Chapter 13
THEO
“Ihave to hand it to you,” Harper said. “This is really nice, Theo.”
He raised his eyebrows, looking up from the perfectly cooked steak he had just cut into. “You have to hand it to me? You’re the one who made dinner. I’ve just been out here pouring wine.”
“And making this fire,” Harper said. “I wouldn’t have thought of doing that.”
“Well, I thought we could use a little warmth.”
Her gaze lingered for a moment, as if she was thinking of saying something, but she turned her attention back to her food, and he was glad.
The truth — which he was sure had crossed her mind, because she was a bright woman — was that it was plenty warm in here, and they didn’t need the fire for that.
There was a better argument for the idea that they needed it for the light, but the sun hadn’t gone down yet, so even that would have been a tough case to make.
Theo had started a fire for ambiance.
She probably knew it. But if she did, she wasn’t saying anything — or, at least, she wasn’t saying anything beyond “this is nice”.
Then again, it probably went without saying.
There was no practical reason for needing to open a bottle of wine.
For that matter, there was no reason she’d needed to make steak — he had seen the boxes of pasta in the kitchen, and they would have done perfectly well.
On that gas-powered range, she could have prepared almost anything, even without electricity.
Instead, by unspoken agreement, they were sitting in comfortable armchairs with their feet up on the stone edge of the firepit, eating what Theo had to concede was a perfectly cooked steak dinner and sipping the nicest Merlot he had been able to find that wasn’t behind a locked door.
Though neither of them had said it, he surmised that this was their way of apologizing to one another for the argument that had taken place.
He was glad. It was going to be a tough couple of days, stuck out here, and it wouldn’t be made any better by fighting with one another.
“You have a point about this place,” he told her.
She looked at him. Her normally tamed hair was loose around her face — she’d unclipped it after she had finished in the kitchen.
He had never taken much notice of it before, but now he did.
It was big and wild, full of uneven curls that made her look like an actress from a 1980s film.
There was auburn in it, too. He had thought it was basic brown, but the fire glow was bringing out the red, and he found himself suddenly captivated.
In spite of himself, he found that he could picture the wedding here.
He could picture Max and Tara curled up side by side next to this fire, her head on his shoulder, their guests coming up to them one by one to congratulate them on their marriage.
It wasn’t as fancy, in his imagination, as a party at the Crystal Ballroom would be.
It wasn’t as impressive. But there was something cozy about it that the Crystal Ballroom could never hope to achieve, and for the first time, he really understood what Harper meant when she talked about making memories.
Even this moment—sitting here drinking wine with Harper—is going to be a memory. And she and I are hardly anything to one another! If I feel that way, imagine how it’s going to be for Max and Tara.
“I told you,” Harper said.
He looked at her more closely, but she wasn’t being arrogant or conceited. She wasn’t trying to score points on him. She was just happy that he had come to see things her way.
“Well, I’m not agreeing we should have the wedding here,” he cautioned her. “I’m just saying you’re right that it’s a nice place.”
“Don’t worry, we’re clear,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re willing to consider it. For Tara’s sake, not mine. I think she’d really like this.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know Tara as well as I should,” he confessed.
She looked up from her dinner, eyebrows raised at that confession. “You don’t know her well? I know they aren’t married, but she’s the mother of your niece and nephew. You guys are family.”
“I don’t spend that much time with my family,” he told her. “I wish I had more free time to devote to that kind of thing, but work keeps me so busy that I just don’t.”
“What about holidays?”
“I see them then, but… again, it’s always a little restricted.
Last Christmas, Max and Tara had everyone over to stay at their house.
Our family, Tara’s family… apparently it was a big to-do.
And I was invited, of course, but I didn’t go.
The Stallions had a game on Christmas morning, and I didn’t feel like I could get away. ”
“They scheduled a game on Christmas Day? That’s a little annoying.”
“It makes a lot of sense from a sports perspective,” Theo countered. “A lot of people are home with their families on major holidays, and they want something to watch on TV, so it’s a great time for a game. You get a lot of publicity.”
“I don’t get it, though. Couldn’t you let the players take the day off? Let them spend that time with their families? And then you could also spend more time with your family. It seems like a win-win.”
“We get big advertisers on holidays,” he said. “It’s probably the biggest marketing season of the year, apart from championships. Maybe even including championships. If you aren’t a baseball fan, you don’t tune in for pennant races, but everyone channel-surfs on Christmas Day.”
“All right,” she conceded. “But you don’t have to be there, even if the players and the team manager do. You could be with your family for the holiday. Even if you’re worried something might come up that required your help, you could go and let them call you back if they needed you.”
“Is that what you do? Walk away from work on holidays?”
“God, yes,” she said, taking a sip of her wine.
“I don’t think I could stand it if my work followed me around on days that are supposed to be just mine.
I mean, Christmas Day? That’s for me to spend with loved ones.
What’s the point of working if you can’t give yourself time away with the people you love? ”
“You have to work hard, though,” Theo said. “Just look at this wedding.”
“This wedding? I don’t get it. What does the wedding have to do with taking holidays off?”
Theo gazed into the fire. The connection was so obvious to him that he couldn’t believe he was having to explain, but she truly didn’t seem to have thought of it.
“I know you and I don’t agree on everything we want to do for the wedding,” he said, “but we both want to give Max and Tara the world, right? We both want to do everything we can for them, and for money to be no object?”
She nodded, but slowly. “I don’t think I knew you felt that way.”
“You didn’t know that I would do anything for my brother?”
“You haven’t exactly been over the moon to help with this. You know that.”
“My version of helping just looks different from yours,” he told her. “I want them to have the very best of everything. I want to buy whatever it takes to make this wedding what they want it to be.”
She nodded again. “And I don’t think money is the answer to that.”
“I realize that now. But you must admit that money at least opens doors that would otherwise be closed. You like this place better than the Crystal Ballroom, all right. I can see why you feel that way. You might even be right. But isn’t it good to have a choice in the matter?
And wouldn’t it be worse if we had no budget and had to find the cheapest place we could get, instead of thinking at all about what they’d like?
What if they had to get married in some community center, or in their backyard? ”
“Do you think they’d mind?” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t care, Theo. They love each other. They’d get married in a fast-food restaurant if they had to.”
“Of course they would. But isn’t it nice that they don’t have to?
You can’t tell me you don’t get what I’m saying,” he said.
“I know there’s something sweet and romantic about the idea that they just want to be together no matter the circumstances, and I’m not saying that isn’t true.
But look at all the decisions you’ve made about this wedding.
You wanted to serve the perfect meal. Not the most expensive one, I know, but not the cheapest, either.
You wanted to pick the right meal for them, and isn’t it good that we could do that without worrying about where the money was going to come from? You understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” she agreed quietly.
“So, you get why I have to work holidays. Why I have to work as much as I can.”
“It’s not because you love baseball so much?”
“I don’t care about baseball. Max is the one who loves baseball so much, not me. That’s why he writes about it. Me, I own the Stallions because I thought it would be a profitable enterprise, and because it would let me take care of my family. Of Max.”
“That’s why you work as hard as you do?”
She was watching him closely, looking at him as if she had never seen him before. Theo leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, trying to decide how much he wanted to say. He never spoke to people about this. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even said something to Max about it.
But there was something about sitting here in the gathering dark that made Theo feel as if he could confide in Harper.
Maybe it was the fact that he could no longer see her clearly — he was reduced to looking at the planes of her face in the shadows.
It made him feel as if he was talking to a theoretical woman instead of a real one.
It was almost like he was talking to himself.
“Everything changed after my father left our family,” he said quietly.
“My mother was on her own. She did everything she could to provide for us, but we struggled. It had never been that way before. We had always been spoiled, always had more than enough. And I decided that I was never going to let anyone be in a position to do that to me — or to Max — again. I was going to make sure from that moment on that I had enough money to provide for the two of us, no matter what.”
He was aware of the fact that he was speaking too quickly, and he forced himself to sit back and relax, to exhale slowly and be quiet for a moment.
Harper didn’t respond.
But she looked at him in a way she never had before.
“I thought you were just obsessed with your work,” she said quietly after a moment.
“If I am,” he told her, “it’s for a reason.”
“He’s lucky,” she said softly. “He’s very lucky to have a brother like you, Theo.”
The words struck right at the heart of him, and Theo felt himself shiver.
He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had told him that Max was lucky to have him.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had believed it was true.
But sitting here with Harper, he knew one thing with absolute certainty — she wasn’t the kind of woman to butter a person up with sweet words and false compliments. If she said something flattering about someone, she meant it completely.