Chapter 12 #2
“You’ve been asking the wrong people what to do your whole life,” his mother said.
“You asked your board. You asked your lawyers. You asked that girl. You’ve never once asked the only people who know.
” She stood up and took his coffee cup away, though it was still half full.
“Go ask her father what she needed. Ask him what you missed. And then shut up and listen to the whole answer.”
* * *
Richard Hadley did not want to let him in.
He opened the door with the lion knocker and saw who it was and started to close it again. Connor put out a hand. He didn’t push. He just held it flat against the door.
“Richard,” he said. “Please. Five minutes.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“I know. I’m not here to talk.” Connor kept his hand on the door. “I’m here to ask you something. And then I’m going to listen.”
Richard looked at him through the gap in the door for a long moment. The old man looked worse than Connor had ever seen him. His eyes were red. He had not shaved. He was not wearing a bow tie. Connor realized he had never seen Richard Hadley without a bow tie.
Richard opened the door.
* * *
They sat at the kitchen table. The same table, Connor thought, where he had sat on a Tuesday night in November and put the transition plan down in front of this man and said, she’s exhausted, Richard, we have to help her.
He did not sit in the same chair.
“Caroline told me about the plan,” Richard said. “She came here on Sunday. In a ball gown and a pair of rubber boots. And she found out I initialed it.” His voice was thin. “She won’t take my calls. My own daughter. She’s never not taken my calls in her life.”
“I know,” Connor said. “I did that. I brought it here.”
“I signed it.”
“Because I told you to.”
Richard looked at him.
“I’m not here about the plan,” Connor said. “I’m here to ask you something I should have asked a long time ago. And I want the real answer, Richard. Not the polite one. Not the one you give the chairman.”
He took a breath.
“What has Caroline needed,” he said, “that I didn’t see?”
Richard Hadley sat very still.
Then he took off his reading glasses and set them on the table and rubbed his eyes. When he spoke, he did not look at Connor. He looked at the scratches in the tabletop.
“Two years ago,” he said. “New Year’s Eve. We had a little party here. You weren’t here. You were in Colorado with some investors.”
Connor remembered. He had called her at midnight. He had been in a hot tub.
“She had too much champagne,” Richard said.
“Which she never does. And about one in the morning, after everybody left, she sat right there where you’re sitting, and she put her head down on this table.
And she said, Dad, I’m so scared.” His voice shook.
“I said, scared of what, sweetheart? And she said, If the season’s bad, he’ll sell. ”
Connor went cold all over.
“She said, Not because he’s cruel. Because it’s business.
And he’s good at business. And he’ll be right.
” Richard wiped his eyes. “She said, Every morning I walk in through the loading dock and I think, is this the year? Is this the season that isn’t good enough?
” He looked at Connor for the first time.
“And she made me promise never to tell you. She said it would hurt your feelings. That you’d saved us, and she was being ungrateful. ”
“I would never sell Hadley’s,” Connor said. His voice came out strange. “Never. Richard. I would never—”
“You never told her that.”
Connor stopped.
“You never told either of us that,” Richard said.
“You put in the money, and you shook my hand, and you took the chairman’s seat.
And then you never came. You sent Brittany to the meetings.
You sent the numbers by email. You never walked the floor.
You never once stood in that atrium and said, this is yours, it’s safe, I’m not going anywhere.
” The old man’s hands were flat on the table now.
“So how would she know? How would I know? We only knew what we saw. And what we saw was a man who owned our store and didn’t care enough about it to show up. ”
Connor couldn’t speak.
“She’s worked every season for three years,” Richard said, “like the store could be taken away from her if she failed. Six in the morning till midnight. She stopped coming to Sunday dinner. She lost weight. You know what I thought, when you brought me that plan and said she was exhausted? I thought, yes. Yes, she is. Finally somebody sees it.” He laughed, a broken sound.
“And you didn’t see it at all. You just had a girl tell you about it.
And I was so grateful that anybody noticed, I didn’t ask why. ”
“She was exhausted,” Connor said slowly, “because she was afraid of me.”
“Your money didn’t make her safe, son.” Richard picked his glasses back up and held them. “It made her afraid. It made both of us afraid. I signed your plan because I was afraid of you too.”
Connor sat at the kitchen table in Society Hill where his wife had done her homework as a girl.
He thought about three years of Caroline walking in through the loading dock every morning at six, and about the windows — Window six, The First Lighting, the girl on her father’s shoulders.
He thought about her sitting at this table on New Year’s Eve with her head down, saying is this the year, while he sat in a hot tub in Colorado.
And he thought about himself, believing he had done the biggest thing a man could do.
“Thank you,” he said to Richard. His voice was barely there. “Thank you for telling me.”
Richard looked at him for a long time.