I spent the next week in unusual places. While my warm bed beckoned me to stay, I was too enraged with my father to surrender to the cozy cave of it. The people in my life were few in number—Dad, Paul, Jenny—but I had always trusted each of them implicitly. Jenny I held blameless, but Dad and Paul had lied to me. And because I didn’t know to look for the worst in them, I’d never realized they were stunting my growth with their fake kindnesses. I’d stayed young and naïve and, just like a child, never left home. But now that I had shimmied into this new, mistrustful skin, now that I understood that everyone—even the so-called good ones—could be sharks, it was easier to step out. So long as I had my mace and safety whistle and healthy dose of skepticism.
I drove to the country club—the patch of land and collection of people I loathed the most, for how utterly out of place they made me feel. But I went because it was the geography my father cherished more than any other, and I wanted to be there, not to feel him, not to be near him, but to stomp on his sacred ground. That was the girl I was now: a spiteful, impudent, angry teenager, ready to defile a consecrated place.
I put my name on the “orphan” sheet as someone looking for a tennis match, and then went to the gym and attempted to jog on the treadmill. But my plan to spite my father on his hallowed ground backfired because everywhere I turned, I saw his ghost. Die already! my mind blared. Leave me alone! I didn’t need to see his chatter-teeth dentures in the mouth of another old man, or hear his booming laugh from a guy goofing around with a buddy, or see the wink-and-a-smile combo my father had perfected delivered by some dandy at the coffee bar. My father was everywhere.
Just as I was rounding my last lap, my phone vibrated. It was the pro shop, notifying me that another single had shown up in search of a partner. I shot a snide look to an older guy pumping dumbbells who had the uncanny ability to clear his throat with the same tenor as my father, then wiped down the treadmill, ducked into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face, and headed to the pro shop.
There stood a woman, a slick alpha girl decked out in all the best gear, a one-piece tennis dress clinging greedily to her perfect curves. As if she were stepping onto the courts at Wimbledon with Venus Williams. I hated her instantly.
“I’m Melissa,” I said. She eyed me like the other girls always had, no doubt wondering why I was wearing a tennis skirt with bulging pockets from the days of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
“Devon Marchón,” she said in her confident, corporate, hint-of-Charleston drawl. She was looking in my direction, but not actually making eye contact. More like she was looking past me, scanning for some cute guy who might delight in watching hotshot Devon Marchón kick my sorry butt. “My tennis partner got called back to work. She’s a surgeon. I didn’t even know about the orphan list.”
She was a VP of marketing at a big firm, she told me as we walked. She rambled on, blabbing about her accounts, her corner office, her new Mercedes. Not once did she ask what I did. I was dying to tell her a lie, like that I was the president of her competitor.
At the court, she took a slug from her gigantic Vitaminwater and unzipped her pro-series Wilson tennis racquet. I set down my Made in China water bottle I got for free from the grocery store. I pulled my racquet from my bag.
“I had a racquet like that when I was in high school,” she sneered.
Me too, I wanted to say. This one. “I haven’t played in a while,” I admitted.
“I’ll try to take it easy on you,” she said, smiling like a mean girl who’d just played a prank.
On any other day, Devon sizing me up as a nerdy, pasty, out-of-fashion easy win would have proved to be an adequate indicator of the game to come. But what she didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was that my father had died recently and, as a parting gift, had lobbed a grenade in my lap, and while the bomb didn’t go off, it sparked enough to light embers inside of me. Whether the small blaze would kindle into an inferno, I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that I was burning hot with anger, and although I might not be able to hit straight today, I could crush the ball in my bare hand.
What Devon Marchón didn’t know was that I had thirty-six years of people pleasing under my belt. That up until recently I was as agreeable and smooth as plush velvet—but now that my father called me out as a mimic at best, I was as sharp as barbed wire.
And what Devon Marchón also didn’t know was that I had spent ten summers at tennis camp when I was a kid and played varsity in high school.
Devon spun her racquet, and I called “W,” so I served first and we rallied for a while. Then I hit a lob over her head, and Devon leapt to return it—a scissors flying open—to no avail. I served again, smoking it. I’d always had a pretty decent serve. But today I was thinking about my father, imagining his too-big dentured smile painted across the ball. I beat the hell out of it. I won the game.
When it was Devon’s turn to serve, I was sure to pivot into my forehand and follow through on my upswing, creating a nice topspin. She talked to herself—“Okay, Dev, let’s do this. Okay, Devon”—and nailed one over my head that I couldn’t return. “That’s the way,” I heard her say. “Now we’re warmed up.” I quelled the urge to ask if I could hit to the doubles court on her side, since it sounded like there were two of her over there.
For me, tennis was a game of math, a matter of statistics, a contest of who made the fewest errors. In order to win, I didn’t need to be phenomenal, I needed to be one percentage point better than she was. I needed to not make mistakes. More points were given up in the net than anywhere else. Risk takers hit toward the alley, aiming for the corner shot, but they missed much of the time. At all costs, I positioned myself to use my forehand and I hit up the middle so that the ball never got caught in the net.
Devon was a risk taker, but she was good. She nailed a few I couldn’t return, and it was indeed a tough match. I was out of shape and exhausted and made the wrong assumption about her having a weak backhand. She didn’t. But I hung in there, and had my serves to help me out. I eked out a win, surprising the hell out of her.
At the sideline, I bent at the waist and gulped from my toxic BPA water bottle. “Here,” Devon said, offering me a bottle of Vitaminwater from her duffel bag. “Drink this.”
Funny thing about finishing on top. People look at you differently, almost instantly.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Great game,” she said. “Do you want to get lunch?”
“I’ve gotta scoot,” I said. “Maybe next time.”
“Definitely!” she hollered back. “Let’s plan on it.”
I refrained from telling her that that wouldn’t happen. If she didn’t like me before the match, she had no business liking me after the match. As two-faced as the rest of them.
At home, I logged on to my computer. If I did as Dad suggested, if I got the heck out of Virginia, if I traveled—where would I go? To Italy, of course. I pulled up the research I had done so many times before, the reputable cooking schools, the ones with five-star reviews, the best places to go. In my exhaustive style, I had examined thoroughly the options available. Tuscany was where I wanted to be, so when I came across the cooking school in Certaldo, I knew I had found my place. I’d stay in a nineteenth-century villa surrounded by grape and olive orchards. I’d learn from local cooks. We’d focus on meat, cheese, wine, and produce. When we weren’t cooking, we’d hike, tour Siena and Florence, and devour the delicacies of the local trattorias. We’d visit nearby artisans, farms, and vineyards.
I picked a date—two months from now—and planned the trip, start to finish. And then I booked it. I consulted no one, including Jenny or Paul. Including Lucas.
Lucas had been calling every night. “What’s going on?” he implored. “When can I see you?”
“Soon,” I promised, because in this tangle, he wasn’t what had me snagged.
The
following Tuesday, he was waiting for me on my stoop.
“Have you been to work this week?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, finding my keys.
Lucas stood. “When are you going back?”
No answer.
“Melissa,” Lucas said, reaching for me.
“Lucas,” I said. “Let’s go inside and talk.”
We sat next to each other on the sofa. I scooted over a bit, placing more distance between us.
“I’m not going back to work,” I said. “At least for a while.”
Lucas blinked, and then blinked again. He cleared his throat. “Why?”
“I need to go on a trip. Alone.”
“A trip?” Now Lucas was the one to place distance between us, pushing back into the corner of the sofa. “Why?”
Because I had a suitcase full of rage and unless I dumped it thousands of miles from home, it would find its way back to me. I could already tell how attached to me it was becoming, how needy it was, desperate for me to carry it around all day.
“What about us? What about our wedding?”
“I promise to marry you as soon as I get back,” I said, and I meant it. I would marry Lucas, I would schedule a mammogram, and I would clean out Dad’s house. All of the things I had been putting off.
This surprised Lucas. He brightened. “We need to set a date.”
I reached for my desk and grabbed the paper calendar. “Let’s do it,” I said.
The relief on Lucas’s face was evident. “This’ll be great. Now I’ll be able to check it off my list! I’ll be able to get back to work, knowing how many weeks/months we have; I’ll know how much work to take in between now and then, and when I’ll need to wrap up my projects so we can go on our honeymoon.”
I lived for checking things off my lists, so who was I to say, but still, his efficiency made my ears ring.
And just like that, two type A planners/organizers/schedulers inked their wedding date on the calendar, setting aside other obligations, such as dentist and doctor appointments. We programmed alerts and reminders.
Lucas reached for me and pulled me in. “This is good,” he said. “Nothing like having a plan.”
“Yep,” I said, kissing his cheek. “Perfect for us. Two peas in a pod.” I smiled and kissed his cheek again. Resignation settled in like the flu.
With Lucas appeased, I went about my next bit of business. With the same exhaustive research methods I used to pick stocks, I selected a counselor whose niche was my greatest phobia: the fear of flying. Her name was Susan McGillis, which reminded me of Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, with Maverick and Goose, and the MiG. (So you’re the one, Charlie said to Maverick.) I took the accident of her surname as a good sign. And she really was a top gun: in another life, she’d been a naval fighter pilot, had flown F/A-18 Super Hornet jets over Baghdad, logged twenty missions in Desert Storm.
We met at Starbucks. “I understand the workings of airplanes better than most,” she explained, as we sipped lattes and picked at scones. “And I get the worry, the anxiety. For me, it wasn’t the fear of flying. It was the anxiety of where I was flying. Fear’s fear.”
I told her about my last encounter on an airplane. The near panic attack that left me at the airport while my suitcases flew to Italy.
“You know,” she said, “the body doesn’t know the difference between excitement and fear. They register the same.”
“I haven’t had much experience with either,” I confessed.
The next Monday morning, I entered Fletcher Financial. I had e-mailed Paul, Roger, and Jenny and scheduled a meeting. We assembled in the conference room. I sat in Dad’s chair, at the head of the table. I started the conversation.
“If Dad were here, he’d start by quoting Alice in Wonderland, when Alice asked the Cheshire Cat ‘Which road do I take?’ and he responded ‘That depends on where you want to go.’”
The three of them issued small, conciliatory laughs.
“I can’t say that I’m exactly sure where I want to go,” I admitted. “But there are some things I know for sure. I want Fletcher Financial to thrive for many years to come. I want our clients cared for as well as if Dad were here.”
“Agreed,” Paul said.
I went on. “But I also agree with what my father said in his letter to me . . .” All of a sudden I felt clammy and flushed.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Jenny asked, standing and coming to me, placing the back of her hand on my forehead.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just figured something out, that’s all.” When my father was delusional, he’d rambled on about “the letter he wished he had never written.” It was this letter, I now knew—his missive to me to be brave. He regretted writing it.
“Sorry,” I said, finding my place. “My father was right, in that it is time for me to get out of Virginia for a while.”
Jenny clapped her little hands, then waved her fists in the air like pompoms, cheering me on as a mom would do.
“I never studied abroad,” I said. “I was never shipped off to war, like Dad. I need to have an experience of my own.”
“How can we help?” Roger asked.
I looked at him squarely. “I’m going to need for you to draw up some paperwork, some interim paperwork.” I explained that I wasn’t yet ready to sell my shares to Paul, but that I wanted to put him in charge of the firm while I was gone, while I was considering my next step. “So whatever needs to be done—new POAs, a new succession planning agreement—I’d like for you to work it up before I leave.”
Paul murmured something about things staying the same, how that’s really all he ever wanted.
I went on. “And Roger, I’ll also need for you to draft some new estate docs for me.” I looked at Jenny. “If my plane goes down over the Atlantic, I need to make sure that my beneficiaries are correct.”
Jenny purred little “nos” as if that would never happen.
“I would want half of my estate to go to Jenny,” I said, regarding her tenderly, the woman whose support of me had never faltered. “And the other half to go to the Fletcher Financial charity fund.” We had established a “Give Back” fund years ago, into which we funneled our own philanthropic dollars as well as the money of some of our clients who believed in our list of charities.
Roger said he would get right on it. Paul and I exchanged smiles. Dad had handpicked Paul many years ago from a competitive pool of graduates looking for their first financial planning job. Dad knew he was one of the good guys. I knew it, too. And Jenny beamed through watery eyes. She was as much my mother as I could ever ask for.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Two nights before I left for Italy, I sat down at my desk, logged on to Facebook, and scrolled through the usual: the aunts, the cousins, the old friends from college. I clicked on Joe’s page. Lots of photos of his children, but none of him and his wife. I was in a “what the hell” type of mood. I had no time for regrets. I had every reason to be brave, especially if my plane plummeted into the ocean.
“I’m off to Italy!” I wrote. “It made me remember how your parents used to always talk about Naples, right? I’ll eat a piece of pizza in their honor. Anyway . . . no need to respond. Just thought I’d say hi. I’m sure you and Lucy have spent time in Italy.”
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Seal it in cement, Missy. Say it.
I began to type. “BTW—I’m engaged. Someday soon I’ll be amongst your kind: the married.” My finger tapped on the backspace key as I considered erasing the entire line. But why? How would that be fair to Lucas, the man I promised to marry?
I hit “Send” and then walked zombielike to my bed, face-flopped onto my pillow, and sulked, because telling Joe that I was getting married meant that I could no longer indulge in the fantasy of him showing up at my door, telling me he’d never stopped loving me, and pulling me int
o the arms I remembered so well.
The next day, I drove to Arlington cemetery and parked in the back row. I hiked up the path, passing the visitors’ center, veering left and then right. My entire field of vision was filled with whitewashed tombstones, grave markers to our fallen soldiers. There were so many. There were too many. It never failed to impress me—the number of dead, the ages of the dead—so many, so young.
I found Dad’s marker. For such a giant guy, the grave marker was diminutive, a sorry meter of his personality and its contagious effect. “Frank Fletcher. Husband, Father, Veteran, Community Leader. Gone, but not forgotten.” I took the last couple of steps slowly, with apprehension, a child contrite after acting out at her father. Now that I had made some key decisions, I regretted that I had wasted a minute of my life feeling ill will toward the man I loved the most.
I kneeled by Dad’s gravestone, placed my forehead on the cool granite, and cried. I told him how I was trying to be brave, how I’d temporarily turned the business over to Paul, how I’d booked a trip to Tuscany, how God-willing I was going to get on a plane, how I’d set a date with Lucas, how I’d sent a message to Joe, the guy I’d never stopped loving. My heart swelled, and it was almost as if Dad were smiling his straight pearls at me. “Daughter of mine,” he would say, “you win some, you lose some. But boy oh boy, when you win.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The next day—three months following my father’s death—I entered Reagan National Airport. Lucas had offered to drive me. So had Jenny, so had Paul. No thank you, I had said to each of them, and now, as years of self-doubt clawed at my ankles, I wondered why I hadn’t accepted a helping hand. Here I stood with seemingly miles of walkways before me. I inched my way toward a wall of glass, pressed my hands flat against the cool window, and watched my breath fog into thin clouds. I stared, wide-eyed, at the airplanes taking off and landing.
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