gabe remembered nothing about Brandon’s birth.
Gabe shut the cabinet door. “No, just changed my mind. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Only for the weekend.” He leaned against the counter. “Hey, want to go out tonight? I could drive back to Chicago tomorrow. We’ll go to O’Reilly’s like we used to. It’ll be like old times. Except now we’re old enough to have a beer.”
Gabe furrowed his brow. He wasn’t in any mood to be social tonight. “No, I’ve got some…paperwork to deal with. And an early morning tomorrow.”
Something flashed across Brandon’s face. Guilt, maybe, or hurt. Gabe hadn’t meant to remind him that he’d given up everything, including college, for Beach Island while Brandon went off to Chicago for business school and his fancy marketing job. Brandon looked like Chicago, from his slicked-back dark blond hair to his navy cashmere sweater. His thick stainless-steel watch glinted in the track lights when he sipped his coffee.
When he lowered the cup, the expression was gone. “Guess I’ll drive home after the meeting, then.”
“The meeting?”
“Yeah.” Brandon waved his coffee cup, and a little sloshed out and dripped onto the tile floor. “I thought I’d sit in today.”
Gabe frowned. Aunt Pat still held her board seat, so Brandon wasn’t a member. He didn’t attend their meetings. He never had to worry about reining in Uncle Bobby’s thrill ride addiction or keeping concession costs in check. He never retrieved dropped eyeglasses from the net under Twister of Terror or cleaned up puke from the teacup ride.
But Brandon hadn’t always been uninterested. A few months after Gabe had taken his dad’s seat on the board, Brandon had made him an offer. His blue eyes had been kind that day, softened with sympathy, when he’d volunteered to take the burden from Gabe’s shoulders.
And Gabe had wanted that so badly. He’d wanted to go back to school, finish his mechanical engineering degree, and then go far away so he never had to lay eyes on Beach Island again. But in the end, he’d stayed. Brandon had urged him to sell the park but warned him they needed to improve the numbers first. That meant cutting corners, especially on safety. Laying off their loyal employees. Gabe wouldn’t do that.
Aunt Pat poked her head into the kitchen. “Bobby and Grandpa are here. We can get started.”
Brandon walked out. Gabe growled and grabbed a paper towel. He bent to wipe up the hazardous splash of coffee on Aunt Pat’s floor.
In the dining room, Brandon sat next to Grandpa. Brandon was taller than their grandfather, but his eyes were the same shade of pale blue. Gabe took his seat across the table beside Uncle Bobby. The chair creaked under his weight.
The board never bothered with Parliamentary procedure or, in fact, any process at all. In his early days on the board, right after Mom and Dad had died, Gabe had tried to introduce some structure and even offered to bring in Darlene to take notes, but everyone else resisted, so the board meetings continued to run more like family chats than like meetings of a multimillion-dollar private corporation.
Gabe sat back and let them talk through Grandpa’s arthritis, Aunt Pat’s latest Junior League function, and Brandon’s advice on Uncle Bobby’s investment portfolio. As he’d done since he was a kid, Gabe stroked over the whorls in Aunt Pat’s burled wood dining table. The table glowed with years of wood polish. It’d come to Aunt Pat from her grandmother, long before Gabe was born. And it would pass to Brandon or his kids, assuming he had any.
Gabe hadn’t kept many of his parents’ things after the accident. Their furniture had been generic modern, nothing like this table. Plus, it wouldn’t have fit into his townhouse. He hadn’t been able to keep their house. Like Aunt Pat’s, it’d been out in the suburbs, and right after the accident, Gabe couldn’t even ride in a car to work. But his parents wouldn’t have cared about the house. They’d always preferred experiences to things.
A sheet of paper slid across the spot of table Gabe had been staring at. Startled, he looked up. Everyone else scanned identical papers in front of them.
“Mile of Mayhem.” Bobby leaned back in his chair like he was already riding it. While he’d never had Dad’s head for business, he shared his enthusiasm for thrill rides. “Bent Cuban eight. Double heartline roll. Rides smooth as silk. A theme park in Abu Dhabi is closing down, and it’s going up for sale.”
“What’s its safety record?” Gabe asked.
“I knew you’d ask that.” He chuckled. “I’ve asked for it, plus the maintenance logs. They should be here next week. But we need to move now before other bidders find out. I asked Brandon here to run the numbers, and on the other side of the sheet is the financial analysis.”
It was just like Uncle Bobby to decide without considering the most important factor. “Wait. You expect us to vote on this without the safety records?” Gabe asked, not flipping the sheet.
“What I want to know is where it’ll go,” Grandpa said. “Park’s full.”
Bobby’s cheeks reddened. “We could?—”
“No.” Grandpa and Gabe spoke at the same time.
Bobby waved his hand. “I wasn’t going to propose that we put it over Founders’ Park. Though Luke would’ve much rather had a roller coaster built to remember him than a pond. With swans .” He didn’t meet Gabe’s gaze. The swans were for Gabe’s mother, Lucy, and he knew it. “No one rides the carousel anymore. If we tear that down, plus the teacup ride, there’ll be space.”
Gabe didn’t mind losing the teacup ride. He had to station a full-time cleaner there to deal with the vomit situation. But he had fond memories of riding the carousel, flanked by his parents. His favorite steed had been the tiger, white with black stripes. Standing on the seat of the carved bench next to the tiger, Dad could reach up and ring the brass bell as they passed.
“Gabe,” Bobby barked. Startled, Gabe looked up from the table. Everyone stared at him. “What do you think?”
He pushed the paper away. “I can’t vote on this until I’ve seen the maintenance logs. I’m not bringing an unsafe ride to Beach Island.” But it was more than the missing documentation that gave him pause. Was he still a voting member of the board if he wasn’t really an Armstrong? Did his vote even matter? Would he be able to vote once he saw the safety record, or would his own ambivalence freeze him?
“Once it’s here, you can take it apart and put it back together again. You can install whatever safety features you want,” Bobby said. “Within reason.”
“Can I?” Gabe asked. “Liability’s more expensive?—”
Bobby interrupted, “—than prevention. We know, we know.”
As always, Gabe wondered if they did know. If it’d been a park patron, rather than his parents, who’d died on Fright or Flight, the park would’ve been sued and probably had to close. Beach Island would be no more, and Uncle Bobby and Aunt Pat would’ve had to find real jobs instead of being semi-retired while Gabe ran the day-to-day operations for them. And protected the patrons from the sloppy practices—including his own—that’d killed his parents.
Aunt Pat snapped, “Bobby, you should know better than to bring us a half-cocked proposal. We’ll vote when all the information’s in.”
Bobby hissed out a breath. “Fine. But if we wait too long, someone else’ll snatch it up. That park up north,” he grumbled.
“We could make the offer contingent on satisfactory maintenance logs.”
Everyone whipped their heads to Brandon, who’d spoken. Who’d said we as if he were a member of the board.
Bobby smiled. “So we could. Anyone opposed?”
Now the heads whipped back to Gabe. And he should’ve opposed it. The maintenance logs were only the first step in evaluating what needed to be done to bring the ride up to his—their—standards. The modifications it required might double the price they’d pay to purchase and ship it. But even knowing all this, he hesitated. Was it his place to stand in Uncle Bobby’s way? Was it his decision to make?
The words caught in his chest and died. He shook his head.
“Well, then,” Uncle Bobby said. “I’ll email our offer today. Our contingent offer.”
Aunt Pat brought up the concession budget for the coming season, but Gabe couldn’t pretend to be interested in that. Instead, he traced the wavy, coaster-like patterns in the dining table. Did he belong here? Was Beach Island still his legacy? What if the DNA results were wrong, and his indecision, his ambivalence, was caused by a mistake?
There was one way to confirm it: meet his siblings. If he could see a resemblance, or if they knew what’d happened, he’d know if he belonged here or there. And if it was clear that he belonged there, he’d offer to give up his seat here. Brandon could take over if he still wanted it.
Chairs scraped back. The meeting had ended. But before Gabe could push back from the table, Aunt Pat plopped into Uncle Bobby’s seat next to him. “Gabe, what’s wrong? Is it Riley? Or—or them?”
“Not Riley,” he said. Aunt Pat had mothered him the entire week of Christmas after he’d called to tell her Riley wouldn’t be coming to the family’s party.
“Oh, honey.” Aunt Pat stroked his hand. “I know it’s hard getting through the holidays without them.”
It had been, but dealing with this news was even harder. “Aunt Pat, do you remember when…when Mom was pregnant with me?”
She pursed her lips and twisted them to the side while she blinked, perhaps flipping through her mental photo album. Then her eyes widened. “Your mother and dad had gone on a tour of the parks out west. You know, all through Texas and California. Took them six, eight months to do them all. And when they came back, they brought you. She must not have known she was pregnant when they left.” She leaned in closer. “I think they’d been trying for a while, thought a vacation might do them good. They called you their little miracle.”
“Huh.” He’d never asked before. He’d just assumed he’d arrived in the usual way. Though, now he thought about it, there weren’t any pictures of Mom with a pregnant belly. There were plenty of him as a newborn, though, and a hospital bracelet in the baby book that used to be on Mom and Dad’s bookshelf. It’d probably gone to storage with the rest of the painful memories.
“Gabe, you look pale. Are you feeling all right?” Aunt Pat rested the back of her hand against Gabe’s forehead.
He leaned away. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
“You should take advantage of the off season. Get away. Clear your head.”
He gave her a half-smile. “Maybe I will. Though there’s so much to do: hiring for next year, overseeing the maintenance. Maybe we should bring in someone to do the hiring.”
“An outsider?” She looked like he’d proposed to run naked through the park on July Fourth. “Our family has run this park for forty years. And we’ll run it for forty more. Darlene can cover for you while you’re gone. Bobby and I’ll step up. And don’t worry at all about the Theme Park Expo. You don’t need to go. I’ll go. Or we’ll send Brandon.”
Which category did Gabe fall into if what DN-YAY had told him was true: family or outsider? And if he didn’t chase down the lead to his siblings, wouldn’t he always second-guess himself the way he had today? In a position where he made decisions that ensured patrons’ safety daily, doubt was dangerous.
His aunt patted his shoulder. “Don’t you worry about it. Just take some time off. Relax. Get some sun.”
Gabe didn’t know much about relaxation, but he knew somewhere known for its sunshine: Las Vegas.