Kendall went to work for her father as soon as she graduated, and met a young architect, Ross McLaughlin, when she moved back from L.A. He was tall, dark, and handsome, and he looked surprisingly like Alex, her great-grandfather, although she didn’t notice it. By contrast, she was blond and blue eyed like her grandmother Camille, who had died shortly after her mother was born.
Ross was building small beautiful homes in San Francisco. He loved fine craftsmanship and small, elegant spaces, combined with a cozy, warm feeling throughout the house. Kendall gave him a tour of the house she had grown up in and he was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it. He told her that his dream was to buy houses and restore them and then sell them. He didn’t have the funds to do it yet, but he hoped to one day. She thought his dreams were paltry considering what he was capable of. He didn’t have great financial ambitions, he was an artist at heart.
“You sound like my brother when you talk about fine craftsmanship,” she said with a slightly patronizing tone. She was a tough girl with a sharp tongue but Ross was intrigued by how smart and ambitious she was.
“What does your brother do?” He was curious about her and wanted to see more of her. But she was often busy with her father and still lived in their family home, although both her parents were away a lot, and she usually had the enormous mansion to herself.
“He makes furniture in England with his girlfriend. He dropped out of the London School of Economics.” It was obvious that she didn’t approve of him. Their father was an icon and Ross already understood that she worshipped him and everything he stood for, although Zack Katz had a reputation for being ruthless and self-centered, narcissistic, and had a huge ego. He didn’t sound like a good guy to Ross.
“Your brother sounds like an interesting guy,” Ross said gently.
“He’s an underachiever. He could do a lot better. He doesn’t get along with my father.” Few people did, from what Ross had heard about him, but he didn’t say that to Kendall. She had a hard shell that made him want to melt it.
“What does your mother do?” He was curious about them.
“She grows orchids and takes care of her gardens.”
“So your family is composed of two underachievers and two stars, you being one of the stars, if I’m assessing that correctly,” he teased her and she laughed. She liked him a lot but he didn’t fit the profile of the kind of man she wanted to be with. She wanted to meet a man like her father one day. Ross was the exact opposite of her father, and different from the men she knew. He was a talented architect and a warm, intelligent, sensible person. He had self-confidence and good values. He wasn’t a show-off, he didn’t want to set the world on fire. He wanted a normal life, not to be a legend. He had grown up as an only child in a family where everyone liked each other, and he was close to his parents. Originally from San Francisco, he had gone to Yale, and had then come back to San Francisco, to build his dream houses one day.
“I think that’s about right,” she said, dismissing her mother and brother as the underachievers. She didn’t respect either of them, only her father for everything he had achieved and wanted to be like him. “And my great-grandparents ran a fancy antique store after the family lost all their money in the Crash of ’29.”
“But they kept the family mansion,” he said, digging for clues to who she really was, what she came from, and what was important to her. It was easy to believe that she was very spoiled, given who her father was. And there was a hard shell around her. He wanted to know what was beneath it. Ice or fire. He hoped the latter.
“No, they sold the house,” she explained, “and everything they had. My great-grandparents started the antique store with furniture from the house they sold, and my great-grandmother became a decorator after the war, when my great-grandfather was wounded and lost his legs. Before that, when they lost everything, she was a teacher, and he became a bank clerk when he lost the family bank in ’29.”