My mom will never sell it, and she shouldn’t. But I guess she’s got the genes to be around for a long time. My grandmother is ninety-five and going strong.” He looked pleased as he said it, and his voice softened even when he talked about his mother. In some ways, he was proud of her, and it was all new to Taylor. “Amanda wrote her an ultimatum, demanding that she step down. She accused me of not having the balls to confront her, so she did it herself. It wouldn’t have gotten her anywhere, but that’s pretty much why the house of cards came down. That, and meeting you, of course. It all happened at the same time. And to tell you the truth, I like my job. I dread the day I’ll be in charge. It scares the hell out of me. What if I screw everything up? I don’t have her creative genius or her vision. I’m a numbers man, like my father. A pencil pusher, as Amanda said.” With no balls, he added silently.
“I’m sure you’ll be great at whatever you do,” she said confidently. “You don’t have to worry about it yet. But wow, that’s quite a story about your mom, and even your dad. It sounds like they did it together, even if she was the front man. You have to have the numbers guys to back up the creative, like you and your brother.” It was a lot to wrap her mind around.
He nodded again. “She’s been grooming us to run it since we were kids. She wants to get the grandchildren into it one day. I think two of them might do it. My sister Liz’s daughter Sophie, she’s going to work there when she gets her master’s from MIT this winter. And my brother’s kid, Alex, but he’s still in high school, so who knows. He just knocked his parents on their asses by announcing that he’s gay. My mom was fine with it; my brother, who’s thirty years younger than she is and supposed to be so free thinking, with his college professor wife, nearly had a stroke.”
“It sounds like you’re related to some very interesting people,” she said with admiration, and then asked him an important question. “Are you still mad at your mother for not being around more when you were a kid, even though you know now what it takes to run the business?”
“She was never around,” he said for emphasis, and then corrected himself. “Well, she was, but not enough. My sister Cass never forgave her for being in the Philippines ordering furniture when my dad died of a heart attack. It took us a day to find her and two days for her to get back.”
“She must have felt pretty bad about that herself,” Taylor said sensibly, with a degree of sensitivity and intuition. “Does she feel guilty about you guys as kids?”
“I think she does now. But it’s a little late. You don’t get the years back. She makes a lot of effort now to be there for us as adults, and she’s good with the grandchildren, better than she was when we were kids. She’s older, and she has more time, although she still travels constantly. She has lots of energy. She just turned seventy in July. That was the trip I took on the boat.” He had told her about it when they met, in a more modest version than going into detail about the Lady Luck. “We do a trip with her every year, on her birthday. This was a big one, the birthday and the trip.”
“At least she makes that effort,” she said quietly. “Do you all get along?”
“Pretty much. Except my sister Cass, who never comes. I haven’t seen her in years. She pretty much divorced herself from all of us, except Granibelle, whom she visits, and she sees my mother a couple of times a year for lunch. I don’t think any of them ever really liked Amanda, although they were polite to her, and she hated them. She just came on the trip because she knew she had to. Our summer trips are a command performance. My mother would go through the roof if we didn’t show up,” or be very hurt, he thought and didn’t say it. Taylor got the picture. They were a strong family, and she could guess easily that their mother was a powerful woman, a force to be reckoned with. He made