Chapter 12 – Sunshine/Kaitlyn
TWELVE
SUNSHINE/KAITLYN
When I was sixteen, my dad drove me to the airport to leave for Columbia. I was sure
my family would come visit me in New York. They would want to see the iconic city, and they’d be so proud of how hard I’d worked to put my stamp on it.
Mom was scared of flying, but she would get over that, wouldn’t she? For me?
She didn’t.
Harmony had come a bunch of times over the years. She’d stayed in my dorm room the first few years, and then come for a week when I’d gotten my first job and my own studio apartment. We got rush seats to all the Broadway shows and went shopping at the second-hand shops on 7 th Avenue.
Dad came a few times. Only staying a night, maybe two.
I’d take him for bagels and Chinese food because he could eat his weight in dumplings.
We’d walk around Central Park because he needed to see trees and not buildings, and he’d ask me questions about my work and I tried to answer him in ways he would understand .
Bliss came once. She went to the Village while I was working. Got a tattoo. Made out with a drummer for a punk band she’d convinced me to go see the night before.
Basically, I hadn’t seen her much beyond one dinner, and not again until she came home to grab her bag and head back to the airport. She’d smelled like cigarettes and bad decisions.
Mom never came.
She called. She texted. But she never came to visit me.
I found it really hard to forgive her for that.
So, because she didn’t come to visit me, I didn’t visit her. I might not have understood that was what I was doing, but underneath all the weekends at the office and the vacations I didn’t take because of work – resentment raged.
Until Dad died. A sudden heart attack at fifty-eight and he was gone. A collapsed artery. No chance to get him to a hospital in time. It was fast and they told me he didn’t suffer.
For him, I came home.
I tried to think back to that time. Had my mom tried to tell me the truth about who my father was then?
I remembered her asking me to stay longer, telling me she had so much she wanted to tell me.
But I’d been sick with grief and loss. Mixed with the guilt that I hadn’t come home to visit more when he’d been alive.
There was always supposed to be more time.
And there was that raging resentment.
I didn’t linger after my dad’s death. I went back to the city and threw myself into work. Burying my feelings under money and success, until the only thing I cared about was making partner.
The front door to the house opened, making the scarecrow statue my mom had made out of flattened diet coke cans shimmy, pulling me from my memories. Mom and I stared at each other over three feet of cracked red brick pavers that led to the porch I’d helped my dad put in when I was in fifth grade.
The truth was, I had been a shitty daughter.
So, yeah, my mom had made mistakes. But I had, too. I could start there.
“You planning on coming in?” she asked. She sounded unsure. Worried. Part of me wanted to pounce on that feeling, make her feel worse. But that part was small and exhausted. Mostly, I was just…sad.
“Was that Tag dropping you off?” she asked, when I was quiet.
I nodded. Tag, who had filled my head with dirty, distracting thoughts so I couldn’t obsess over my confusion and hurt feelings.
Tag, who had so quickly become a safe space in this town.
“He’s a good man. Always lending everyone in town a hand when they need it,” my mother said.
She took a deep breath and I suddenly felt bad for her.
How scared she seemed. Small, too. My mother was an artist. Sort of.
A woman with big ideas and spotty follow through.
When we were little, she’d take us for midnight picnics.
She’d feed us cake for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner.
She was chaos, and for another kind of kid… probably magic.
It wasn’t her fault that I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just never understood her and she never understood me.
“Well, come inside,” Mom said, opening the door. “We should just have this out.”
I shook my head and took a couple steps towards her. The world felt different in cowboy boots. I didn’t hate it. “I don’t want to have it out, Mom. What’s done is done,” I said. “Getting angry and shouting isn’t going to change anything, and you already told me what happened.”
Mom’s lips trembled and she shook her head. “Getting angry and shouting might make you feel better.”
I laughed. “I don’t know, Mom. Seems like a lot of work.”
She laughed, too, until it caught on a sob. She pressed her fingers to her lips like she was trying to keep it all in. But then it all came pouring out.
“I was young and in love. Stupid, stupid in love. I couldn’t make myself get over him. No matter how I hard I tried.” she said.
“I think what I don’t understand is…he didn’t pick you, Mom. He picked his family over you and he got married and you still…” I trailed off, wondering why she hadn’t respected herself more.
“Honey,” Mom licked her lips and seemed to search for the right words.
A giant bumble bee flew around her hydrangea bush.
A breeze lifted the ends of her reddish-grey curls.
“I hope you never get your heart broken the way he broke my heart. It was…” she shook her head and I stepped closer again. “Humiliating. Life changing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“So, when he came back, sniffing around my door like a kicked dog, begging… begging for a chance to talk to me. To see me. To touch…anyway,” she shrugged.
“It took a stronger woman than me to say no.” She stepped forward then, her eyes liquid and soft.
“Yes, it was wrong, but it wasn’t a mistake. It brought me you.”
“Mom,” I said, all but rolling my eyes. We didn’t need the sappy stuff .
“I know I failed you in a lot of ways. You were…so different from me that it made me doubt myself around you. You got so old so fast that I didn’t know what you needed.
I felt like I missed my chance to be important in your life.
I saw how your father was with you, your real father, the man who raised you.
I saw how he loved you and how you leaned on him.
I thought maybe that was all you needed-”
“It wasn’t,” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I needed you, too, Mom.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice breaking. The tears that had been pooling in the corners of her eyes finally falling. She wiped them away fast, like she didn’t want me to see them.
“Did you love Dad?” I asked. “Or was he just a convenient scape goat?”
I was surprised by how angry I was at the thought of that. My beautiful, special dad should have been no one’s second choice.
Mom shook her head, the tears coming for real.
“Your father showed me what real love was. He was my angel. The way he saw all my flaws and loved me because of them, not instead of them. He knew every gruesome detail, because I told him, and still, it didn’t matter.
He said he wanted my future, not my past. I hope all you girls find a man like your father. ”
I was relieved that what I thought had been true when I was a kid was real. More than relieved, really. Comforted. It felt like a boulder had been pushed off my chest and I could breathe again.
“And Leroy McGraw really didn’t know about me.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “No. I never told him once I knew he wasn’t leaving Sasha.”
“So, if he didn’t know about me, how did he find out?”
She sighed. “I think he always suspected something. I married Edward only weeks after we broke things off. I could only hide my belly for so long. Most folks understood that Edward and I jumped the gun before marriage. But Leroy knew me well enough to know I wasn’t stepping out with two men at the same time.
When he was diagnosed with cancer, he asked me to come see him.
Said he had to know the truth before he died.
Edward was gone. Sasha was gone. Didn’t see the harm in telling him the truth then. ”
I nodded.
“He was curious about you after that. Obsessive, really. Wanted to know everything about your job. I didn’t have a lot of answers, so he looked you up online.
Studied your career, read everything anyone ever published about how smart you were.
How outside the box your methods were. He said you reminded him of his mother.
Apparently, she’d been very smart but had never had the chance to prove herself away from the ranch. ”
That was nice and all, but I didn’t give a shit. Not really. I cared about my sisters, these new half-brothers of mine. I cared about doing what I could to help the ranch, which would help all of them.
I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “That’s it then? All the secrets?”
“That’s it,” Mom said, with a smile. “All the secrets I have are out in the open.”
“My room still here?”
“I just put fresh sheets on the bed.”
And with that, Monica Calloway stepped back from the door, opened it wide for me, and I…came home.
“Where are Amity and Bliss?” I asked over dinner.
Mom had made chicken pot pie, my favorite when I was a kid. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I tried to avoid dairy, gluten and sugar as part of a healthy diet.
“They moved out. Amity lives above the café and Bliss lives over the bar. Thought they might come home for a visit, but they must be busy.”
“Is that safe. Living over a bar?”
My mother chuckled. “The girl from the big city is asking me if our town is safe.”
“Mom, New York isn’t what you think. I have a doorman to my apartment. They have rowdy cowboys getting drunk every night downstairs. I’m pretty sure I’m safest of all of us.”
“No one around here would touch those girls. They know it would be a death sentence for them. People want to drink, they need the Last Stand. People want to eat, they need the Last Meal. People want to eat or drink at home, they need-”
“The Last Chance,” I finished for her. “Got it.”
“They’re excited to have you home,” Mom said, with that raised eyebrow that immediately brought back a rush of guilt for being the shitty sister. “We’ll stop by Amity’s place tomorrow.”
“They’re only excited because they think I can save the Swinging D, which in turn will save the town and their businesses,” I said.
“No, they’re excited to have you home,” she corrected me. “And because they plan to raid your suitcase for fancy, big city designer clothes.”
I chuckled. “They’ll be disappointed then. I didn’t bring much with me. ”
Mom tipped her head. “You don’t plan to stay long?”
I pushed a pea covered in chicken gravy around the bowl in front of me. “I have an idea. It might work. It might be a disaster. But it’s something.”
“All anyone can ask of you is that you try.”
My phone vibrated in my back pocket. Leaving my phone behind this morning had put me behind the eight-ball at work. The texts and voicemails from my assistant had gotten increasingly desperate. But, I’d taken an hour before dinner and put out every fire.
But there were always more fires.
I pulled out my phone and thumbed in my passcode.
Jared Evanstone: We need to talk. Call me immediately.
If I had an ounce of whimsy, I would have put his name in my contacts as Jared Asshole Partner, but I was always too petrified he might see it.
“I have to take this,” I told my mom, pushing back my chair and leaving the kitchen.
It had always been ingrained into us as kids, that we didn’t take phone calls at the kitchen table. The kitchen table was for family time. So I left the room and wandered into the living room across the hall before hitting Jared’s contact number.
“Kaitlyn,” he answered, on the second ring.
“Yes, Jared.”
“When are you returning to New York?”
“That’s unknown at this point. There are still things to settle regarding the estate.”
“Not good enough,” he said, in his normal clipped tone. Like I had already failed him and he was exasperated by having to deal with me. “You’ve seen how tumultuous the markets have been. Our Singaporean friend is getting worried. ”
“Really? He hasn’t been calling me.”
“Because I called him.”
I gasped, outraged. Contacting one of my clients was unbelievably unprofessional, and if he wasn’t a partner, might get him fired, considering how much money my client was bringing in and how his bullshit might have put it in jeopardy.
“Tell me you’re making a terrible joke.”
“You’ve been gone for days!” he said, fully trying to justify his idiocy. “The partners were worried-”
“Then the partners should have come to me,” I said, slow and steady, practically breathing fire. “You had no right.”
“I had every right,” he said. “As a partner in this firm.”
There was no way I could convince him what he’d done was wrong. He was entirely that guy. He’d deny starting a fire while holding a lighter and a can of gasoline. How he got partner over me was an absolute mystery.
Actually, not really. He had a dick. That put him at the head of every line.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to deep breathe away the headache blooming behind my eye.
“I will talk to my client ,” I said. “I will handle any questions they have about the volatility in the markets, and I will be home as soon as I am able.”
“That might not be good enough, Kaitlyn,” he snapped. “You said you wanted to make partner, so you need to wrap up your business at home and get back to work.”
He ended the call and I scowled at the phone.
That mother-fucker. He must have seriously fucked up.
The firm always believed that the market was tumultuous. That was the fucking nature of the market. There was never a lull or a down time. If it was up, we were working to get the most bang for our buck. If it was down, we were working for the best bargain prices.
The bold truth was, time was running out on the lure of a partnership.
Berkley, through Jared, had been dangling that particular carrot in front of me for two years now. It was always there as both a lure and a threat.
If you’re serious about making partner…
You know we’re considering you for partner…
If you make this deal, a partnership is on the line.
I was starting to wonder if I even liked carrots.
“Everything okay with work?” Mom called out from the kitchen.
“Yep.” I lied, because what would be the point of telling her the truth?
“They told me to take all the time I need,” I called out to her, as I made my way back to the kitchen.
My pot pie would be cold, and my stomach was in absolute knots, but I took the plate anyway and popped it into the microwave.
After all, it was my favorite.