A Family Affair: Winter: Truth in Lies, Book 1 (2 page)

Six days had passed since Uncle Harry changed their lives. 
Dear God, he’s dead.
 The rest of the night unfolded in an underwater blur—eyes open, mouths moving but not speaking, hearing nothing. Her mother fell forward, clasping her hands against her forehead, a flower wilting inch by incredible inch. Uncle Harry talked and drank, talked and drank, but it was hard to concentrate on what he said because the underwater currents blocked everything—sound, sight, feeling, certainly understanding.

Christine remembered little of that night other than the smear of life and loss pulling her under, sinking her soul, and the sight of her mother crumpled in a chair with Uncle Harry and his glass of Johnny Walker Red.
 
A man called
, he’d said…
from the hospital. Charlie was in an
 
accident, his car flipped…nothing anyone could do. They’re sending him home.

Sixty seconds and a handful of sentences was all it took to change their lives in horrible, drastic ways they could never have imagined. He’d taken this trip for years, even in snowstorms gusting ice and hail, and always, always come back. She’d never expected to kiss him good-bye one afternoon, seven months shy of his fifty-ninth birthday, and never see him again.

A tiny speck of hope still clung to the possibility that the man in the accident wasn’t her father, that by some bizarre confusion, it was another man, maybe a thief who had stolen her father’s wallet, knocked him unconscious and left him along a deserted road, then took his car, too. When the funeral director contacted them to say the body had arrived, she went with Uncle Harry, praying for a mistake, a miracle, anything. But even at the entrance of the room, some thirty feet away, she recognized the straight nose, the silver-gray hair, the high cheekbones. Her father was dead.

Her mother refused to see him that first day and spent most of her time sequestered in the master bedroom, coming out only once when Dr. Leone brought over a bottle of Valium for her.
 
Your mother will need these
, he’d said. 
This is going to be very difficult for her.
 He was right, of course. She’d depended on her husband to keep life even and her daily dose of Vicodin to keep her arthritic back under control.

Now what? Christine rubbed her temples, trying to ease the dull ache in her head. She could step in, take care of money matters and the daily inconveniences that always seemed to overwhelm and upset her mother.
But what about the rest? No one could replace Charles Blacksworth. He was the one person she could count on for honesty and direction. Hadn’t she carried the sealed letter from Wharton’s around in her briefcase for four days, waiting for his return so he could share the joy or torment of its contents? Wasn’t he the one who helped her shop for a condo and fought the real estate company when they tried to renegotiate the terms?

And how could she ever forget the day he promoted her to vice president? They’d been eating chicken burritos at El Charro’s when he reached in his pocket and pulled out a single key, the one to the large corner office next to his. The reception six days later was a lavish, formal affair, with two rooms full of colleagues and friends in attendance, but it could not compare to the afternoon in the corner booth of that dark Mexican restaurant.

I’m so proud of you, Christine.

Thanks, Dad. That means a lot to me.

You remind me of myself at your age.

I’m only doing what you taught me.

And you do it very well.

I’m going after Granddad’s pocket watch next.

It’s only a watch, Christine.

We both know that’s not true, Dad. It’s so much more than a watch.

And it’s caused more harm than good in this family. I’d just as soon toss it out.

In that case, I’ll take it now.

Your grandfather meant well, but he rewarded the wrong things. I earned it because I practically lived at the office. Is that what you want?

I want to be the best, Dad, like you.

You are the best, Christine, right now, just the way you are, and no father could ever be prouder than I am of you.

And now he was gone and she was sitting across from Thurman Jacobs’s gigantic cherry desk with Uncle Harry squeezed into a Queen Anne wing chair next to her. Thurman Jacobs had gone to MIT with her father, then on to Georgetown before joining his father at Jacobs & Jacobs, one of the most prestigious law firms in Chicago. The firm handled all of the legal issues for Blacksworth & Company, and Thurman himself took care of her father’s personal matters, including his will. It was the matter of the will that brought them to see Thurman this afternoon. She’d hoped to hold off at least another week before dealing with the business side of her
father’s death. Who cared how many stocks and bonds he had, how many unit trusts, the value of his investment property? None of it would bring him back—most of it would just be a brutal reminder of his death. But Uncle Harry had insisted. 
It’s best to get it over quickly, deal with it, straight up.
 It was an odd piece of advice from someone like Uncle Harry. She’d come, though, to appease him and immerse herself in the emotionless distribution of assets, anything to stop thinking about her father’s face, pale and waxen against the satin lining of the ebony coffin.

Thurman Jacobs entered through a side door, his tall frame slightly stooped, like a sapling whose weight isn’t sturdy enough to hold it erect. His gray suit hung from his shoulders, the excess material drooping at the sides. He was bald on top with a trim edge of dusty brown rimming the sides and back of his skull. The round wire frames he wore made his nose seem a bit too long, his face too narrow, and that, coupled with his gangly, bent stature, gave him an Ichabod Crane appearance. At fifty-eight, he looked a full ten years older, yet when he spoke, the rich timbre of his voice blurred the outward visage, and the listener forgot the awkward homeliness encasing the man, forgot the stooped shoulders, the too-long nose, forgot everything but the pure eloquence spilling from Thurman Jacobs’s thin lips.

“Christine. Harry.” He held out his hands to them from across his desk—bony hands, traced with thin, blue veins. “Thank you for coming so quickly.” He eased his hands away, took a seat behind the massive cherry desk, and opened a black portfolio.

“Christine, your father and I went back a good many years—” he bestowed a sympathetic smile on her —“since our days at MIT. I wasn’t just his attorney, I was his friend.” He cleared his throat and when he spoke again, the richness of his voice filled the room. “Which makes this whole situation that much more difficult.”

“Thank you, Thurman. I know my father held you in very high regard.”

He nodded, rubbing his right eye from under his spectacles.
“And I him. We had an understanding, Charles and I, one that went well beyond business.” He flipped open the black portfolio, pulled out a thick document, and leafed through several pages. He rubbed his eye again and shifted in his chair. “Christine, I wish there were some way to say this, some way to prepare you…”

“Thurman, she’s a big girl. Just say it.” Harry reached over and grabbed her hand.

Thurman Jacobs tugged at his shirt collar and his skinny neck inched out like a chicken. “The estate’s been apportioned into an equitable distribution—one part, including assets, real and otherwise, to you, one part to your mother,” he paused, “and one part to a third party.”

“A third party?
Who, Thurman? MIT?”

“No, it wasn’t MIT.” His voice turned quiet, unfamiliar.

“What then? Or who?” Christine asked. “Maybe it’s you, Uncle Harry.”

“It isn’t Harry.” Thurman’s strong voice deflated, the air spilling out in one long, slow whoosh.

Uncle Harry squeezed her hand tightly, but his gaze remained on Thurman. “Just tell us so we can be done and get the hell out of here.”

Thurman’s thin lips moved with effort. “One part has been left to a Ms. Lily Desantro.”

The words were out, forming a complete sentence, and yet they made no sense. Who was Lily Desantro? The pressure from Uncle Harry’s fingers dug into her flesh. She stared at their hands, locked together; her nails pressed into his tanned skin, leaving small, red moons on the back of his hand.

“Jesus,” Uncle Harry swore under his breath. “What the hell was he thinking?”

Christine dragged her eyes from Uncle Harry’s marked skin to the man behind the desk. “Thurman? Who is Lily Desantro?”

Thurman Jacobs was a man possessed of great eloquence, the one chosen by colleagues and corporations to represent, to present, to speak about matters great and small at conventions and Rotary Club dinners. And yet now, he stared at Christine, speechless, his bony fingers rubbing the sides of his protruding temples.

“Thurman?”

“Lily Desantro.” The name fell out between half-closed lips as though he struggled between
duty to tell, loyalty not to.

“I don’t…understand.”

“Do you have an address?” This from Uncle Harry.

Thurman Jacobs picked up a pen, scribbled something on a piece of paper, and held it out. Harry snatched it from him. “Thanks.” Then he stood up, still clutching Christine’s hand. “Come on, kid, let’s go.”

***

The whole world was one great big screw-up. Harry sat in the lounge at the Ritz, waiting for Christine to come out of the restroom. He’d decided to take her for a drink before he told her the truth. Actually, he was the one who needed the drink—several—to give him the guts to carry it out. Why couldn’t people just be who they were? Womanizers, drinkers, liars, and manipulators, instead of pretending around it all, hiding the secrets like dirty laundry stuffed under a bed, and then dying, so the grieving got whammed with two losses—the flesh-and-blood bodies and the images they thought they knew.

Charlie should have told him he had something on the side. Harry would have understood. Gloria was a pathetic piece of flesh and bone, a real martyr, served up super-size. How much pain and self-pity should a man have to take? Charlie should have gotten rid of her years ago. So what if she was Christine’s mother? No woman would have pulled that clinging crap on Harry. He’d never get married. Marriage was nothing but a primitive form of torture; women strapping their hands around a guy’s balls and yanking. Move too far to the left, yank; one extra step to the right, yank. Breathe too hard, yank; not hard enough, yank; breathe at all, yank, yank, 
yank!

So, what was he going to tell Christine? He didn’t like being left to clean up messes; he wasn’t good at them. Creating the mess, now that was his specialty— trash it and duck out, move on to the next catastrophe. Nobody ever expected him to stay around and certainly not to figure a way out of something like this. Hell, no. But Christine was the one decent human being in this screwed-up world. Should he lie and buy a little time, maybe make her think this Desantro woman was some do-gooder out to save the world or some other bullshit?

“Uncle Harry?” Christine slid into the booth beside him. “Are you all right?”

“Just thinking.”
He eyed the drinks on the table. “I must be thinking way too hard if I didn’t see the waitress bring these drinks.” He let out a half-hearted laugh, picked up his scotch and swallowed.

Christine sipped her wine. “Uncle Harry, what’s going on?”

“It’s tough, Chrissie.” He stared at the scotch in his glass. Three more of these should mellow him enough to get the words out.

“Uncle Harry, who is Lily Desantro?”

Harry polished off his drink and set it down. “The first time I heard the Desantro name was the night your father died. The phone call”—he did not want to do this—“remember that? There was a man on the phone; he was the one who told me about Charlie. Said he hit a guard rail and flipped over.” He didn’t mention the part about it taking three hours to pry Charlie from the car.

“Anyway, the guy said not to come, he’d have the body sent home. I asked him who the hell he was and that’s when he told me about the woman, said she was in the car with Charlie.” He paused and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She was this guy’s mother.”

“Is she alive?”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so. He didn’t say she died but I didn’t ask.”

“So, this woman, what exactly was she to Dad?”

This was the part he’d wanted to avoid—the uncertain, almost fearful look on her face, speckled with the tiniest glimmer of knowing. People played games with themselves all the time, asked questions to answers they already knew deep in their gut yet couldn’t admit or didn’t want to admit. He saw it every day with his married friends who bought their wives bracelets and two-carat rings stuffed with diamonds and rubies. All signs of romance, love, affection, devotion, whatever in the hell you wanted to call it, and yet, it wasn’t that at all. It was duty, and ninety-eight percent of the women had picked out the piece, designed it, ordered it, and then told their husbands where to pick it up.
Happy Friggin’Anniversary. These same men followed every piece of ass, every short skirt, tight shirt, screwing them with their eyes, sometimes with their dicks, but if you asked any one of them if they loved their wives, they’d say, “Of course,” not even a second’s hesitation, which always told Harry they were lying, and they knew it. That was the knowing part. They knew whatever love they’d felt in the marriage had been reduced to trips to Tiffany’s and their Gold Card, and if they had found something on the side, they knew, too, that it would stay right there on the side, because they weren’t giving up their homes, their country club memberships, their right to see their kids every night, their 401Ks... their life. They weren’t giving up their life, and yet, none of them realized they’d already done just that.