45. Morgan
Morgan
Bale Brothers Taking Bale Resorts Down in Their First Act of Teamwork Since the Death of Their Parents
That headline alone should tell you how I am doing as a whole. As I sit in my office at the end of the day, the building is empty except for the cleaning crew and Donovan. I’ve told him three times to go home, but he’s refused all three times.
“Alex is at one of those paint and sip classes, so I would just be going home to an empty house anyway,” he waves his hand.
“I thought you loved those,” I say indifferently.
Not because I don’t care. I do. But because my brain is in a million different directions.
The company is tanking, worse than it was after Scarlett’s article.
Not to mention the court date with Conrad is tomorrow, something I am dreading for more reasons than I care to talk about.
“Sometimes,” he says. “But tonight’s landscape, and I don’t love landscape. I’ll do portraits and puppies all day long. We did that once: painted Rory and Lorelai. I think the girls were offended,” he chuckles. He’s talking about their pugs. “But Bob Ross shit? Not my thing.”
I nod once.
“Ratings are down,” I say.
“They’ll go back up,” he offers.
“Bookings are down,” I add.
“Again, fluctuation is normal. Focus on the court case and you’ll steer the train back on the tracks.
He’s got no solid ground,” Donovan tries to encourage me.
But right now, I don’t want encouragement.
I want the bullshit to be over. Done. I want to restore everything to what it was 20 years ago.
Back to what it was just a few days ago…
I sniff and clear my throat and shove thoughts of her to the back of my mind as deep as I can shove them. Problematically, thoughts of Scarlett seem to float to the surface when I’m not paying attention. Forgetting her is a minute-by-minute struggle for me.
“Here’s the thing,” I sigh. “I don’t want to go to court.”
“You don’t mean you want to just hand it all over to him, do you?” Donovan asks.
“Hell no. I just mean it’s ridiculous that we are going to court to begin with. Can you imagine what my parents would think?” I ask.
“No, I can’t,” he says quietly. “But with Conrad, there’s no easy way.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut.
I am willing away a headache that I’ve had all day, probably from the fight I got into with said brother.
He only got one real shot in, a shot that gave me a swollen lip.
Then, while we were rolling around, we managed to bang each other up pretty good.
It was a reminder that as fit as we are, we’re not exactly strapping young lads anymore.
“You can only do what you can,” Donovan tells me, and I nod.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah…”
As I’m driving home, something festers in me.
I can see my parents in my mind. Hear their voices.
I worry about how people talk about memories of loved ones fading, so I have made a point over the years of replaying their faces, their voices, and their laughs enough times in my head that I won’t forget.
They would hate this.
They would tell us to work together. To fix it outside of a courtroom. To reconcile.
I turn left instead of right, and even though the pit in my stomach grows with every mile I take in the opposite direction of my house, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m doing what they would want.
I haven’t been to my parent’s estate in years. But as I pull up to the gate, despite it being owned by Conrad now, it looks exactly the same. A rush of feelings crash into me, and I let them flood over me momentarily before punching in the gate security code only to have it flash red.
“Alright, so he changed one thing,” I mumble before pressing the call button. Thanks to security cameras, he knows it’s me, and having pressed it again, he answers.
“In your words, brother, what do you want?” Conrad asks.
“Open the gate,” I tell him, more exhausted than anything.
Conrad snorts. “Fat chance.”
“Look, I just want to talk,” I tell him.
“I thought you said it wasn’t a good idea for us to talk. I thought you said you were done,” he says.
“I am done. Done with the bullshit. The fighting. The animosity…”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you fired shots,” he says and I bite back what I really want to say before saying what I should say.
“I’m not here to fight,” I say.
“Good, because I don’t think it’s going to look good if we show up in court with more bruises. My lawyer advised against it,” he says.
“Conrad,” I level with him. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to go to court.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re going to lose. Again, you should have thought about that before.”
I pause again. “This is a family matter. Let’s settle it without lawyers…” I say. Then, “It’s what they would want.”
It’s silent on the other end, and I am about to put my car in reverse when suddenly the gate opens.
“You got new couches,” I say as I walk through the foyer.
“Obviously. Their couches were outdated even back then,” he says.
“And uncomfortable,” I add, but despite the conversation being light, neither of us smile. For one, we still can’t stand each other. But also, standing here together in their home for the first time in 20 years is eerily nostalgic.
And really fucking hard.
“I updated the kitchen too, if you want to see,” he says, sauntering that way. After taking a deep breath in, I follow. “Finally put in the gas range Mom always talked about.”
“Do you cook?” I ask.
“Not like her,” he says, handing me a beer.
“Nobody cooks like her,” I say, and he nods.
We both stand there for a moment, sipping beer in silence until finally, I break it.
“You’re not going to win tomorrow, Conrad,” I tell him, and immediately the teeth come out.
“I told you if you came here to fight, there’s the door,” he points.
“Neither am I,” I tell him. “If we go in there guns blazing, arguing over petty brother bullshit, the judge will probably send us both packing. It will be a waste of money and time and only hurt the image of Bale even more.”
“So, what is it you’re suggesting we do?” he asks.
“We gotta clean up the mess,” I say.
Conrad thinks about that, rubbing the nape of his neck with one hand. Then he pulls out a barstool at the counter and gestures for me to do the same.
I follow suit.
“Have you looked at the media lately?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He nods. “It’s bad.”
“It is bad.”
“Before they were slandering just me. No thanks to you,” I say, and he shrugs. “But now they’re slandering both of us. And all it’s doing is ruining the image of mom and dad.”
“Now you get it,” he says, and I give him a curious look.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Oh, come on. For years you were the golden child. The responsible one at the meetings with your face everywhere. All suits and ties and demands. Meanwhile, I was the one everyone talked about. And not in a good way.”
“You were traveling around, living your best life,” I tell him.
“Seriously?” he asks. “That’s what you think I was doing?”
“I mean, you got a DUI when you were twenty…” I say.
“I was still fucked up over their death,” Conrad admits with less tact than I’d prefer, and I visibly wince at his choice of words.
“I was stupid for a couple years. I’ll admit that.
But after that, I tried. I traveled and managed things, and updated things as I went.
But as you probably figured out in the last couple of weeks, the good stuff never makes the headlines. Only the shit people make up.”
I have to admit he’s right about that, and I nod.
“Not everyone has a professional travel blogger to make their image shiny,” he adds.
“No. Some people just hire them to write shitty articles about their own business,” I jab, and this time he nods.
“True, true. But in fairness, Scarlett actually refused to give a dishonest review. She said if the experience was amazing, that’s what she was going to write. The fact that you fucked up her stay only worked to my advantage,” he says with a grin.
I take another sip of my beer.
Then he sobers again. “It hasn’t been easy for me either, you know,” he says.
“You sure make it look easy,” I say back.
“We all cope in different ways. You hide in the dark,”
“And you YOLO your way around resorts ignoring your responsibilities,” I say.
“And now you see just how heavy those responsibilities are. I can’t keep up with them. Nobody can. Do you know what it’s like stepping into the resorts and being told you’ll never be him?”
“Actually, as of late, I do know. I know exactly what it’s like to be held to his standard.”
“It fucking sucks,” he lets out.
“It does,” I agree. “But it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”
Conrad doesn’t look too convinced. But I never give up easily.
“Listen,” I say, setting my beer down on the counter and leveling with him.
“Right now, it’s us against the media. They’re having a heyday watching us destroy each other.
We’re standing on a crumbling foundation here.
But it’s our fault it’s crumbling. We’ve let our grief and angst rip everything they gave us apart.
We have to work together. It’s the only way Bale will survive. Neither of us can do it alone.”
Conrad stares at me before tipping his head up in my direction. “So you’re admitting that I’m not a failure?” he asks.
“I don’t think either of us are. But both of us will be if we don’t clean up the mess.”
Again, he’s quiet, thinking about that. It’s a Hail Mary for sure.
We haven’t worked together on anything since we were kids.
Pretty sure the last time was when we were trying to build a sandcastle big enough that we could walk inside it.
In the end, we both almost buried ourselves alive, but at least we were working as a team.
“Alright. We can have peace talks,” he says, before going to the fridge again and grabbing two more beers. “But first, you have to tell me everything.”
“Everything?” I ask.
“About her,” he says and I just blink.
“There’s nothing to tell anymore. It’s over,” I say, reaching for the new beer, but he snags it away from me.
“Oh, come on. There’s a story there. You can’t have a one-night stand and then hire the girl and swipe her bucket list and there not be a story. Spill it.”
It isn’t until I start talking that he hands me the beer again and sits down. And I tell him everything. Start to finish. Even the things I didn’t want him to know.
By the time I’m done, my second beer is half gone and I feel like a filleted fish, heart still beating.
“Damn,” he says. “So you fell in love.”
“I didn’t say that,” I snap back.
“Not in so many words. But I knew it anyway. Those photos showed sides of you I haven’t seen in years. I doubt it’s just because she’s a really good photographer.”
Once again, he’s not wrong. It’s a new pattern that I’m not fully used to yet.
“Yeah, she definitely created something new in me,” I say vacantly, but Conrad shakes his head.
“Not created. It was there before. It had just been dormant for a long time. Honestly, I used to think if I was wild enough for both of us, maybe that part of you would come back to life.”
I don’t really know what to say to that. So I just nod.
“I think a small part of both of us died with them,” I say after a while.
“I think so too,” he agrees.
“But the question now is what do we do?” I ask.
“No, the question is what would they have done?” he asks.
I let out a breath. “They would have made a list,” I say.
“They did love lists, didn’t they? Checklists. Packing lists. Grocery lists. Bucket lists…”
“Yeah.” I nod. And Conrad just smiles.
And even now that the book is back in Scarlett’s hands, the bucket lists continue to follow me. I’m starting to think a higher power has something to do with it. Or the spirit of two people who don’t want to see Conrad and I fail.