Family Merger

by Leigh Greenwood

  “I’m counting on you, too,” Ron said to Kathryn.

  “I don’t mediate family fights. I still think you should have let me bring—”

  “They can talk to your psychologists and family counselors next week. This weekend I don’t want anybody telling them what to do.”

  “I hire professionals because they can’t figure that out on their own.”

  “Go with me on this thing,” Ron said. “It may not be the answer, but we’ve got to try everything.”

  Kathryn didn’t know when her I had become Ron’s we, but sometime during the last week he’d invented a role for himself and stepped into it with all the enthusiasm of a new convert. He’d been to Geneva twice, but had returned the next day both times. He’d contacted the parents of the kids, convinced them to take part in this weekend. She looked forward to it with fear and trembling. Ron seemed excited.

  Kathryn looked out the window at the tree-covered hills and the low mountains in the distance. The Blue Ridge didn’t have the grandeur of the Rockies or the Sierra Nevadas, but they were more welcoming. The air wasn’t so thin, the trails were grassy and tree-covered, and temperatures were moderate. It could be an idyllic location for a close-knit family’s weekend getaway. She didn’t know how it would work as a backdrop for real-life versions of a family feud.

  They had left the paved road a mile back. The mountain fell off at a near-forty-five-degree slant.

  “I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend,” she continued.

  “The forecast is for sunny days and cool nights,” Ron said. “I ordered it especially for you.”

  Kathryn laughed. She wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t. He’d already managed several things she had thought impossible, getting Kerry’s father to agree to come to the retreat being at the top of the list. She was relieved when they reached the paved drive that curved around the base of the hill on which the retreat had been built. The arching limbs of some ancient maple and hickory trees kept the glare of sunlight from their eyes. They rounded a stone wall that encompassed a flower-filled garden, and Ron pulled the Bentley to a stop in the parking lot in the middle of the complex. A quick count showed Kathryn four buildings, the two largest with two stories. One had a huge front porch and the other an even larger deck. The stone-paved courtyard between them offered a view out over the mountains. The view of the evening sunsets would be fantastic.

  “I hadn’t realized the complex was so large,” she said.

  “It was built to handle up to sixty executives and their wives.”

  “Do you think it’s big enough to handle Shamus O’Grady?”

  “I once had the senior executives of the big three automakers here. I think it can handle Shamus.”

  Kathryn wasn’t sure. Even now she saw Shamus approaching their car, a glass in his hand. Probably his famous Irish whiskey to fuel his even more famous temper. Kerry was only a step behind his father, his face a mask of anger. “You’ll get your chance to find out sooner than you thought.”

  Ron popped the trunk and got out of the car. “Glad to see you had no trouble finding the place,” he said to Shamus. “Kerry, how about giving us a hand here?”

  “My son’s not a bellhop,” Shamus grumbled. “He doesn’t carry luggage.”

  “We can handle the luggage. I want Kerry to help with the food. You can lend a hand though if you want.”

  “I thought you said this place was first-class,” Shamus groused. “I didn’t know we had to bring our own food.”

  “Mrs. Collias wouldn’t let us leave without her chicken salad. She said you never know what strangers will put in it.”

  “You promised this place had a gourmet kitchen,” Shamus said.

  “That doesn’t mean they know how to fix Mrs. Collias’s chicken salad,” Kathryn said. “The girls love it. Not to mention her rum cake, her special cheese bread, and roasted pecans no one else in the whole world knows how to make.”

  “I thought we were supposed to be getting in touch with ourselves,” Shamus said, “not eating ourselves into an early grave.”

  “This is for the picnic tomorrow.”

  “I’m not going on any damned picnic,” Shamus said. “I didn’t give up a weekend at the club to pick ants out of my food.”

  “Take it easy, Dad,” Kerry said. “You said you weren’t going to jump to any conclusions. What do you want me to carry?” he asked Kathryn.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you’d have more business if you weren’t so hard to get along with?” Ron said.

  “I have all the business I want because I’m the best,” Shamus shouted. “People stand in line to get me to build their house.”

  “But not the really big houses,” Ron said. “Have you noticed that?”

  “I have,” Kerry said as he lifted the cooler from the trunk. “I heard one of the boys at school talking about it.”

  “You never said anything to me,” Shamus shouted at his son.

  “That’s because you never listen to me,” Kerry replied. “Where does this go?”

  “In the recreation room downstairs,” Ron said. “There’s a refrigerator and freezer in the closet.”

  “I don’t do those big houses because I can’t deal with those women,” Shamus said. “They don’t know what they want. One of them had me rip out a kitchen twice.”

  “You got paid, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “She paid for the privilege of being able to change her mind. She wanted the house of her dreams, Shamus, not the house you thought she ought to have. Does the rum cake go in the refrigerator?” he asked Kathryn.

  “I’ve got the best reputation of any builder in Charlotte,” Shamus shouted.

  “And the worst reputation as a person,” Ron replied. “Do you think it would be all right to cut the cake before dinner? Rum cake is one of my favorites.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Kathryn said. “Ruby will chop off your fingers if she hears.”

  “Did you have anything to do with my losing the Harris contract?” Shamus asked.

  “No,” Kathryn said. “I did. When Naomi told me her contractor was driving her nuts and they hadn’t even started the house, I told her she didn’t have to work with anybody that made her miserable.”

  “Dammit!” Shamus shouted, his face turning purple. “I worked a damned year to get that contract.”

  “Then you’ve got Kathryn to thank for the fact Naomi Harris is willing to give you another chance,” Ron said. “After the last time you talked to her, she said she would live in a tent before she’d let you build her house.”

  It was almost comical to see the air go out of Shamus.

  “There’s a catch somewhere,” Shamus said. “What is it?”

  “Naomi can’t stand people yelling, even when they aren’t yelling at her,” Kathryn said. “She believes everybody in the world ought to get along together.”

  “Save the sweetness and light for Sunday. What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is you have to find a way to incorporate a little sweetness and light into your personality, or Naomi will give the job to your biggest competitor.”

  “And when is she going to see if I’ve got this sweetness and light?”

  “She’s not going to unless I tell her you’ve improved. I told her I was spending the weekend with your family in the mountains.”

  “I suppose you had to nose it around that Kerry knocked up some chick and now he wants me to support them.”

  “You’ve got to learn to express yourself a little better, Shamus,” Ron said. “Talking like that can make you unpopular.”

  “Especially in this case,” Kathryn said. “Naomi and Lisette’s mother are friends.”

  “That whole damned crowd sticks together,” Shamus said. “I didn’t want Kerry to go to school with them, but his mother wouldn’t let me rest until we got him enrolled. Now look what’s happened? He’s got some young lady pregnant, and I’m stuck in the woods trying to make nice when I rather
bash their heads in.”

  “Bashing heads is Dad’s solution to every problem,” Kerry said. “Got anything else that needs to be carried in?”

  Kathryn couldn’t believe the difference in the boy. He’d had several long talks with Ron in between Ron’s visits to Geneva. She didn’t know what they discussed, but Kerry had developed a backbone. She hoped his father would be proud of him, but she supposed he would more likely see Kerry’s new maturity as some kind of challenge.

  In a way she felt sorry for Shamus. He’d come from Ireland as a boy, pulled himself up from poverty without anybody’s help. Ron said Shamus interpreted Kerry’s acceptance by his friends as a rejection of himself. It was ironic everything he’d worked for was to give Kerry the chance to move into the very society that he now saw as a barrier between them.

  “Did you know about any of this?” Shamus asked his son.

  “Yeah. I talked Robbie Harris into getting his mother to offer you the job, but he was really ticked when you treated his mom like you did. I tried to tell you about his mom, but you never listen to anybody. You have all the answers. And if anybody argues with you, you shout a little louder until they give up and go away. Well, you’ve shouted everybody away but Mom and me. Give me the pecans,” he said to Kathryn. “Lisette’s crazy about them, but Ruby says it’s not good for the baby for her to eat too many.” He turned to Kathryn. “Don’t tell Lisette.” He winked. “I want to surprise her.”

  “She’s a child,” Shamus said. “You can’t marry a child.”

  “She’s old enough to have a baby,” Ron said. “That qualifies her as a woman, even if she’s not as mature as we might wish.”

  “Don’t try and come the high-and-mighty with me,” Shamus roared. “You’ve got a kid in the same condition. What are you doing about its father?”

  Kathryn knew it hurt Ron to have his daughter’s situation flung at him like that, but she was proud of the way he responded. He didn’t raise his voice. If anything, he sounded more patient than ever.

  “I don’t know who he is yet,” Ron said. “When I do, I’ll decide what to do about it.”

  “Well I’ve already decided what I’m going to do.”

  Kerry was halfway to the lodge, but he turned around at his father’s words.

  “Kerry’s not going to marry that girl. He’s going to finish high school and go to college like his mother wants. He’s going to be a doctor or a lawyer and be so damned respectable he can look down his nose at anybody he wants.”

  “You know I don’t want to go to college,” Kerry said. He didn’t retrace his steps, just stood there, halfway across the parking lot, facing his father with a maturity Kathryn knew would have been impossible a week before. “I don’t need to go to college to build houses. I want to go into the business with you as soon as I graduate.”

  “I’m not letting you build houses,” Shamus said. “You’re going to college.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What are you going to do to support that girl and your kid? I’m not paying your bills.”

  “I’ll start my own company,” Kerry said.

  Shamus uttered a derisive laugh. “And how the hell are you going to do that? It takes a hell of a lot of money to get started these days.”

  “I know. That’s why I’ve talked to Mr. Egan about being my partner.”

  Chapter Seven

  Shamus turned a royal purple. “You did this!” he screamed at Ron. “You encouraged him to defy me.”

  “No. I just told him since he was about to become a father, he had to start acting like an adult.”

  “He’s a kid!” Shamus shouted. “He ought to act like a kid.”

  “I wish both our children hadn’t made the decisions they did, but it’s too late for that. Your grandchild will arrive in a little more than six months. That’s a fact that can’t be ignored.”

  “I can ignore it,” Shamus said.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think you will. Come on, Kathryn. If we don’t get settled soon, they’ll start the party without us.”

  Ron had arranged for the families to be grouped together in large suites with several bedrooms. He and Kathryn were in a suite with Cynthia and Leigh. The two girls had driven down an hour earlier. As they approached their building, Leigh leaned out the window.

  “Hurry up,” she called down. “Wait until you see this setup.”

  Kathryn was only slightly more prepared than Leigh for the luxury she found. Their suite was made up of four huge bedrooms, each with a private bath, and opening onto a common room big enough to contain a conference table, an entertainment center, a business center, an area for socializing around a large stone fireplace and a wet bar.

  “I wish Daddy could build us a beach house like this,” Leigh said. “That way all of us could stay there at the same time. My grandparents have a place like this. It’s loads of fun when all the cousins get together.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Cynthia said. “I don’t have any cousins.”

  “Well you can hardly blame your parents for that,” Kathryn said. “I imagine they would have liked some brothers and sisters.”

  “Your mother especially wanted a sister,” Ron said to his daughter. “She was delighted you were girl.”

  “Didn’t you want a son?” Cynthia asked her father.

  “I wanted several children,” Ron said. “But I never regretted having you, not even when we found out your mother couldn’t have any more kids.”

  “You must have wanted a boy to carry on the business.”

  “I was more interested in having boys to play football with. I never got to do that as a kid. I was looking forward to it.”

  “So instead you got a fat daughter.”

  “I got a tiny thing—you only weighed five and a quarter pounds—with no hair at all and huge blue eyes. For the first week you stared at me like I was something out of a fantasy movie. After that you seemed to decide I was safe and would even let me hold you without screaming for your mother.”

  “Mom says I did that, too,” Leigh said, laughing. “It used to scare Dad to death. To this day he swears girls come into the world yelling at men.”

  “The smart ones know to check them out carefully,” Kathryn said. “Are you girls settled in your rooms?”

  “I’m practically lost in mine,” Leigh said, “but I love it. Even my parents’ bedroom isn’t so big as this one. I can’t wait to tell Mom about the king-size bed.”

  “But your family is one of the most famous in Charlotte,” Cynthia said.

  “That’s because everybody’s in politics. That doesn’t mean we have a lot of money. We don’t have anybody as smart as your father. I used to tell my brother he ought to marry you and get your father to give him a job.”

  “But I thought…” Cynthia let the sentence fade.

  “We had some ancestors a couple hundred years ago who were in the right place at the right time,” Leigh said. “We’ve had a few more since then who have done fairly well, but it takes smart people like your Dad to keep thinking of new ways to make money. You don’t have to be smart to know how to spend it. My dad says the dumber you are, the more you spend. Now I’d better stop chattering. Mom says I never know when to shut up.”

  Kathryn thought her mother was probably right, but maybe she had given Cynthia something to think about. Having her best friend openly admire her father wasn’t a bad thing.

  “We’re all gathering for hors d’oeuvres at six,” Kathryn said. “If your father and I don’t hurry, we’ll never be ready.”

  “We can help,” Leigh said.

  “Thanks, but I’ll probably go faster by myself.”

  “Yeah. I’ll probably ooh and aah over everything you brought. Mom says you have the best taste of any woman in Charlotte.”

  “Of course she does,” Ron said. “She chose to spend her weekend with us.”

  “Not that she had much choice after you railroaded her into it,” Cynthia said.

  “I admit
I was doubtful at first, but after the way your father handled Mr. O’Grady in the parking lot, I think it may turn out okay.”

  “That man scares me,” Leigh said. “He always looks like he wants to hit somebody. I think you were very brave to face him.”

  Ron laughed. “I don’t think he considered hitting me.”

  “I don’t know. You ought to hear some of the things Kerry says about him.”

  Ron gave her a conspiratorial look. “Could I enlist you two girls to help me this weekend?”

  “Sure,” Leigh said. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Tell me something about the kids and their parents?”

  Kathryn opened her mouth to object, but Ron forestalled her.

  “I’m not talking about gossip. Everybody has a reason for feeling the way they do about something. It may be completely crazy, but to them it’s valid. If I can understand what it is, maybe I can figure out a way to bring them around to my point of view.”

  “You mean force them to do what you want,” Cynthia said.

  “I know what he means,” Leigh said. “Sometimes people are afraid of things they don’t need to be afraid of. But they’ll never tell you, so you don’t know what to say.”

  Cynthia looked to Kathryn for confirmation. “I’m not sure I like the idea of prying into people’s private lives,” she said. “I wouldn’t want people doing that to me.”

  “It’s not prying exactly,” Ron said. “It’s pretty much what a psychologist does when you go to him.”

  “He’s a professional. Besides, you know he won’t use it to try to get you to do something you don’t want to do.”

  “Everybody knows why they’re here,” Ron said. “I take that as a sign they want the same thing.”

  “Shamus said you forced him,” Kathryn reminded him.

  “He’d already thrown away the Harris contract. I’m only offering him the possibility of getting it back. He has plenty of other work.”

  “But he wants the Harris contract very badly,” Kathryn said. “I think you’re taking unfair advantage of him.”