Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
Ben
Bray and I don’t meet regularly, and when we do, we don’t really talk about much.
We tease each other, have some drinks and chat about nothing—the news, sports, business at a very superficial level.
It’s some kind of ritual we go through because we’re brothers in the same town who don’t want to lose touch, but we don’t really connect.
I didn’t realize how superficial our relationship was until Avril and I went to Worth’s house.
It was full of people who don’t share the same DNA but act like a family.
Bray and I are different. We don’t talk about what happened when we were kids, other than to laugh about things we did that we shouldn’t have done.
We don’t talk about the fact that both of us have come back to New York, the city we spent the first part of our childhood in, the city where we ended up living in our car with our parents.
We don’t talk about Dad and how the last image I have of him is him waving as we went through security at the airport.
Maybe it was because I was a kid and I was scared, but something in me knew I’d never see him again.
Bray and I don’t talk about anything below the surface.
As I step into the bar, and Bray waves at me from the barstool he’s sitting on, I wonder why there seems to be some invisible wall between us, even when we’re together.
“Hey,” he says, standing. We give each other a hug, but I wait for him to pull away before I do. I’ve seen what familial connections look like at Worth’s house, and I want to know if we can have that too.
“Good to see you,” I say.
A smile curls at the corner of his lips. “Good to see you too. Sorry to have dragged you away from your shmoozing for the evening.”
I smile, ignoring the jibe. “It’s good to be here,” I say.
“Okay,” he says with a chuckle. “Can I get you a beer?”
Bray loves a sports bar, so here we are in my idea of a special part of hell, and there’s absolutely no point in asking for a glass of good red wine or a martini. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll have what you’re having.”
He places the order and then we settle next to each other at the bar. There are TVs directly in front of us, behind the bar, and lining the walls. Wherever you look, there are flickering lights of blue screens.
“What’s with you and sports bars?”
Bray shrugs, but I want to know why. We’re brothers.
We share the same DNA, yet I barely know him.
Is it because of what happened in New York?
Because of losing Dad? Because we’re back in the town that ruined our family?
I don’t know because we never discuss it.
It’s like an enormous elephant is squeezed in between us, and neither of us can see over it to the other.
“Is that since university?” I ask. When did it start?
“Since coming back to New York,” he answers. “I didn’t have cable TV. I didn’t understand all the US sports. It’s so different from the UK. It was cultural research for me.”
I laugh. “Smart.”
“And it was cheap. New York’s an expensive city.”
“Do you still have that flatmate?” I ask. “Joe? Is that his name?”
“Joe Romano? No, of course not.”
“Who’s your flatmate now?”
“I don’t have one.”
“But you’re still in the same place, right? Where was that again?”
“I live on the Upper West Side.”
“You do? I thought you lived in Brooklyn.” I feel kind of embarrassed or ashamed that I don’t even know the borough my brother lives in.
“Not for about four years.”
“Huh. How come I didn’t know that?”
He takes a swig of his beer. “I’m not sure I mentioned it.”
I’m certain he never mentioned it. I would have remembered something like that. Why would he keep something like that from me?
“You should come to dinner at my place sometime,” I say. “I could cook for you.”
He chuckles. “You still love to cook, then?”
“Yeah.” I think back to the papers that Avril printed off for me—culinary school. I’m definitely not loving my job at the moment, but do I really want to go to culinary school?
“I was always surprised that you didn’t go into the restaurant biz,” he says.
“Do you blame me for not following in Dad’s footsteps?”
Silence echoes between us.
We don’t mention Dad.
I can’t remember the last time he came up.
We always swap our latest encounters with Mum, but we don’t talk about the past. Nothing about the restaurant closing, about being homeless, about leaving New York for England and never seeing our dad gain.
A single, one-syllable word that’s like a cork on our past, keeping it all bottled up.
“Not at all,” he says. “I never expected you to do the same as him. I just thought that you might own restaurants or something. Now.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I say, before I realize how much I’m revealing about myself. “I’m definitely feeling like I’m at a turning point in my career.”
“You’ve achieved so much,” he says with a warm smile, like he’s proud of me, and it lifts something in me.
I never wanted to be successful to make anyone proud.
I know that motivates some people, but not me.
I was motivated by fear. Fear of what can happen when you’re poor.
Fear of that knock on the car window at two in the morning and a drunken face pressed against the glass.
Fear of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
“Thanks,” I say and then I realize I should repay the compliment, but I want it to be authentic, and I’m not sure I know what he’s achieved. I know he works in tech. I settle on asking him how his job is going. “Where are you working again?”
He laughs. “I work for myself. Set up a few years ago.”
“Really?” I ask him. “I didn’t know that.”
He holds my gaze. “No. I never told you.”
“Deliberately?”
He pulls in a breath. “I think so.”
His comment hits me in the stomach like a fist. “Oh,” I say.
He shrugs. “You’re the rich, successful, older brother. I didn’t want to…feel I was competing.”
“You know I’m always happy to help.”
“I know. You always tell me that. Every time we meet.”
Do I? I don’t remember, but I’m pleased he knows I’d help him.
“You never take me up on it,” I say. “I might be able to introduce you to people. Investors, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he says. “But also, it’s good to feel you’ve done it on your own.”
I let out a knowing half laugh. I understand why he feels like that, but only first-generation wealth has that attitude. People with generational money will take all the help they can get. When you start with nothing, there’s so much pride mixed in with everything. “I get that.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“I think it’s complicated, but no, I don’t agree.
I think business is about people. People do business with people they like.
People who are successful in business are generally well connected, well respected and well liked.
There are exceptions, and of course it’s all relative.
What one person is respected for, might not be what you or I would respect them for.
And we all know plenty of very successful people who seem morally corrupt.
But dealing with them isn’t terrible. In my experience. ”
“Hence your schmoozing, and I know you don’t think so, but I mean that as a compliment. You’re easy to like, Ben. You always have been.”
“Thanks. But my job is more than shmoozing.”
“I know. I know you’ve made yourself indispensable to New York business.”
There’s no doubt that there’s more written online about me than Bray. But it isn’t until now that I realize he must have read that stuff about me online. He must have looked me up, because I’ve never talked to him about what I do and why I do it.
“So tell me about the Upper West Side,” I say, wanting to know more about him.
“Not much to say. It was close to the office and I like being close to the park. I run there every morning.”
“You still run?” Bray used to do long distance at school. I’d forgotten that until just now. He was excellent at it.
“Yeah. It clears my mind. I have all my best ideas when I’m running.”
“And what are you working on at the moment?” Hopefully that’s a sufficiently broad question that I haven’t tripped myself up.
“I’m focused on taking the company public.”
I try to disguise my shock. “Right. That’s a big project.”
“It is. And we’ve only just started the process. It will take a year of preparation to really be ready, but we’re already regulated so we have the right systems in place.”
“Regulated?”
“I mean it’s state by state and not federal, but yeah, we’re regulated.”
“Right,” I say. Is now a good time to admit I have no idea what my brother does for a living? “Regulated and you’re going public.”
Bray chuckles and slaps me on the back. “USA Sports Betting Inc. You should look us up.” He slides off his stool and excuses himself to go to the loo.
I pull out my phone and look up USA Sports Betting Inc. as Bray suggested. It’s online gambling. Any sport. Anywhere in the world. I put my brother’s name in the search bar, but it times out. Is he the chief technology officer or something? Maybe something more junior. He’s young, right?
Then I close down the page and just search my brother’s name.
And he appears on my browser: chairman and chief executive of USA Sports Betting Inc.
There must be some kind of mistake.
I close down that window and open a fresh one, then type in his name again. Chairman and chief executive. There it is again. Then I search for financial information about the company. There’s not much online, but that makes sense because it’s a private company.
At that moment, Bray comes back to the bar.
“So I looked you up,” I say. There’s no point in pretending that I knew all of this stuff about my brother before he went to the loo. I clearly didn’t.
Bray doesn’t say anything. He just slides back onto his seat.
“Looks like you’re doing pretty well. Why do you want to float?”
“My investors want to realize their investment, and…I did what I set out to do. I took advantage of the change in law in 2018, and we’ve gone through this massive growth curve, but that’s over now.
It’s steady state from here. And that doesn’t excite me.
So, we can float. I can take some of my money and go and invest it somewhere else. ”
“Sounds like you have it all planned out.”
“I’m just focused on the IPO at the moment. One step at a time.”
“So you’re going to be rich,” I say.
A small smile curls around Bray’s lips. “I’m already rich. But the IPO will be a boost to the bank balance, there’s no doubt about that.”
How is it possible that I didn’t know anything about my own brother’s success?
“Sports bar. Now I get why, if it’s your pick, you always take me to these places.”
Bray laughs. “It’s good to understand the end consumer.”
The number of times I’ve offered to help Bray out over the years, he’s always said no to me.
I can’t help but think of Avril. She wants to prove to her older brother that she’s not a baby anymore, that she can make it on her own.
Is this what’s happening here? Do Bray and I not talk about things because he doesn’t want me weighing in or giving unsolicited advice?
Maybe it’s because he never needed my help.
Whatever the reasons, I couldn’t be prouder of my little brother.
“So after the IPO, when you have all this extra cash, you think you might invest in a couple of restaurants?” I ask Bray.
“You need a job?” He nudges me with his elbow.
I laugh and clink my beer bottle against his.
Feels like I’m finally getting to know my brother.