by Hazel Parker
I think I have an idea. But I’ll go along with it.
“I have witnessed so many horrific things in my childhood and young adult life that I consider it a miracle of God that I have made it this far. The best that I can understand it is that I have been asked to make sure that the generations after me have stability and control so that they do not have to suffer as I have. So when I tell you to get married before you can have a place in the will, it is not because I want to see you suffer. On the contrary, it is because I don’t want to go to the grave not knowing if my family was set.”
At least now, my grandfather’s rationale made some sense. I didn’t agree with it at all and felt it had too many flaws to even list off, but at least he didn’t come across as some stuffy old man going, “It’s my way or the highway.” I just didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that I had plenty of stability already. Love just didn’t factor into it.
“A life without love isn’t worth living. You have a very successful career and I’m sure lots of money, but what good is that if you cannot share it with someone?”
“I know,” I said, but that wasn’t admitting I knew what my grandfather meant.
It was more admitting that I could see there was no winning this particular argument. If I couldn’t win it now, so close to the deadline, there was no winning it at all, period. I would have to figure out a way to play by my grandfather’s rules.
“Well, you know that you have to. I would suggest going to talk to Nick. He seems to have figured it out.”
“OK,” I said, standing up. “Sorry I lost my temper.”
My grandfather gently dismissed me. I walked out determined not to show any more frustration, but the second I got into the hallway, I wanted to break something.
Talk to Nick? What the fuck? Talk to the Major League All-Star who had half of California chasing his dick and had stumbled into a hot woman as a result? The one who could have afforded the family yacht with his own money?
“Why don’t you just pay someone off to marry you?”
The memory of us on my family’s yacht just a couple of weeks ago came roaring back, and with it came that statement from Nick. I’d laughed it off at the time as ludicrous, as the kind of thing that only desperate, fat men did because they couldn’t sweet talk a librarian into smiling.
But…
Well, shit, it’s not like I had much time. And it’s not like there was any rule about the marriage. My grandfather had never said love was required or that it was required I be dating the girl for some time. He had just assumed that was how it would play out.
How about it? Brett, the player, gets into a secretly arraigned marriage. How does that sound?
It sounded fucking crazy.
But the alternative of being left out of the will was so much worse, it made the “fucking crazy” seem “fucking obvious.”
I got back to my office, slumped in my chair, and put my head in my hands. A few seconds later, the familiar knock pattern from Layla followed.
“Come in,” I said. “Not that there’s anything that can be done.”
“Oh, don’t be so pessimistic,” she said. “I take it that it didn’t go well?”
“When was the last time you heard of an elderly man having his mind changed by something someone his twenties said?”
Layla, usually the one full of snark and combative words, kept quiet as she took a seat across from me.
“You want me to ask around to any of my girlfriends…”
“You really want to do that?” I said.
“No, no, I don’t. That would be too weird if you wound up marrying one of my friends and she became my sister-in-law.”
“Yeah, exactly,” I said with a sigh. “This fucking sucks, Layla. Not to go too deep into your past, but at least you’ve known what it’s like to have love. I’m just…out here, womanizing, flirting, and having fun. And if it weren’t for that dollar sign above my grandfather’s head…”
“You’d just keep living this way until you burned out, I get it,” she said. “And maybe it’s better that you don’t know what it’s like to have gotten burned. It’s not something you recover from, I’ll tell you that.”
Or choose to recover from? I wisely kept my mouth shut on that one.
“I guess maybe I’ll just have to start making sacrifices,” I said. “Guess this geezer is going to have to settle down.”
“Aww, poor guy,” Layla said, but it was strangely said without sarcasm. “Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. Lord knows we all need a little bit of it.”
I smiled, thanked her, and waited for her to leave the room.
She wasn’t going to be the one to help me.
But she was right. I was going to get a little bit of that help.
Chapter 2: Chelsea
In the corner of our downtown Sacramento family store, a high-end, Italian furniture shop named Polozzi’s, I could hear everything.
I could hear the customers coming in, speaking with our sales agents, and the mixture of “oohs,” “ahhs,” and “oh, that’s kind of pricey.” I could hear my father in another office just down from me, on the phone, usually speaking about things that seemingly had nothing to do with furniture or anything related to that particular business. And most of all, I could hear my own yearning for something more, something greater than what I already had.
“Yes, Mario, I already told you, the order has been placed,” my dad said in an adjacent room as I ran through some financial numbers form the previous month.
I didn’t know what my father did, but I knew well enough not to discuss it. The numbers for the store always seemed to turn out in the green, even when I knew full well there was no logical reason for them to do so. In a similar fashion, I liked to believe I had somehow turned out just fine, even if my mother had passed away eight years ago and my dad was largely “at work” most of the time.
In other words, I might not have known what my father ever did, but I knew well enough that somehow, the “hands-off” approach was working. Even if that means he has his hands on somewhere else.
My cell phone buzzed in my desk drawer, causing me to jump unexpectedly. I already had a sinking feeling of who was contacting me, though I had to admit some surprise that he was doing so this early.
“What do you mean, package not found?” my father said in the other room. “How damn difficult is it to find something left on your doorstep? Or maybe you need to walk the ten feet down your driveway to your mailbox?”
I knew I didn’t need to answer the text, not when it was in the middle of the workday. But, then again, what else was someone vastly overqualified as a degree holder from UC-Berkeley for a role as a back-office accountant at a family store supposed to do when they had finished their job around eleven a.m.? Pretend to do work? Keep an eye on my father and keep a mental dossier of all the things he did that seemed shady? Keep my mouth shut so that I could continue to earn a livable income at a wage laughably higher than what my role entailed? I hated to sound so arrogant, but sometimes, the truth contained a hint of arrogance.
I pulled open the desk drawer and sighed. Sure enough…
“Hey! Haven’t heard from you since our date last week. Let’s chat soon! Hope all’s been well!!! :-)”
Karl.
Karl had been my most recent Match.com experience, and he had shown me the challenge of trying to seek a serious relationship at such a young age. The guys who had their shit together knew it and just slept with the field accordingly, and the guys who wanted to sleep with just one part of the field didn’t have their shit together. After the date, I hadn’t exactly ghosted Karl; I’d told him that I would contact him later when I figured things out, but I hoped that that got the point across.
I guess, as I said, some guys didn’t have their shit together.
“What’s this, you on your cell during working hours?”
I immediately slammed my phone back in my desk drawer, but there was absolutely no reas
on to try and do a cover-up when my father walked in the door.
“I thought it might be an emergency,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s not you I worry about; it’s one of the floor people coming back and seeing you on your cell and thinking they can get away with it. They’re the ones I worry about.”
I know. You don’t ever seem to really “worry” about me.
“Anyway, I need to go check in on a furniture delivery for Mario,” he said. “Can you hold down the fort?”
“Of course,” I said, knowing I had far too much experience for a back-office accountant and quasi-manager to not know how to hold down the fort.
“Thanks.”
“What time will you be back?”
My father looked surprised to hear the question. I felt surprised for having asked it. We were so used to not having any communication of the clarifying kind.
“I dunno, before the end of the day.”
With that, my father left. Unfortunately, “before the end of the day” did not specify the end of the workday. I was most likely to see him here at about nine a.m. when I got in the next day; he was probably just going to head back to his apartment at the end of the day.
At least now, though, I could relax. It wasn’t even time for the mid-day closing, and I had already finished my work. I could…
Do absolutely nothing.
I need something more. More challenging. More invigorating. More…exciting.
A better job. Better prospects. A better situation.
I tried to remind myself that I was only twenty-four, that most people took until their thirties before they started doing work that really made them valuable, but in a weird way, my father’s presence, as hands-off as it was during the day, would likely make it impossible for me to branch out too much.
I stayed in the back office, playing games on my phone and my computer, until just before one in the afternoon when our store closed for two hours. I locked down the place, told our employees to go enjoy their time off, and started walking toward the nearby pub, which also served good wine and some great lunch.
“Oh, hey!”
I recognized the voice immediately. My reaction before might have been empathetic, but now it was frustration.
“Karl, what do you want?” I said as the lanky, awkward guy approached me from the other side of the pub.
Also, how the hell did he happen to bump into me? This is going from desperate to creepy distressingly fast.
Maybe my dad’s side work will come in handy.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for a second date, and—”
“Karl, I was hoping you would get the hint, but let me just spell it out,” I said. “I enjoyed my time with you, but I just don’t think it would work if we kept going out. I’m sorry.”
Even that was not exactly spelling it out. I didn’t enjoy the date at all. He had talked about his work as a computer programmer literally the entire date, to the point that I almost wanted to ask him what he remembered about me.
“But, but, I treated you so well, and—”
“And what?” I said. “That doesn’t mean you are automatically handed a second date, Karl.”
Karl looked utterly confused. I started to suspect that someone had probably coached him on his dating technique but had failed to account for the part where the woman would act like a normal human being and have agency to say yes or no.
“This is bullshit,” he said, his voice still pleading. “I was so kind to you! I treated you well, and, and…”
“Karl,” I said. “No one’s been honest with you before about this, have they? You were nice to me, but you didn’t connect. You treated me like a test, like a thing to be played, not a real person. I’m not like most girls.”
That was probably too arrogant, and most women likely said that. But I was so fed up with Karl that I had lost my filter. I would have said “poor guy” looked frustrated and confused but stalking me outside the pub was a step too far.
“Fine, fuck off,” he said in a fury. “I treated you well. See how you like the assholes of the world!”
Like yourself? I thought with an eye roll as I ignored him and walked into the pub.
At least Karl was nice enough to reinforce the thought that I needed something more. But where to find it?
And for that matter, could I even seize it if I found it? I still saw myself as the awkward dork in high school who didn’t go out, didn’t party, and didn’t really drink. I did all three now, but it wasn’t like I worked Monday to Friday and then immediately slipped into a cocktail dress to go to a nightclub.
I tore through my lunch, but by the end of it, I was just feeling a little more stressed and a little more disappointed with how things were going. I did what I almost never did—I ordered some alcohol on a lunch break.
“Any particular requests?” the waiter asked as he handed me a drink menu.
I scanned the list. It didn’t take me long to find the answer.
“The Ferrari Malbec, please.”
A Ferrari wine. The good shit.
Actually, come to think of it, I could easily start filtering my dates out based on if the guy chose to order a Ferrari wine, a Miller Lite beer can, or a gin and soda on our first date. The second said, “guy who had just gotten out of college and hadn’t matured his drinking habits;” the last one said, “guy who is probably an alcoholic” or “guy who can only operate under the guise of liquid courage.”
The first one, I hoped, represented the kind of guy I wanted.
I had no idea how I’d even meet such a person, though, let alone actually wind up in a serious relationship with them.
I got onto Bumble and Tinder and looked through my various matches. I tried to do the “Ferrari Wine” test. Would any of these guys be likely to drink wine?
A few of them did. But those same guys were also the ones that didn’t show their teeth when they smiled, that wore sunglasses in half their photos, and that tried to impress by standing next to fancy sports cars. In other words, once again, it was the dichotomy problem.
Maybe I just needed a stroke of luck to come down. Maybe I just needed some handsome man to walk through a door, strike up a conversation with me, and have it fall into that.
Or maybe I just had to accept that I wasn’t going to get married at this point. I just hated that that meant waiting for a few years.
I took my time finishing my wine, in no particular rush to make it back to the store. I got a text from my friend Amanda, asking if I wanted to grab some drinks after work. I said sure, mostly because I had nothing else to do, even though I wasn’t a heavy drinker. I closed my tab and went back to the shop. Bored, I looked up Ferrari Wines on Google.
The winery had started some fifty, sixty years ago, founded by a man named Alf Ferrari. The website said that the winery was run by generations of Ferraris, but it didn’t specify anything more. The only photo was of Alf and his wife, both of them very obviously grandparents.
I decided then that whoever got my next date would have to take me to Ferrari Wines. Spoiled? Maybe.
But after stalkers outside Polozzi’s, I felt like I’d earned the right to ask karma for something nice in return. And who knew? Maybe I’d get something much more than just “nice” in return.
Maybe, for once, luck would be good and not mediocre.
Chapter 3: Brett
“Brett?”
I looked up to see my grandfather knocking on the door.
“Grandpa,” I said, trying to sound certain but likely sounding anything but right then. “How can I help?”
“Well, by the end of this, you can help me process this paperwork,” he said, dropping a stack on my desk with such force that the thud reverberated through the room. “But I also wanted to use this as an excuse to come to you and say that I hope you understand what I do with you and the rest of the grandkids is out of love, not some archaic belief. At least, I hope love isn’t archaic.”
“I know” referred more to the fact that I knew there was no winning this argument. I could scream and bitch and moan and maybe even take them to court if I really hated my family...but I didn’t. I loved them, as archaic and backwater and crazy and traditional and stiff and uptight as I thought they could be sometimes. It was just too bad that that love mandated I get married in the next, say, fourteen months or so.
“We went through hell in ways I hope you never learn to get you this far,” my grandfather said. “The least that I can do is to make sure that whatever hardships you suffer, they are not to the same degree as what I suffered. Starting with this paperwork.”
He leaned over, patted my shoulder, and gave a genuine smile that showed none of the exhaustion I had.
“See you around, Brett.”
He left my office, humming a tune to himself, seeming mighty pleased and happy with how he was feeling. It was nice that at least one Ferrari in this winery felt good about himself.
I looked at the paperwork and at the clock. It was about fifteen until five. I had plans to meet up with Nick on one of his rare off days in the season, and given that the next opportunity to meet up with him probably wouldn’t happen until around the All-Star break in July, I desperately had to get this done.
It was times like these that I wished I had an assistant to help me with the brunt of the paperwork.
Nevertheless, feeling charged and desperate to go see Nick, I sprinted through all of the paperwork, signing the necessary documents, placing them in a bin for further review elsewhere, and discarding them as needed. Most of the papers were just contracts or forms that needed signatures; they were forms I’d already handled a million times. My concern had far less to do with what I had to do than how much I had to do.
Fortunately, I finished after about forty-five minutes, meaning I’d make our six o’clock drinks schedule no more than a couple of minutes late. I sprinted—literally—out of the office, hopped in my Tesla, and hit the road to meet up with good old Nick.
