Chapter 5 Birthright
FIVE
Birthright
I walk into the executive offices of InVivion looking exactly like I have nothing to offer anyone there, or anyone in the world.
I walk in as someone’s estranged son.
When I leave, half an hour later, in the same t-shirt, same beat up jeans—I’m the guy I was in Seattle.
Wealthier, yes, but no one’s heir anymore.
I dropped the burden of who-knows-how many shares of stock onto the desk of the man my father mentored.
A man who’d seen my father every day for the last ten years.
The man my father paid far more attention to than he ever did to me.
Nice guy. He seemed really upset about the whole thing.
He also asked if I’d let him buy me a drink.
I thought about it. He’d know so much, maybe even have answers to the millions of questions still spinning through my brain, but I declined. He was a little too good looking, and I’m not trying to torture myself any more than the universe already is.
Though I gave away my share of the company, I still have an obscene amount of money to burn.
An amount I can’t wrap my mind around. Even when I total up all the things I could possibly need until I die of old age, I don’t even crack a few million.
I don’t know what I’m made of, but whatever it is, it doesn’t cost much to maintain.
I think about the money, though. I think about it all the time.
It’s burning another hole in my brain along with all the other questions I leave unanswered about the kind of man my father was.
I guess I should buy a house or something.
Or I could get a car. I could get a dream car.
I could even buy a boat if I knew how to sail one.
What I really want today, though, is a bike.
Austin has nice trails around the lake. The Hike and Bike Trail around Lady Bird Lake is one great thing this city’s got going for it.
The rest has been slowly consumed by urban gentrification and traffic as bad as L.A.
I pull up to a bike store on Barton Springs Road, which hasn’t changed all that much in six years, and grab my phone from the passenger seat of my rental.
The shot of adrenaline I get when I see a missed text from Tristan does something completely different to me than that man’s offer of a drink did.
Tristan
16202 Mountain View Road
His address?
Tristan
Your dad’s house.
Oh. That makes sense. I’ve been wondering what that other key was for.
Thanks
Tristan
Want me to meet you there?
It’s not a good idea. He belongs to Connor, even if it’s not that way. Still…he offered. I respond with a nervous breath.
Sure. Give me an hour.
I buy the most expensive bike that makes sense. Then, not far from my parents’ house in Tarrytown, on Mountain View Road, I pull up to the house where Tristan is waiting on the front porch.
It’s a very small house in comparison with the other homes in this upper class neighborhood.
I don’t know what it was about my dad that he lived so far beneath his means, but it’s just one more question I’ll never get an answer to.
And the house is one more thing I’ll have to deal with before I can be free of this legal bond between us.
Tristan looks good. His hair is pulled back, and he’s wearing a snug fitting white t-shirt and loose cargo pants that hang low on his hips, revealing a strip of his abdomen.
He and my brother are a total mismatch. Tristan is taller and covered with a layer of lean muscle.
He also looks like he spends more time in the sun than Connor does.
Everything about Tristan looks natural while Connor’s hair dye and piercings look almost like a costume. Something he’s hiding behind.
“You look nice,” I say as I walk up the winding path beneath the live oak tree in the front yard. Honestly, I noticed how he looked before I noticed the house.
I was talking about his face, but he looks down at what he’s wearing before giving me half a grin. “Thanks. Tiny house, right?”
“What’s the deal with that?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Your dad was weird.”
I try out the fourth key on the key chain the lawyer gave me. “Like a mad scientist?”
“More like a shut in. Like a hacker,” he says.
I grunt a laugh as the doorknob turns. “I wouldn’t know.”
Tristan shoves his hands in his pockets as he steps up next to me. “Well, in case you think this house will spill all his secrets, don’t get too excited. He bought it about a month before the accident. He was gonna move in at the beginning of June. There won’t be much of him here.”
“That’s fine by me,” I say. “Less to pack.”
I let Tristan go inside first. He enters a tiny foyer that opens to a small den on the right. The refinished red oak hardwoods gleam in the late morning light streaming through the back windows. “Screen porch? Nice,” I say. I cross the floor to the French doors leading outside.
“Connor was really excited about this place,” Tristan says from behind me.
“It’s nothing like the house on Pecos.”
“He loved it.”
I can see why. It’s very small, but it’s been well taken care of. The floor plan is simple, two bedrooms, a study, one bathroom. It’s nothing outstanding, but I get this feeling as I walk through the pristine rooms. Like I’ve been here before. Like I’ve missed it.
I find Tristan in the kitchen, his hands on the edge of the sink, peering out the window facing the street. “Expecting someone?” I ask, and he startles. When he turns to smile at me, something massive unlocks in my chest.
His words from the other day come back to me like a whisper.
I sometimes think we’re not our own best judges of where we belong.
One year isn’t so much when I think about it.
People leave their lives for a year all the time to study abroad or work in another country.
Baseball players do their time in the Dominican Republic and come back to start their real careers.
People leave for college and come back to their hometowns.
There’s a weight on my shoulders. Obligation. Guilt. Closest living relative.
I owe Connor.
I can do this. I can stay. I can give him a year. He doesn’t have to like it, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to live with myself if I go back to Seattle and abandon him again. My apathy does have its limits.
Tristan says, “No, I just like it here. Good vibes.”
“Thanks for telling me about it. I own so much property now, it probably would have been a month before I realized this was here.”
“It’d be a good house for Connor, maybe…”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t have to decide now.”
“Okay,” I say.
He blinks rapidly. “Right. I should probably go. I told Connor I’d get him some food.”
“How’s he doing?”
Tristan braces his hands on the countertop behind him.
The movement broadens his chest and shoulders, stretching his shirt tight over his nipples.
I do my best not to look directly at them, so I can’t say for sure, but my first thought is piercings.
I think his nipples might be pierced, and that is truly not what I need to be thinking about when I’m asking about my brother.
“Better. He’s really determined. In terms of all the things pissing him off right now, the fact that he’s got a limp is probably the top of the list.”
“Not me?” I try not to sound so surprised.
Tristan gives me half an understanding grin as he crosses his legs at the ankles. “You’re in the top five, but I actually don’t think you even made the top three.”
“I guess that’s good?”
“If it helps, he’s angry about everything. And he’s got every right to be. Second stage of grief, you know?”
I nod. I do know. “I’m glad he has you.”
“He’s not a huge fan of me right now, either, but like I said, I don’t blame him.”
“Why? What’d you do?”
Tristan shrugs. “I have parents. Two functioning legs. And I’m moving away at the end of summer.”
“Right. Where are you going to school?”
“Houston,” he says without elaborating.
I shrug. “Quick drive. Could be worse.” I add this to my own list of reasons to keep my eyes on his face and not his chest, but his face is no picnic to look at either.
It’s a series of paintings waiting to happen.
Oil on canvas. Shadow and light. I don’t consider myself bad looking—I’ve been told often enough in the last few years that I’m not, but next to Tristan, I’d only call myself average. Basic.
“It’s terrible timing,” Tristan says as he lets go of the counter and looks toward the door that leads out of the kitchen to the driveway alongside the house.
“Yeah. I guess.” I gesture toward the door and say, “After you.” Because with the two of us talking in this kitchen, it’s starting to feel too much like a place I could call home.
I head back to Seattle the first week of July, not to stay, but to pack, among other things. While I’m there, I turn twenty-four, accept an offer on the Pecos house, quit my job, gather up all my clothes, papers, and art supplies, and break up with Carrie.
That last thing is kind of a low point.
She and I have exchanged a few more texts and calls since I’ve been in Austin, mostly regarding the fact that I wasn’t sure when I’d come back to Seattle. I didn’t tell her about the deaths in the family, the inheritance, or really anything else. And she never asked. It was more like:
Still out of town?
Yep.
Bummer. Let me know when you’re headed home.
Will do.
All that aside, she takes the news that I’m moving away harder than I expect her to.
All I say is I’m leaving for a year, and she turns it into a massive breakup with tears and a slammed door.
When I’d told Tristan she wasn’t “that kind of girlfriend” I thought Carrie took our relationship as casually as I did.
Monogamous friends with benefits. That wasn’t the case for her, apparently, so now I feel like the world’s worst asshole.