Chapter 18
THE SILENT PARTNER
I went to the Cricket and barreled my way inside, ignoring all the people calling hello. There was only one person I wanted to unleash my crackling rage on.
He was in his office, shut behind the closed door, hiding from the world. I shoved my way inside without bothering to knock and found him sprawled back in his chair, Hannah hovering above his desk with unmistakably worried eyes.
“Well,” Hatch said, blinking up at me. He seemed entirely untroubled by my whirling rage. “If it isn’t our little shit-stirrer.”
“Louisa, please tell me you didn’t,” Hannah said beseechingly. There was a desperate expression on her face.
How had they heard, and so quickly? It had been no more than half an hour since I’d erupted at the banquet. The speed of gossip in this suffocating town only added to my fury. “Which one of your little spies was it this time?” I demanded.
Hatch leaned back and settled his hands across his stomach. “Otis,” he said simply, like it was the most obvious answer in the world.
I snorted derisively. “Of course. Just another fly trapped in your sticky web.”
Hatch regarded me warily. “It seems you have something to say.”
“Oh, there are many things I’d like to say. Starting with, why the fuck did you go behind my back with the university?”
The door banged open, and suddenly my dad was standing there, breathless like he’d sprinted from the parking lot.
“Louisa,” he said, his worried eyes latching on to mine.
He slammed the door behind him and strode into the room, his eyes flickering from Hatch in his desk chair to Hannah prowling near the wall.
“Well, good,” he said with barely restrained emotion.
“We’d better air this out all together.”
Hannah lurched forward, still watching me desperately. “What did you tell them, Louisa? What did you do?”
“I told the truth!” I shouted. “They were going on and on about this wonderful new facility, and how Uncle George would have been so proud, and they were completely fucking up his legacy, and I couldn’t take it anymore! I told them the truth about who he was!”
Hannah jolted away with a noise like a hissing cat. Gone was any trace of affection she had for me, any proof that she had taken me under her wing and mentored me through the last few weeks. Now her scorn sliced through me like a hot knife.
Hatch was the complete opposite. He merely tapped the arms of his chair, regarding me like an unforeseen problem that complicated his evening plans.
This lack of response got under my skin in a different way, making me itch with madness.
I wanted nothing more than for him to explode so it would justify my own explosion.
I wanted to rail and scream and shout everything I’d been holding in all summer.
“You had no right to do that, Louisa.”
It was my dad who spoke. His voice was dead quiet. He hovered behind me and I could feel his eyes burning into the back of my head, daring me to turn around.
“Whose right was it, then?!” I spit back, half glancing at him. “Who was going to stand up and tell everybody that their precious hero wasn’t who they thought he was?”
“He wasn’t who you thought he was, either,” said a new voice.
We all turned. Grandpa was leaning against the door, wearing an expression of disgust and dismay that matched Hannah’s.
He took an arrogant step into the room, taking up all the space as if he owned it.
“The two of you rushed out without so much as a goodbye,” he said, looking between Dad and me.
There was a hint of relish to his tone, like he was excited to eviscerate us.
“Once again leaving Martha and me to clean up your mess.”
“You don’t belong here,” I said, doing my best to hold my own against that scary gleam in his eyes. “This was Uncle George’s sacred place.”
“Oh, sure, very sacred,” Grandpa baited. “You would know, because you knew him better than anyone, didn’t you, Louisa?”
“Amos,” Hatch said in a warning tone.
Grandpa pretended to look around, as if he hadn’t noticed Hatch before. “Well, hello there, Marion.”
“Nice of you to show up, Amos,” Hatch said, unnervingly calm. “I wish you would come when we actually call you.”
Grandpa ignored him and set his sights on Hannah. “And who are you? Another one of George’s disciples?”
Hannah stared him down with more hatred than I had ever seen on her face. “I’m George’s family.”
Grandpa flat out laughed in her face. “It seems we have different definitions of family, sweetheart.”
“Indeed we do, sweetheart,” Hannah shot back.
“Enough pleasantries,” Grandpa snapped. “I’m here for damage control. I’ve talked with the foundation board and Rhett Calhoun, and we’re going to issue a statement that Louisa was confusing George with an uncle on her mother’s side—”
I roared with outrage, but Grandpa plowed over me.
“—and, Louisa, you will speak to the press and apologize for disturbing the fundraiser—”
“Like hell I will,” I spit, staring up into his pompous face.
Grandpa laughed again, almost like I was paid entertainment. “Louisa, you still don’t get it, do you? George was the mastermind behind all of this.”
“Dad—” my father began.
“What are you talking about?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Oh, honey,” Grandpa said with a deep, affected sigh, “George was the one who arranged for the university to buy this land and to name it after him. Before he got sick, when he was still on the board of trustees, he was the one who suggested this exact spot.”
All the blood drained from my face. “You’re lying.”
“The board didn’t even know he owned this place,” Grandpa went on, relishing every word.
“You see, back when Marion tricked him into opening a business together, George at least had the good sense to ensure that Marion was the only listed owner. His own involvement was protected by a DBA pseudonym. Otis Penny was the one who advised him.”
I looked around wildly. My dad’s face had gone completely white. Hannah looked as shocked as I felt. But Hatch—Hatch had the audacity to lower his head, hiding his face from me.
“Is this true?” I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
Finally, Hatch lifted his head. There was a darkness in his eyes that could have ravaged the earth. “You remain a stand-up human being, Amos,” he said in the ugliest growl I’d ever heard.
“Louisa deserves the truth,” Grandpa said, unfazed—even delighted—by the crackling tension in the room. “You’ve had her dancing like a monkey all summer, thinking she understood who my brother was.”
“Hatch,” I said, not caring that my voice caught, not caring that my armor of rage was slipping off. “Hatch, please—”
Hatch gripped his chair so hard that his knuckles were white. “The thing about a silent partner, Louisa,” he began, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it, “is their silence typically buys them a minority percentage of ownership.”
My body seemed to understand before my brain did. A sickening prickle ran down my spine. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying George owned forty-nine percent to my fifty-one, and this sale only required the majority owner’s signature.”
My heart stopped. “So you never needed me? You just let me believe we had a deal?” I gritted my teeth and poured as much loathing into my voice as possible. “You asshole. When did you do this? When did you sign the paperwork?”
Hatch set his mouth. “Three days ago.”
“The day after my thirty days ran out,” I said breathlessly. “But—but that afternoon that Grandpa and Coach Calhoun came—the thirtieth day—you told me we could still sit down and talk about it—”
“He hoodwinked you, Louisa,” Grandpa said. “There was never a ‘thirty days.’ The sale—the naming—it was the endgame all along. Marion was stringing you along the same way he did to poor George—”
“Get out,” my dad said.
Grandpa blinked in surprise. “Excuse me?”
Dad raised a shaking arm toward the door. “Get out, Dad. You’ve said your piece, you’ve laid your ruins. You can gloat somewhere else. Out.”
Grandpa’s nostrils flared. He took one last look around the room, then cocked his head like he was satisfied with the damage. “I’ll see you later, son,” he snipped at my dad. And then he was gone.
It was like all the oxygen had gone from the room. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Hannah was bent over, her hands on her knees. My dad and Hatch made eye contact, and the whole of the universe passed between them.
“Why,” I said flatly. It was all I could manage.
“Louisa…” Hatch sighed. “You’ve got to understand that the truest love of George’s life was his persona.”
“Hatch,” my dad said sadly. “That’s not why—”
“It is why,” Hatch insisted. “George loved me, but never as much as I loved him, and never as much as he loved himself. We both knew it. The best thing he ever did for me was agreeing to finally sell this place, but in my heart of hearts, I always knew it was because of the land opportunity, the legacy opportunity. I didn’t stand a chance against that, so I took what I could get. ”
I looked from Hatch to my dad. “But—but you let me think this place meant something to him. That he wanted me to know it because of the connection between us.”
“And that’s true,” my dad said in a pained voice. The pity in his eyes nearly cut me at the knees. “He did love this place, Lou. He did want you to know who he was. But he wanted all those other things, too.”
“He wanted them even more,” Hatch said.
“I don’t … I don’t understand how he’d want to be remembered for one part of himself, but not the other.”
“He was a complicated man,” Hatch answered. “He wasn’t good and he wasn’t bad, he was somewhere in the middle.”
“‘Complicated,’” I repeated. My skin began to prickle again, the anger spreading across me like a toxin.
“No, I’m starting to think he wasn’t complicated at all.
I think he was just as bad as Grandpa, taking whatever he wanted without putting anything on the line.
He wanted the spotlight, but only if he could control where it landed.
Never on the parts of him that were like me, right?
And you two, and everyone here, you all made excuses for him, you protected him, you let him do whatever was easiest without ever having the guts to say, Hey, George, maybe you can’t have it both ways, maybe you should use your influence to make things better for other people—”
“You don’t know what it was like to be George,” Dad started warningly.
“Neither do you! You have no idea what it’s like to walk around wondering if people hate you because of something at the very core of your—”
“Stop making this about you!” Dad screamed.
I flinched, staring at him in shock.
“You didn’t even care about his death until it became about you!” Dad went on, his eyes widening maddeningly. “Even now, you only want to hear about the parts you can understand!”
“I want his legacy to be known! His real legacy!”
“Football was his real legacy, too! Being an arrogant asshole was his legacy! Having a heart as big as the sky was his legacy! You can’t cut those parts of him away!”
“The dead don’t belong to just one person, Louisa,” Hatch interjected, still unnervingly calm. “George belongs to Rustin as much as he belongs to the rest of us.”
I clenched my jaw and stared from Hatch to my dad. “I’m not sure I want Uncle George to belong to me at all anymore.”
“Fine, then!” Dad said, sweeping his arm over the room like he was ready to do away with me forever. “Rid yourself of him! Rid yourself of the whole town! Sell the bar and get back to your life in Connecticut and—”
“Yeah, Connecticut is damn right, because there’s nothing left for me here!”
“I think you’ve proven that this summer,” Dad said with a final cutting breath. He turned, chest heaving, and bolted out of the office.
Immediately, all the fight went out of me.
I wanted to sink to the floor, to collapse into a sobbing heap until all the bad things leaked out of me.
But Hatch was still sitting there, silent in the wake of my family’s rupture, so I grabbed for the wall and stumbled my way out to the back porch, to the spot where I had first encountered Hatch, where I had kissed Aubrey, where I had gazed at the treetops in the morning light and wondered if Uncle George had reveled in the same glory.
I had believed this place to be a sanctuary, but that wasn’t true, was it?
It was merely another way for Uncle George to exercise his significance in this small, suffocating town.
And what had I been to him? An opportunity to live vicariously through younger blood, braver blood?
Was I one last dig at Hatch, a chance to hurt him even in death?
Or did I mean something to him, did he think of me, did he pray for me, did he want the best for me, did he believe I could do it, did I matter?
What did he expect from me when he’d never had the guts to articulate it to my face, when instead he’d died and left me a half-baked legacy to figure out, thrusting me into this world of people who loathed him and worshipped him and pitied him and owed him?
Who had he been, really, and what did that mean for who I was?