Chapter 29
At the height of his power, my father had a sailboat—a hundred-foot Hallberg-Rassy—that he named Chasing Sunshine. I still have some of the detritus from it: personalized paper cocktail napkins, a deck chair with my name on it, an orange-and-yellow-striped life preserver.
My father was never happier than when he was at the helm of that ship.
I think he knew that it helped people to overlook those personality quirks of his that I’ve mentioned previously; he was a man who saw what he wanted and took it, and if you could get over his methods, there was a lot of fun to be had in sharing the spoils.
We cracked open many a lobster tail on Sunshine’s deck, floating in bright-blue Caribbean waters and romancing various twentysomethings.
The setting more than made up for my father’s favorite joke: Watch the boom doesn’t knock out those new pearly whites, kiddo, they cost me a fortune!
We set sail on Sunshine to enjoy the best of what life has to offer, and so it struck me as particularly tragic that that’s where my father died.
I like to think that if I’d had more time to prepare, the ending might have been different.
But he scared me, frankly, with all his talk about the angry mob of employees that would come for him, and for me too.
At this eleventh hour he wanted to appease them, even if that meant backing down from all his plans and dreams with his tail between his legs.
He wouldn’t hear that it was too late to come clean, that it was better to keep this thing rolling forward, dishonest as it was, until it righted itself with new investment.
No matter what I said, I knew that I was powerless to make him stay the course he’d set. (Not a mistake I’ve ever repeated.)
It was a disgusting thing to witness, this change of tack. You know what they say: In for a penny, in for a pound; the captain goes down with the ship! The captain of Chasing Sunshine went down without it, though, I’m sorry to report, and they never found his body.