The Parsonses
Brick Three had just settled in his chair in the living room with the Sunday New York Times on the coffee table when he heard the front door open.
He listened carefully—maybe one of the kids was going to go straight up to his or her room, leaving him in peace.
Then he could hide behind the newspaper, trying to process the events of the last thirty-six hours.
His son was going to be a nurse. His daughter was moving to Wisconsin.
His other daughter was in love with a rich Finn and would be working in exotic hotels.
And he and Jane were having another child.
He was forty-four years old and his life was turned upside down.
“Hi, Dad!”
He was surprised to see Lydia enter the room, and even more surprised to see his father right behind her. He put his newspaper down.
Brick Three stood up. “Dad. Hi. What’s going on?”
“Does something have to be going on for me to visit my son?” Brick Jr. joked.
Damn, Brick Three thought. Something is absolutely going on.
Jane bustled into the room. “Brick Jr.! Lydia.” She kissed them both on the cheek. “Would you like some coffee?”
“We would,” Brick Jr. said. “Please.”
“We brought pastries from Wicked Island Bakery.” Lydia handed the white paper bag to her mother.
“I’ll put these on a plate,” Jane said. “I’ll bring the coffee in. Sit down, sit down.”
Brick Three, Brick Jr., and Lydia sat down.
Brick Three felt as if he were on an extremely small airplane piloted by strangers. It was bad enough that he wasn’t the pilot, but he didn’t even know where they were going.
“Son,” Brick Jr. said. “We have a proposition.”
Hell’s bells, Brick Three thought. Now what?
“Dad,” Lydia said, “I want to join Parsons. I want to work for you and learn everything and eventually take it over.”
Brick Three’s mind went blank. The words wouldn’t compute. His first thought, his immediate reaction, was that his daughter and his father had been conspiring together without including him.
Jane tralala-ed into the room, humming and setting down a tray with coffee mugs, a plate of pastries, and a pile of Christmas-themed napkins. He could tell by her smile that she’d overheard the conversation.
“That sounds intriguing,” Jane said, squeezing onto the sofa next to Lydia.
Brick Three was still speechless.
Jane said, “I thought you were going to work for Golden Resorts.”
Lydia leaned forward. “I was. But so many things have changed, and many of the skills I acquired working with hotel management will transfer easily to working with the insurance company.”
Brick Three still stared, as if mesmerized, hypnotized by an invisible magician.
And that was true, because the invisible magician was memory.
When Lydia was four, Florie three, and Lucas two, their grandfather suggested to Brick Three that he take Lydia with him to work.
Brick Three had laughed and said to his daughter, “Sweetie, you don’t want to work.”
“Do want!” Lydia had told him. “Pwease, Daddy.”
So the next Sunday, Brick Three took Lydia to his insurance company office.
She’d been shown the handsome gold and green quarterboard and the large shining plate glass window.
No one else was working, so he put his key in the front door lock and turned and held the door open for her.
Lydia had gone wide-eyed as she slowly, solemnly, entered the front offices, where the desks of his various employees were.
Lydia walked around the room, quietly studying each desk, nodding as if she approved of what she saw. She said, “Desk. Computer. Paper. Folders. Oh, Daddy, look!”
Marsha Ingram, in charge of auto insurance, had an in tray on her desk. The base was made of pale turquoise plastic and it held three removable bins in yellow, pink, and lime green.
Lydia had put her finger out and touched the tray. “Oh,” she said, “beautiful, Daddy.”
Brick Three remembered chuckling and holding out his hand. “Now come see my office,” he told her.
His door was plate glass, and the wall facing the main office was glass.
He had a large mahogany desk—it had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.
He kept a tidy surface, which was relatively easy now that everyone had computers.
Behind his desk was a bookshelf packed with extremely boring tomes of laws and practices.
Lydia patted the rim of the brass waste basket and nodded admiringly.
“Very nice,” she told him.
Several manila folders rose haphazardly on one side of his desk.
Lydia shook her head. “Messy.”
Brick Three lifted her up to sit in his desk chair and she laughed out loud when he gave it a push and it twirled around three hundred sixty degrees. Lydia spotted the brass pull on his desk drawer and glanced up at her father for permission.
“Sure. You can open it.”
She actually gasped at what she saw inside.
A wooden bin held several dark green pens with the company’s name embossed on them—gifts for clients.
An old electronic calculator. Scissors. Colored pencils.
Post-its in different colors. Business cards.
Reading glasses. Rubber bands. Paper clips.
A book of stamps. Lydia had discovered the magical necessities of the adult world.
After that day, he often took her into the office with him.
She would sit quietly at the desk in the back and work on her pad of paper with the colored pencils.
Her extremely formal presence as she bent over her paper, murmuring to herself, made him feel the dignity and importance of his profession.
He’d taken Florie and then Lucas into the office when they turned five, but it didn’t hold the same magic for them. Florie wanted to sit at a desk and look at cartoons on a computer. Lucas spent the time trying to throw a rubber ball across the room into a waste basket.
But Lydia…Brick Three now realized that she had been born to work for him.
For a moment, his heart seemed to drop into a deep well of sorrow because Lydia had gone to his father first. Did she feel the need to have her grandfather’s support to ask if she could join the company?
Obviously, she did. He couldn’t deny that.
And he regretted that.
Still, there she sat, his firstborn child, his daughter, in his living room, all adult and bossy and ready to fight and there was nothing Brick Three wanted to do as much as smile at his daughter and say, “Okay.”
So he did.
He smiled at Lydia. He said, “Okay.”
“Oh, Daddy!” Lydia jumped up and flew across the room and hugged him so tight he couldn’t breathe. She kissed the top of his head.
Jane was crying and Brick Jr. was pretending to cough as he hid his face in his handkerchief and Lydia did an impromptu victory dance, then picked up the plate and held it out to Brick Three. “Have a pastry.”