Chapter 47
Tucker
A week later, we request a family meeting with Arthur Weggers, which he grants.
The conference room at his law office is packed to the gills with Hotts and Hott-adjacent humans—my four brothers, their wives and girlfriends, Hanna and Easton.
The kids are with Easton’s mom. The dogs, I assume, are home alone, and I’m glad, because we can barely pull our chairs out, there are so many of us around the table.
Weggers walks in, wearing a plum-colored suit. “Greetings, all,” he says.
“Hi, Arthur,” Hanna says.
“What’s the purpose of this meeting?” he asks.
“Closure,” she says. “We fulfilled the terms of the will in the timeframe specified. We want to know that means the land is ours and that there won’t be any more…challenges.”
I’m positive she wanted to say bullshit, and I applaud her restraint.
“The land is yours, and there won’t be any more challenges,” Weggers says. “Will that be all?”
We exchange glances around the table.
“Isn’t there some—” Hanna hesitates. “I don’t know, final letter? Video? Something?”
I realize that I’d been assuming the same thing. That at the end of this whole travail, our grandfather would effectively show up and explain what he’d been thinking. Tell us why he’d seen fit to torture us all this way. Give the whole thing some meaning…
“No,” Weggers says.
The single, small word hangs in the room, all wrong. Another round of glances pinballs around the room.
“Nothing?” Hanna asks.
“Nothing,” the lawyer says. “Unless you want me to make some kind of speech?”
“Oh, no,” she says, “that really won’t be necessary.”
“Then, if you’ll excuse me, I have a terribly large amount of work to do.” He pauses. “And a date later tonight.”
And on that note, he walks out of the room.
“A date?” Sonya asks.
Hanna fills her in on the events of the wedding. When she gets to the part about the questions about Arthur’s dick size, we all duck our heads and wince.
“Little Artie Weggers,” Natalie says. “All grown up and going out on his first date! Who woulda thunk?”
We let that percolate for a moment. Then Ivy says, “It feels unfinished.”
“What feels unfinished?”
“Everything,” she says. “It’s like we went through a whole two-year program and there’s no graduation ceremony.”
There are murmurs of assent around the table. Sonya says, “I mean, what would a graduation ceremony look like?”
“We could burn the letters,” Rhys suggests.
“Already done that,” Shane and Quinn say at the same time.
“We could go around the table and each say something. Like what we learned,” Preston suggests.
My other brothers and I glare at him.
“What?” he says.
“I hate that shit,” Quinn says. “You know, like at Thanksgiving when all the food’s on the table and someone says, ‘Let’s all say what we’re thankful for.’ We’re all thankful that this bullshit will be over quickly and we can tuck into the food, which is what we all actually came here for.”
“I’m usually thankful for the fact that there are lots of different kinds of cranberry sauce with different textures so if you don’t want to eat those weird crunchy berries you don’t have to,” Shane says.
“You would be,” Ivy says, but fondly.
“I’m thankful for the fact that we’re all here,” Rhys says.
This startles all of us so much that we go dead silent.
“What?” he demands. “I am. If grandfather hadn’t been such a dick, we never would have met Sonya and Ivy and Natalie and Eden, and we—”
“And Autumn,” Hanna says.
Everyone turns to look at me.
“Where is Autumn?” Shane asks.
“She went back to Baltimore.”
“Why?”
Quinn puts the question out so baldly that everyone turns to look at him instead of Shane or me.
“I mean, we’re all thinking it, right?” he asks.
“All the rest of us, we did our will thing, and then we— Oh fuck, I’m just going to say it—don’t hate me.
We all lived happily ever after. Or—” He gives Sonya such a sappy grin that we all lose our appetites for a year, but hell if it isn’t also kind of sweet. “I did anyway.”
“I did, too,” Shane says, taking and squeezing Ivy’s hand. She blushes and tilts him a look under her eyelashes.
“And me,” Preston says, smiling at Natalie, who smiles back.
“I mean, it’s early days,” Rhys says, shooting a smirk at Eden, “but she hasn’t kicked me to the curb yet.”
Eden rolls her eyes. “Like you said. It’s early days.”
And now they’re all looking at me again.
“Maybe I’m not made for happily-ever-after,” I say. “Maybe I don’t want happily-ever-after. Maybe Autumn isn’t my happily-ever-after.”
“Also,” says Sonya reasonably, “maybe happily-ever-after wasn’t the point of your grandfather’s game.”
“What is the point, then?” Shane asks. “Because I’m going to be really fucking pissed if there’s no point.”
“It’s obvious what the point is,” Preston says. “The point is that we’re here.”
“In Rush Creek?” Shane asks.
“No,” Hanna says. “Here could be anywhere. It just happens to be Rush Creek.”
“No,” I say. “Here couldn’t be anywhere.
It has to be Rush Creek. But not because of anything to do with Rush Creek.
Because Hanna belongs here. And we belong with Hanna.
When Preston says ‘we’re here,’ he’s not talking about a place, not talking about geography.
He’s talking about family. He’s saying the whole point is that we’re all… together.”
There is a long pause while they all stare at me.
“Yeah,” says Preston finally. “Exactly.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “That works.”
“Cosign,” Quinn says.
“Yup,” Rhys agrees.
“We good?” I ask, looking around the table at my brothers.
“Yeah,” they say, almost in unison. “We’re good.”