That was the quietest moment I’d known in a long time.
I reached out and took both of Uncle Sheridan’s hands in mine. We sat there, alone in the middle of that mob of people, and I thought about how Alva had been three years younger than me.
I also thought about how I wanted to stab leukemia in the face, lots and lots of times, with one huge and seriously sharp knife – I pictured the blade as being jagged and rusty for some reason, but maybe that was just me.
Uncle Sheridan looked down at our joined hands. When he looked up and trained his sharp old eyes on mine, he was once more calm, focused, and way tougher than the likes of me.
“Do you remember when we first met?”
“Outside Devon’s office, that morning he dropped the bomb on me about being his new personal assistant – I was kind of in shock at the time, but I remember meeting a suave old Jedi master who was dressed to the nines, sure.”
“Would you like to know what I thought of you in that moment? My first impression?”
“Let me guess – a chubby girl who totally didn’t belong there?”
He shook his head. “You impressed me as being an earnest, well-meaning young woman who would likely serve Devon well, if he gave you half a chance – of course, I assumed he’d soon drive you away with his moods and his erratic personality, because that was what happened to all of his personal assistants.
“I am glad I was wrong about that. I am grateful beyond words that Devon found you, and that you came to mean so much to him – much, much more than all those grasping, whining, self-centered actresses and models and such who took shameless advantage of his generous nature, who exploited his fears and insecurities for the sake of headlines and profit.
“Miss Daniels, I said the story of how Alva left us was very much your business. I said that for a specific reason, a reason that I need you to understand.”
He paused, drawing in a deep breath. “Alva was always there for me, and then one day she was not. From that day to this, life has been largely without color for me, a practical exercise with little heart to it. My love for Devon gives my existence what little meaning it has, and so I want more than anything to know that you will always be there for him, as Alva was for me.
“I need to know that you will stay with him through whatever may come, whatever this plan of his might be, whatever else fortune might throw your way – I need to know that you will always stay by his side, no matter what happens.”
“Always, sir.”
He nodded. “Good, that’s settled. Now, as much I’d like to stay and enjoy your company further, I do have this and that to take care of – if you will excuse me?”
I gave Uncle Sheridan’s hands a final squeeze, he smiled like the lordly old gentleman he was, and he stood up.
I watched him go, watched him walk away through the circulating rivers of young people, and then I turned my attention to my burger and fries – they weren’t going to eat themselves, after all. I pulled out my phone too, deciding there was no time like the present to ask Google just what had happened to Kevin Killane.
Something said stop.
Something deep inside me said to stop – or maybe it was something from outside, I don’t know.
Something said to stop, turn around, and watch Uncle Sheridan again.
So I did.
He walked past the front counter, and I watched as he stopped to smile and trade a few words with the cashiers and cooks. They joked with him, he laughed, and I watched as he walked to the door.
I saw him pause, stand to one side, and hold the door open for a very pregnant girl. Then he went outside, and I remember how the sun lit up his thick mane of white hair as he looked both ways, stepped off the curb, and walked to where his stylish old antique limousine waited in a nearby parking space.
I watched as his driver stepped out and held the door open for him, and I remember how he flicked away a stray bit of paper – it might have been somebody’s crumpled receipt – that the wind blew up against the pinstriped sleeve of his immaculate suit.
I watched him slip inside the car. I watched the door thump shut, sunlight flashing off the chrome trim, and then I couldn’t see him anymore.
I watched every little inconsequential detail of how Uncle Sheridan left that McDonald’s. I’m glad I did.
I never saw that sweet old man again.
31. Together and Apart
We lost Uncle Sheridan a week later.
It was quick, it was clean, but it cut me to the heart that he was alone when it happened – alone in a crowd of strangers.
It was a sunny day in late October, a warm few hours of sunlight that brought everyone out onto the streets. Crowds thronged the sidewalks, couples held hands, street vendors sold steaming hot pretzels, buskers tootled on their saxophones, and Uncle Sheridan decided to walk to a meeting at Killane Corporate Holdings.
Hey, why not? It was a sweet warm day, right?
Later, I talked to the cops who stopped traffic and waved impatient, honking drivers around the spot where it happened. I even tracked down several of the people who were walking near the most badass Jedi master in the known universe in his final moments, the businessmen and students and street people and hustlers and tourists who were his last company on this earth.
They all agreed – it happened in an instant.
You might say it happened between one breath and the next.
One moment, he stood waiting at the curb with a dozen or more strangers. A few heartbeats later, the light changed and they all started walking across State Street, dress shoes and worn sneakers and sandals slapping against the black and white stripes of the crosswalk, everyone intent on their destination on the far side.
Uncle Sheridan never got there.
A breath, and he was walking. Another breath, and he dropped in his tracks in the street. One moment, he was a kind, strong, wise old man; the next moment, he was a bundle of legs and arms lying in the road, startled strangers yelping and cursing as they stumbled over his body.
Some glacial bitch in a pencil skirt and fuck-me heels shrugged as she told me he hit the ground like a sack of well-dressed bricks, but she still made it to her interview on time.
A jogger said he remembered it was weird the way that head of perfect white hair suddenly dropped from sight into the crowd and then there it was again, two inches from the toes of his Nikes.
A girl who looked barely legal but still had two toddlers hanging off her sniffled and cried a little as she told me about looking down at his face lying on the street, cheek pressed against the asphalt, blank eyes staring at nothing.
One of the cops described pushing through the mob of gawkers, ordering people out of the way, and how the first little thing he noticed about my honorary uncle was the way his dead fingers still clutched the handle of his briefcase.
It might have been a heart attack, it could have been a stroke, but whatever it was, it took him in seconds.
Two days later, I cornered Uncle Sheridan’s doctor, lied and said I was his patient’s granddaughter, and asked how someone who seemed so healthy could drop out of this life faster than a crossing signal could change. That esteemed medical professional said his best guess was that an aneurysm had ruptured – a weak section of artery, in the brain or near the heart, had popped like a balloon, bleeding the old man out from the inside before he could blink.
The doctor plastered on his best consoling smile, patted me on the hand, and reassured me my ‘grandfather’ was dead before he hit the ground, and that he didn’t suffer, not one bit.
Yeah, that really helps, Doc.
I cried for hours.
Devon didn’t cry.
Devon didn’t talk.
Devon froze.
I expected him to power into full panic attack mode, but he didn’t. Instead, he dropped into total silence, total absence, total withdrawal from me and his business and everything around him. I almost wished he had blown up into one of his cataclysmic freak-outs �
� the rivers of sweat, the chest pains, the frantic galloping breathing, the jackhammer heartbeats, those were all enemies I knew how to fight.
But this? I had no clue.
I realized I’d have to cut my own grieving short when Devon wandered into his office the morning after it happened, sat down behind his battleship of a desk, and spent the next two hours staring off into space. As in he didn’t say a word, he didn’t move, he just tilted his head to one side and stared like a laser at nothing for two solid hours.
He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him, he didn’t look at me, he barely twitched. People who had urgent appointments with him were backing up in the outer office, fussing at his receptionist Dana and getting more impatient by the minute, but as far as the big guy was concerned, they didn’t exist.
Somebody had to be practical, and I nominated me. I cleared out the people waiting to see him by announcing that Mr. Killane had experienced a death in the family and their appointments would be rescheduled for a later date, thank you very much. That and a fierce glare sent them on their way, solving problem number one.
Next, I had Dana cancel all of Devon’s meetings and appointments for the next week, wiping his calendar clean.
I then called every department head and senior executive in the place, one after another. I told each of them that Mr. Killane would be unavailable for business consultations for at least the next week, and that if anything urgent came up in the meantime, they were to suck it up and make their own decisions as to what to do. It surprised me more than a little, but they all took their marching orders from me like good little boys and girls.
Now I just had to get Devon through the funeral in one piece.
Thank god for Uncle Sheridan’s older sister, Lee Jackson Whatever Montvale – she swept in from out of town with their younger brother Lincoln Davis Montvale in tow, and she made all the funeral arrangements in a blur of efficiency. I was grateful as hell, because I had all I could do to get Devon to eat, sleep, and put one foot in front of the other; figuring out how to set up a stately, elegant service for the sweetest old man in the world at the same time Devon was absent without leave and my own heart was breaking would have been way more than I could handle.
He still wouldn’t talk.
I steered Devon through all the endless rituals of the funeral, and he never said a word. He wore the midnight-black suit I laid out for him, went where I led him, nodded in all the right places, and looked suitably grave and forlorn – but through it all he remained as silent as … well, as silent as a tomb.
Graceland Cemetery huddled under a grey, freezing sky – winter was back, and it provided the perfect weather for a funeral. Rain icing its way into sleet pelted out of the clouds, soaking the brown grass and pattering against the tombstones. A keening wind gusted through the ranks of markers and memorials, buffeted past marble saints and angels, and tugged at the black umbrella I held over Devon’s head as I stood at his side.
I don’t think he would have noticed if I hadn’t bothered with it. I’d had to stand on tip-toe and pull his overcoat onto him, and if I hadn’t brought the umbrella, I’m sure he would have just stood there and let the icy bullets of rain tear into him as if they didn’t exist.
As if he didn’t exist.
Uncle Sheridan’s final resting place was with Alva, of course. Alva was cremated, all those years ago – Lee Montvale told me that while cremation was still thought of as kind of out there back then, Alva had always considered it to be the modern, sensible thing to do.
Now it was time for Uncle Sheridan to join her.
As we all watched, the silver urn with what was left of Alva was removed from a niche within a marble vault, opened, and together Lee and Lincoln Montvale poured their brother’s ashes into it as well.
Above and to the left of the niche, an older, weathered bronze plaque was set into the marble; it displayed Alva’s name, the dates of her birth and death, and all that. Above and to the right, a fresh plaque bore the crisp, newly-inscribed details about her husband, Sheridan Grant Sherman Montvale.
Below the two plaques, just above the niche and carved directly into the marble, were the words ‘Together Forever.’
Damn right.
It seemed like we stood in the rain for hours after that.
All the mourners filed past us to offer their respects, and there were a lot of mourners – that tough old Jedi had outlived most of his family, but there were friends and lawyers and business partners, guys he’d gone to school with, and people who knew him from doing business with Devon, as well as representatives from all the charities he’d showered money on over the years.
And you know what? There was even a small group of teens and twenty-somethings from that McDonald’s we’d eaten at, cashiers and cooks huddling together under their umbrellas and looking kind of nervous about whether or not it was okay for them to be there.
Lee Montvale smiled like a champ and took them into her arms, one by one, whispering and hugging and sharing her grief with them. I saw tears shining in the eyes of those kids – maybe they weren’t titans of industry or from grand old families, but they loved that old man too.
Lincoln Montvale spoke to each of them, I did my best shaky smile and took each of their hands in turn, and Devon – well, just as he had with everyone else, Devon nodded at them without a word, mechanically, like a giant doll designed to do nothing but nod.
An endless amount of time later, the afternoon sky darkened as the rain made up its mind and changed over to sleet. Somewhere in there, I held one more hand, murmured something vaguely comforting to one more stranger, and then noticed that was it – that anonymous blur in black, whose face I never really looked at, was the last of the mourners.
Now it was just me, Lee and Lincoln Montvale, and … well, Devon, if you could say he was even really there, with the state he was in.
Bleak and awful as the day was, we didn’t want to leave. It was something unspoken, but leaving would have meant abandoning Uncle Sheridan somehow, leaving him alone and dead forever in that marble vault, and we couldn’t bear to do that, not yet.
So without a word, the four of us took shelter beneath the branches of an ancient oak tree, just across from the vault. We stood there under our umbrellas, staring at the still stone structure, at the niche, and at the urn holding the remains of two people who did not deserve to be there, not in any universe that was remotely fair. We stood, we stared, and we didn’t say anything for what felt like at least a year or two.
I guess you won’t be surprised to learn that what with my big mouth and all, I was the first one to break the silence. “Ma’am … um, Ms. Montvale? I really appreciate … Devon and I really appreciate you making all the arrangements for this. I couldn’t even have begun to cope with that stuff, not on top of everything else.”
Ashley, you moron – he was her brother, remember? You think this was easy on her? You think she didn’t want to retreat into bawling nonstop, instead of bucking up and dealing with what had to be done?
But Uncle Sheridan’s big sister was all class, just like he was. “Please, dear, call me Lee – and believe me, I needed the distraction of making all those arrangements. If it hadn’t been for having to make so many calls and decisions and setting up this, that, and the other on into infinity, I’d have been curled up in a ball somewhere crying my eyes out.”
Then her arms were around me, and we were hugging for probably the tenth time that day. I only had one arm to spare for it – I didn’t trust Devon to not just drop the umbrella if I tried to hand it off to him – but I squeezed the stuffing out of her anyway.
I pulled back, looked her up and down while trying not to be too obvious about it, and knew that calling this tall, elegant, more-than-three-times-my-age woman by her first name wouldn’t be easy.
She had the classic Montvale head of perfect waves of white hair, and she commanded the ground she stood on as if she were a queen. Her long lines and poise could have gotten her a car
eer as a model back in the day, and she managed to make a veil, pearls, and a severe, neck-to-ankles black mourning dress look like an outfit you’d wear to a White House ball where you planned to outshine the President.
She hugged me again for good measure, and gave me a peck on the cheek. She flicked a glance full of doubt at Devon, and then turned back to me.
“Ashley, dear, I’m going to go over to speak to Lincoln for a moment, all right?”
She walked a few steps over to her surviving brother, linked her arm in his, and they whispered together for a few minutes, their backs to us.
I waited, I looked up at Devon, and yep, he was staring off at some indeterminate point in the distance, still saying not a damn thing – and did he even know where we were?
Come back to me, big guy.
Lee Montvale walked back to us, the hem of her black dress sweeping over the wet, freezing grass. She stopped a foot away, and she spoke – but not to me.
“Devon, I’ve spoken with Lincoln, and he agrees with me that you should have this – it’s what Sheridan would have wanted, I’m quite sure.”
She held something out to Devon, something about four or five inches long, a cylinder of brushed steel that looked to have a removable cap at one end. It was small and stylish, but also ordinary, like a tube of severe modernist lipstick, or a trendy little pill container – of course, it was obvious what it had to be, and I prayed Devon wouldn’t just vacantly drop the thing into the grass while he continued to gaze off into space.
He didn’t.
Lee Montvale took another step forward, pressed the object into his palm, and Devon closed his fingers around it. He opened his hand again, stared down at the gleaming grey cylinder for a minute or two that lasted forever, and then he dropped it into his coat pocket.
“Thank you, Aunt Lee.”
Devon’s voice was a cracked, hoarse whisper. It was the first time I’d heard him speak since it happened.
He didn’t look at her as he said it, but more off to one side of her, as if he couldn’t quite remember how to meet her eyes – but he was talking, and that was progress.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 36
