Baby, Be My Last: The Fairfields | Book Three

by Lennox, Piper

  “So why didn’t you change it legally, when you were old enough?”

  “I thought about it,” I confess. The brandy bites inside my chest when I swallow. “My whole life, Mom told me being a Fairfield would ‘open doors I didn’t even know existed.’ Guess I kept hoping, one of these days...she’d be right.”

  Tim sets the cigar in a heavy glass ashtray, then holds up his finger for me to wait while he goes to a filing cabinet across the room. I watch the tendril of smoke the cigar emits curl toward the high ceiling.

  The smell reminds me of Grandpa McIntyre, who smoked a cigar every single evening after dinner. He used to take me to the tobacco shop in Hillford when he ran low and let me choose which ones he should buy. I liked the smell of cognac-dipped ones best. I’d hold the paper to my nose on the bumpy truck ride back to the farmhouse, inhaling the scent and feeling like a grownup, for some reason, because I liked it so much.

  “This,” Tim says when he sits back down, “is why I asked you to come in today. Besides us talking things out more, of course.” He tosses a packet onto the desk in front of me.

  “‘The Acre Hotel: Position Fulfillment Manual,’” I read, then look at him. “What is this for?”

  “Page 92.”

  I flip to it: Hotel General Manager. “So it’s a job description manual, for all the positions in the Acre?”

  Tim nods and takes another puff of his cigar. “And the page in front of you,” he says, “is the description for your job.” His smile is faint, when my eyes drag back to his. “If you want it.”

  The air suddenly feels acrid, stinging my eyes and throat like I’ve inhaled tacks. I read the description from start to finish, but only one thing really grabs my attention.

  Staring Salary: $197,000.

  “I know it’s not your current field,” Tim continues, “but the pay is good, much better than any other GM job you’ll find in this area. There are lots of ways to advance and grow, too. And you’d be good at it.”

  My heart feels like it’s being squeezed, rather than beating on its own. “Is it even legal for you to give me a job? Aren’t there laws against nepotism?”

  Tim laughs. “If fathers giving jobs to their sons were illegal, Fairfield Industries wouldn’t even exist. This isn’t a government job or anything, so laws like that don’t apply. All I’m obligated to do is notify my shareholders that I’ve hired you, and that we’re related. Not that any of them will mind. ”

  “Don’t I need a degree for this? Hospitality or—or at least management?”

  “Bourne Fairfield dropped out of school at the age of twelve. There are some hospitality courses you can take, if you want, but I was always told the best way to learn anything is to dive right in.” He motions to me. “You’re a Fairfield. Smart, able: you’ll pick it up as you go.”

  The numbers catch my eye again. I have to finish my brandy just to remind myself I’m really here.

  “Can I think about it?”

  Now Tim is the one who looks surprised. I’m sure he thought today could be one big hug-it-out session, and that I’d jump at this shiny gift of his like he was Oprah handing out cars.

  “Sure,” he answers, finally. “Take all the time you need. The position doesn’t have to be filled until February.”

  Tim walks me to the elevators. The book is tucked under my arm. Every time the corner pokes my ribs, I think of those numbers again.

  “I don’t know if I’d feel right,” I say suddenly, when the elevator opens, “taking a job I—I didn’t earn. It’s, uh...it’s tempting.” I rake my hand through my hair and sigh deeply. “Really tempting. But there’s this feeling about it I can’t shake. Like it’s charity, or something.”

  “I only give charity to charities,” Tim says simply. “Think of it as one of those doors that your mom talked about. You said you kept waiting for one to open—now it is.”

  He holds out his hand. This time, I shake it.

  22

  “Wow. Not what I would’ve expected, when he called you up there.”

  “Right?” Silas stretches out his legs on my bed. Arrow hops up and falls across them, sighing. “I thought he just wanted to talk his way out of shit. You know, not take any responsibility for what he said when I was at the estate.”

  My hairbrush snags its way through the last bit of my hair. I look at him in the mirror. “I mean...isn’t he still doing that?”

  “Kind of. He admitted it was stupid and selfish, and he said he wouldn’t do things the same way again. But then he turns around and says it is what it is, basically. Which...I guess is true. He can’t undo it.” He quiets, turning my alarm clock in his hands, sending the hammer clinking dully against each bell. “Maybe I’m not being fair. Staying mad at him over it.”

  “You have the right to be angry,” I remind him, “and when you forgive him, it should be because you’re ready. Not because he talked you into it.” I pause and set down my brush. “That’s not what I meant, though. I was talking about the job.”

  Silas sits up and watches me dig my uniform out of the closet. “You think he only gave it to me so I’ll forgive him?”

  “Don’t you? It’s not based on merit; it’s not like he’s seen your résumé or called employers. He’s just giving it to you to try and make up for not being in your life, instead of taking the blame.”

  “He did take the blame.”

  “He blamed your mom. He still blames your mom. And you won’t even go find out if that’s the truth or not.”

  “Why are you turning this into a bad thing?” Silas nudges Arrow off his legs and stands, following me into the bathroom. While I change, he braces his forearms in the doorway. “It’s a great job. Does the reason I get it really matter?”

  “It would to me, if I were in your shoes.” I fish my Acre nametag out of the jewelry dish. I’m so tense, I accidentally stab my finger on the pin when I put it on. “I wouldn’t want a job just because somebody feels guilty. I’d want it because they know I’ll be good at it.”

  “I will be good at it.”

  “Tim doesn’t know that.”

  He catches my hand when I reach for my toothbrush, staring at me like he can see everything I’m thinking. I know he can’t, though. If he could, he’d be gone in two seconds flat. He wouldn’t kiss me like he does, sudden and deep, until the tension in me dissolves.

  “I didn’t say I’d take it.” He pulls me close, arms around my waist. “But...yeah, I’m considering it. It’s incredible money. And I’d get to live in the city.” He hesitates. “You could move in with me, if you wanted.”

  “I didn’t think of that. I guess that’s one perk.” The rest of his words register as I kiss him back. “How much money?”

  “Almost $200,000 starting,” he says, nodding at my shock. “Yeah. That’s more than I’d ever make in Hillford. I think I’d be crazy not to consider it.”

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “GM. At the Acre.”

  I fight every electric signal in my legs, telling me to step away from him. “The Acre?”

  “Yeah.” Silas shrugs and straightens my nametag. “So that would be kind of cool, right? Us working together.”

  “Me working for you, you mean.”

  Silas’s arms fall to his sides as he steps back. “What’s the real problem, here? Because it—” He stops himself and takes a breath.

  I run the lint roller over my shoulders and arms, watching him through my hair. “Because it…what?”

  He exhales, tongue tucked against his cheek. “It sounds like you’re...I don’t know. Mad, I guess.”

  “I’m not mad.” I slide past him, jostling Arrow as I sit at the foot of my bed and unlace my shoes. “I’m confused. A few days ago, you couldn’t stand this guy. What makes you think everything will magically fix itself when you take a job from him?”

  “If,” he corrects. “I might not take it. If it weren’t for the paycheck and getting to live close to you, or with you, I wouldn’t even be conside
ring it.” He pauses. “And that’s all I’m doing: considering it.”

  “Okay.” I shrug and finish getting ready, eager for the conversation to end. Our kiss goodbye in the driveway is the first one I don’t wish could go on and on. As I drive in one direction, and he drives away in the other, it’s the first time I don’t feel a pang surge through my chest, not knowing when I’ll see him again.

  I’m surprised when I see the exit for Hillford. It feels like I’ve just left Camille’s house when suddenly, I’m home.

  I put on my signal to take it.

  Then I stop, look at the job book Tim gave me on the passenger seat, and let the exit pass.

  Filigree is about twenty minutes farther on the highway. This part of the trip feels excruciatingly long.

  Mom just about cries when she opens the door to find me.

  “I didn’t know you’d be in town today! Come in, come in. I’m making chicken, I’ll go throw some extra in the fryer.”

  I hear my back crack from her hug, it’s so tight. “That’s okay, Mom, I’m not hungry.”

  “You can take it with you. Come in, I’ll get you a drink. We haven’t talked all week, I was getting worried.”

  I’m tempted to remind her I’ve still texted her every morning, like always, but I realize it has been different lately. Instead of conversation, it’s more her updating me on the little bit of excitement that goes on around here, while I do the textual equivalent of smiling and nodding. The longest message I’ve sent was probably something like, “Wow, that’s crazy,” in response to Mrs. Langley getting into an argument with another old lady about the church potluck.

  Mom pours me some Pepsi and invites me to sit in the kitchen while she cooks. I don’t like the buzzing energy, her excitement. I’m here for something serious.

  “...and the birdfeeder’s empty, again, but of course the squirrel keeps coming back,” she’s saying, when I come out of my silent rehearsal, wet my lips, and stare at her until she turns from the back window.

  “Why did you tell me Tim left us?”

  I might as well have spiked my glass onto the floor, she looks so shocked. “What?”

  “You told me Tim abandoned us—that he just ghosted you completely, stopped visiting, stopped payments, all of it.” It’s almost impossible to look her in the eye. I’d much rather stare at the ceramic napkin holder in the center of the table, shaped like a goose on a nest. But I do look at her, no matter how sure I am she’ll cry and I’ll lose the anger that’s finally flinging these words out of me.

  “Because he did,” she says, after a moment. Her mouth is open a bit, eyes honed on mine. “I suppose he’s been talking in your ear about me, all these weeks?”

  “No,” I say quickly, but it’s too late: she’s already got a dish towel in her hand, whipping it on the countertop as she paces and makes “pssh” sounds.

  “I knew it.” Piece by piece, she fishes the chicken out of the fryer. “I knew when you started this whole mess, Tim was going to feed you lies left and right. He thinks he can throw me under the bus? Turn my own son against me like that?”

  “I’m not ‘against you,’ Mom.” I roll my eyes.

  This, as I already knew, is the wrong thing to do.

  “Silas,” she says gravely, pointing the tongs at me, “I told you years ago, the first time you wanted to go off and reconnect with him, that he would try and do exactly this. Didn’t I? That he’d tell you a bunch of lies, and try to take everything I said and twist it.”

  “Except that you didn’t tell me much of anything, did you?” I turn in my seat and cross my ankle over my knee, waiting for the answer she doesn’t give. “All you ever told me was, ‘He abandoned us.’ You made it sound like he pretended I didn’t exist. You never mentioned him paying for Pines Charter, the Towncar—”

  “And? You think a few gifts and some checks early on makes him walking out okay?”

  I search her eyes. There’s so much conviction there, I hate having to ask my next question.

  But I know I have to. I went looking for answers, prepared to go wherever I had to in order to find them.

  “Did you tell him you’d contact his wife if he came near me again?”

  Mom blinks, like she’s waiting for me to laugh and tell her I’m kidding. “Why would I do that?”

  Now I have to look away. Her voice sounds too hurt. “Tim said he was going to leave Jeannie for you. For us.” I stare at the napkin holder. Trace the edges of the goose’s beak with my finger, the ceramic smooth and cold, just like I remember from when I was a kid. “And when he didn’t...I don’t know, I guess you were angry, and....”

  “And what? If I couldn’t have him, no one could?” Mom drops the tongs into the sink and sits across from me. “Silas. Look at me.”

  Slowly, I do.

  “I told him he had to be in your life a hundred percent,” she says quietly, “or not at all. Yes, I thought he would leave Jeannie. I didn’t want him to, exactly—that’d be a horrible thing to wish—but when he and I got together, he swore it was over with her. Said they were basically divorced as it was, in fact. Just a matter of paperwork.”

  The chair creaks as she sits back, gaze drifting from me to the napkins. “So, yes,” she goes on, “I thought he was going to leave her. Months went by, years...and he just had every excuse you could think of for still being with her. But I believed him, over and over again.”

  I wait for the rest. When she doesn’t offer it, I ask, “When did you stop?”

  A sad kind of smile crosses her face. “When he told me they were in counseling. He said he loved us both—me and Jeannie. But he had to try and make his marriage work. And...I agreed.”

  Mom takes a breath. I hear the tears at the back of her throat, but she swallows them down and shakes her head, adjusting her composure as easily as the clip holding back her hair.

  “I never wanted to be a mistress,” she says, laughing to herself in a dark way. “I guess no one does, really, but—but I never expected I’d fall for a married man. I thought seeing a ring on a guy’s hand, knowing someone else had put it there, would always stop me. And it always did. Until I met him.”

  “What was it about him that even.... I mean, how did you guys—”

  “You probably didn’t catch many glimpses of it from your visits,” she says, sighing again, “but he’s very charming. And funny. And he had this way of...” She searches for the words. “...making me feel loved. Not the gifts and money, but the way he’d look at me.”

  “Yeah,” I say, voice sharpening, “definitely didn’t see that side of him.”

  “Well, he was young.” Mom gets up and starts fixing our plates. “A lot changes in twenty years.”

  I study her back as she moves around the kitchen. “So you gave him up? Or he walked out?”

  “I gave him up for myself,” she says, and pauses to look out the window again at the empty birdfeeder. When she turns back to me, her eyes look glassy. “You’re the one he walked out on.”

  The plate clanks as she sets it in front of me. Her fried chicken is one of my all-time favorite meals, but the sight of it right now makes me nauseous. I nudge it away as carefully as possible. “He said you told him not to see me anymore.”

  “I told him to step it up, or stop it altogether,” she corrects. I pass her the salt and watch her pour the usual ridiculous amount on her food. “I got tired of him showing up once a month, at best, and acting like all his gifts and the private school could make up for that. I told him it was fine if he stayed with Jeannie; I was over that, by then. And I really did think it was better to try and make his marriage work, if there were still feelings there. But he couldn’t just erase the whole thing like it had never happened.” She takes a bite and chews thoughtfully before looking up at me. “He wasn’t going to erase you.”

  “So why didn’t you let him stay in contact? I know it was ‘all or nothing,’ but....” My sentence trails. Not because I don’t know what to say, but because I’ve kno
wn exactly what I wanted to say for weeks, and can’t believe I’m finally doing it.

  “But maybe ‘some’ would have been better for me than nothing,” I finish.

  “I didn’t think so. Pop-ins a few times a year, a bunch of toys delivered by courier on your birthday instead of by him? What kind of relationship is that?” She nods at my food, urging me to eat. I push it away farther, but her glare makes me pull it back and take a bite. “He just couldn’t understand that all the money, all the stuff—it couldn’t make up for him not being there. You needed him. And I wasn’t going to let him buy his way off the hook like that.”

  I nod. Finally, something we agree on.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t get.” This time, when I push my plate away, she doesn’t reprimand me. I wipe my mouth and look at her. “Why did you name me Fairfield? If you wanted him in my life completely or not at all—why give him even that one thing, me taking his name?”

  “That wasn’t for him,” she laughs quietly, pressing her mouth to her palm, elbow resting on the table. “It was for you. Being a Fairfield—”

  “I know. It ‘opens doors.’” I pull my hands through my hair and stand. Mom watches me in silence as I carry my plate to the counter.

  “Silas.”

  I hesitate, but turn when her chair scrapes the floor and she stands.

  “His name was the only advantage I could give you,” she says, voice warped with tears again. “Maybe I did make a mistake, not letting him give you the gifts and money—I’ve never stopped wondering if I made the right choice for you, there. But his name....”

  My dish lands in the sink harder than I mean it to. “I’m sorry, I just don’t get. If I wanted someone out of my kid’s life, and mine...I’d remove every single reminder. Especially their name. Being a Fairfield, but not one of those Fairfields—do you have any idea how much shit I caught over that? People thought I was lying. And the ones that believed me? They just felt sorry for me. Nobody gave me any advantages, nobody opened doors—it was all pity.”