by Nancy Adams
“I can imagine that this must be extremely hard for you, Sam,” Oprah began. “This is your first live interview for nearly five years. You’re a deeply private person even though your status as the second-richest man on the planet makes you one of its most sought after too. This must have been a very difficult time, even coming here tonight.”
“Yes, it is,” Sam said, “but I had to break my isolation from the public. You see, my…Marya…when she was alive, was very much the public face of the company. She knew people, Marya. Knew them very well. She knew what they wanted and she knew what they needed, too. In the past fifteen years, she allowed me to sink into the background, something I was only too willing to do. But I have to learn that as the majority shareholder and cofounder of the largest company in the world, I have a duty to present myself to the public.”
“Does that mean that we’ll be seeing much more of Sam Burgess in the future?”
“I guess it does. Not that I’ll be doing an interview every day. Perhaps only a few a year. But I’ll be much more noticeable from now on. I owe it to the people to present them with the real Sam Burgess, rather than the false one portrayed in the media.”
“I must say that that’s excellent news, Sam,” Oprah said, before facing the camera and adding, “But I’m afraid that’s all we have time for. I’d like to thank both Sam and Jenna for joining me and my audience this evening. I hope that their frank and compelling answers have cleared up what has been a rather trying time for the both of them, and I hope that they both now receive the respect and decency that they both deserve.”
With that, it all ended. Both Sam and Jenna let out a huge sigh of relief, turned to one another and hugged for several seconds on the couch.
“I mean it guys,” Oprah said as she got up to leave, “thanks a lot.”
“Thank you, Oprah,” Jenna said from within Sam’s arms.
After that, they left the building, getting into the Hummers and bursting out of the studio gates, the media scrum running alongside with cameras and microphones for several yards. As they bounded away from Beverley Hills toward LAX, both Sam and Jenna were cuddled up on the backseat. A tepid relief traversed through them and they both felt that everything had gone well. Sitting opposite them, sandwiched between two security guards, was Gary Scott. He was on the phone to his people who were attempting to get the public reaction to the interview, searching social media on the internet and checking in with their contacts within the traditional media.
Gary put the phone down and looked across at Jenna and Sam.
“Do you want the news?” he asked.
“I guess,” Sam muttered.
“Well, it’s a success. Early indications are that you have both the public and the media’s sympathies. The New York Times has offered to send someone to the house as soon as possible to do a follow-up interview. Would you be up for that?”
“Sure,” Jenna said.
“Don’t worry, guys,” Gary said. “You can smile now. It’s all up from here on in.”
Jenna smiled at the PR man’s enthusiastic words, turned to Sam and kissed him lightly on the lips, before snuggling herself back into his side. Sam, in turn, closed his eyes and rested his chin on top of her head. He felt so close to her then, like they were a team, taking on the world side by side. She was only the third woman that he had ever felt this close to.
Thinking of this as they swept through L.A., Sam allowed himself to smile gently.
CHAPTER TEN
It was eight o’clock and the Prior household was sitting down to dinner. The reason it was so late was because of Joe Prior’s late arrival back from Boulder. The table was set and Joe had been hastily introduced to Paul. They were now all sitting around serving themselves salad, baked potatoes, corn on the cob and fried chicken in June’s own special family recipe marinade. Joe had been quite enthusiastic when he’d said hello to Claire in front of everyone, and the two had even shared the dubious display of a hug, Claire wincing from within her father’s arms, before he turned to Paul and shook the young man’s hand firmly.
Now Joe was seated at the head of the table, helping himself to a large glass of red wine. June was to the right of him, Kyle to the left, and further along the table sitting next to Kyle was Paul, and opposite him, next to June, was Claire. June was sporting a slightly embarrassed expression. The moment her husband had come home, she had realized that he was drunk.
“So, Joe,” Paul began, wanting to engage with Claire’s father, “June tells me that you’ve been busy opening up some new stores. How many is it that you own?”
“Currently we have a total of seven stores throughout Colorado up and running and another two ready within the month. I expect to expand out of the state within a year and become nationwide.”
“Wow,” Paul said before taking another forkful of salad.
“Dad’s gonna hand it all over to me when I’m older,” Kyle boasted to Paul.
“Hold your horses, kid,” Joe let out. “You’re only just out of diapers. You know the drill, you go to college first. Then we see about you coming onboard in an executive sense.”
“Anyhow, you might not want to do that when you’re older,” June said across to her son.
“I will if it’s a multimillion-dollar corporation,” Kyle returned.
“It won’t be that easy,” Claire put to Kyle. “I don’t think running a company is about having lots of free time and money, Kyle.”
“I can work hard,” her brother contested.
“We’ll see,” Joe muttered as he poured himself another wine, taking a slug the moment he had.
“So, Paul,” June asked, “do they have a department store out in Sunny Rift?”
Sunny Rift was the name of the small town that Paul had grown up in.
“Yes, it’s called Tait’s,” he replied.
“Is it family run?” June asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Everything’s only family run while its owners are thinking small,” Joe remarked gruffly. “If you wanna stay moving sideways then you stay family. But if you wanna take your business forward, you gotta aim to become corporate. My grandpa thought small like that. Wanted to stay family. It wasn’t until my old man got ahold of the store after gramps died that he was able to implement expansion. My old grandpa was a good old boy, as they say out here, but he had no imagination. He simply wanted to keep one little store to hand from generation to generation. But my pa thought bigger than that. He sent me to college to study business, something his own father had stopped him from doing. He then let me help him expand it until it was three stores when he died. Now we’ve been growing by thirty percent every year for the past seven.”
“Wow,” Paul said, trying to sound impressed. “That’s awesome.”
“Yes, it is.”
Joe finished off yet another glass, but when he went to refill it, he found the bottle was empty. Wobbling slightly, he got up from his chair and went to fetch another. While he was gone, June turned to Paul and mouthed the word ‘sorry’. Paul gave her a soft look as if to say that she needn’t worry. Meanwhile, Claire ate as best she could in complete silence.
When Joe returned with another bottle of wine, he instantly filled his glass and resumed his drinking, slumping himself clumsily back down into his chair.
“Hey,” Joe abruptly exclaimed, “any of you catch that shit going off—”
“JOE!” June burst out, making everyone at the table jump. “I won’t allow cuss words around the dining table.”
“Sorry,” Joe shrugged. “Anyhow, did any of you catch all that stuff going off with that billionaire computer nerd and his hot shrink. Did you catch that?”
Joe looked directly over at Paul, his eyes wide and a big grin on his face. The latter said nothing and hoped that Joe wouldn’t go on. He looked across at Claire, who simply remained silent with a gently pained expression rising on her face.
“You musta seen it?” Joe went on in boisterous fashion. “Someone
hacked into his security system and stole a video of them doing it.”
“And you’ve seen it?” June put to her husband, shooting razor eyes at him as she did.
“No,” he mumbled, turning his eyes down to his dinner plate. “A couple of the guys at work were talking about it.”
“I seen it,” Kyle suddenly announced.
“You what?!” June exclaimed loudly with a look of horror directed at her son who sat opposite her.
“Sure,” Kyle continued nonchalantly as he played with a piece of chicken on his plate. “Kenny Carter found a link to it.”
“And you watched it?” June asked her son.
“Sure.”
“Sure?!” June let out. “What does ‘sure’ mean?”
“It means sure.”
Paul observed that Joe was sitting at the end of the table grinning all over, the product of his son’s impudent behavior.
“Anyway,” Joe went on, “they say that she’s gonna take the guy to the cleaners. She’s already living at his big ol’ palace out in the sticks. Done pretty well for herself, if you ask me. Sounds like another gold digging…”
As Joe was about to pronounce the next word, he lifted his wine glass to his lips and took a swig, mouthing the word silently into his glass as he did.
“They were on Oprah earlier,” June said, deciding to leave her beef with Kyle for now. “I watched a little of the interview. She said that it was all lies. They seemed pretty genuine.”
“Wouldn’t you seem genuine,” Joe said as he finished his wine, “if several billion dollars counted on it? I know I would. I’d sit and tell the world that he was the best thing since cherry pie.”
Paul had noticed that Claire was shaking under the table and her face had gone white.
“Can we please talk about something else?” Paul uttered loudly, breaking into the general conversation of the table.
Joe, June and Kyle all turned sharply to Paul and looked at him with incredulous faces.
“Sorry,” Paul said softly, “it’s just everyone’s been going on about this story all week and I’ve just heard enough. Sorry, I didn’t need to be so rude at your dinner table. I should remember my manners.”
Claire looked over at him and smiled.
“It’s okay, son,” Joe said. “I didn’t mean to bore you.”
“Sorry, Mr. Prior, you weren’t boring me. It’s just I share a house with six other people and they’ve been talking non-stop about this. I guess I must be tired from the flight is all. Again,” Paul turned to Joe and the others, “I’m sorry.”
After that, the conversation flowed a little easier and stayed away from the subject of Sam Burgess. The more Joe continued to drink, the less he spoke, and this kinda suited the rest of the table. Even Claire began to climb out of her shell and talked with everyone. Once dinner was finished, Kyle went to his room, Joe went to the lounge to watch basketball and Paul, Claire and June went to the kitchen to wash up. Joe had asked Paul if he fancied joining him, but the young man had declined, stating that the meal had made him gassy and he needed to stand for a while, giving him the perfect excuse to stay with the others in the kitchen.
In truth, the drunken Joe had unsettled Paul slightly and he preferred to stay away from him. He also sensed an air of tension between Claire and her father. Before he’d come, Paul had his suspicions that Claire and her father didn’t get along. This was easy to assume from the fact that she never once mentioned him. On the plane over, Paul had actually had to turn to Claire and ask her what her father’s name was. June called all the time and Claire was more than willing to chat about her mother. But to the father, nothing.
“Uh!” June said as she returned to the kitchen from the lounge. “Your father’s asleep already. He’ll probably end up sleeping all night on the couch again.”
“He was really putting it away,” Claire remarked.
“Yeah,” June agreed. “These past months he’s been drinking a lot more. It’s the stress of opening two more stores in quick succession. It’s a real gamble, one which could backfire and see the company shrinking rather than expanding. He’s real worried by it. He’s been a bit better lately, but tonight was bad.”
June’s face went sad and she looked at Claire.
“What is it, ma?” Claire asked her.
June let out a big sigh.
“I just wish,” she began, her voice trembling slightly, “that he could’ve laid off the boozing tonight. You know, for his little girl. It’s the first time he’s seen his daughter in almost nine months and he comes home drunk and then gets even drunker, making an ass of himself in front of her new boyfriend the first time that we’ve met him. Paul”—she turned her melancholy eyes onto him now—“I’m so sorry. You must think we’re a family of mooks?”
Paul laughed at Mrs. Prior’s innocence, shook his head and assured her that he would never think that.
“So polite,” June said softly with a grin. “So polite.”
“It was the same when Claire came back to mine for Christmas,” Paul lied on the spot. “You remember, Claire?”
“How could I forget,” Claire went along.
“Your father got drunk?” June asked Paul.
“No—not my dad; my ma! She got blazing drunk and fell asleep at the table! Fell face forward into her food!”
“Really?” June asked, turning to Claire.
“Yep, it’s true, ma. I had to help Paul and his father get her to bed.”
“Joe’s a novice when compared to my mom,” Paul remarked with a grin.
This had the result of making June feel much better, and Claire smiled at Paul the rest of the time that they cleaned the kitchen.
When they’d finished it was very late, so Paul and Claire went to bed. They kissed on the landing before going off to their separate rooms to sleep, Claire feeling relieved that her first day back home was out of the way.
Paul, meanwhile, still felt slightly unsettled by Claire’s father.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Later that night, Claire was awoken by the sound of a key going into the lock of her bedroom door. Instinctively she had locked it before going to bed, as she always did at home. As she listened to the sound of the key scraping in the lock, she realized that it could only mean one thing: that her father was coming into the room. At the dawning of this sudden realization, she curled up into her duvet, burying her head beneath the covers. The door was gently opened and then closed in similar fashion, before the light was unceremoniously switched on. This was then followed by the sound of the tall figure of her father moving a chair to the middle of the room and sitting down.
“You’re awake,” came Joe’s deep voice in a whisper. “I know you’re awake.”
“Please, leave, Joe,” Claire said from within the covers. “Or I’ll scream.”
“You won’t scream,” Joe growled. Then in a hardly perceptible whisper, he added, “You never screamed before and you won’t now.”
Claire burst up out of her covers and faced him with her angered face.
“That’s more like it,” he remarked disdainfully, his eyes glazed over from the booze. “Where you been all this time, Claire?” he then asked her. “You really just been fucking that little boy up in Maine all this time, or have you been up to something else?”
“Where do you think that I’ve been, huh?”
“I don’t know. Your ma’s been going fucking loopy. You hurt your ma, you know that?”
“Don’t talk to me about hurt, Joe. What would you know about it?”
“What do I know about hurt, she asks,” he growled in his slurred, drunken speech. “I been hurt,” he pronounced, his voice full of indignation. “You hurt me, for one.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“No, I mean it,” he said looking up from the ground at her. “You think it’s easy to have your little girl threaten you with terrible things.”
“I never threatened you, Joe. I came to you for answers and you proved it to me th
at I wasn’t imagining it. You did do those things to me. For three years I waited night after night, petrified in bed, for you to come into my room and put your body all over me. How did it feel, Joe, to abuse your own daughter? What was it that thrilled you?”
“You shut the fuck up!” he snarled, screwing his face up as he did. “You plant fucking worms in my head. Fucking worms that eat me up inside. I swear I didn’t do it.”
“You did,” Claire said sternly to him, sitting up in bed now and towering over him. “You did all those horrible things that you see in your mind. You Joe Prior businessman, pillar of the community, father, husband, family man, Republican. Pedophile.”
With the pronouncement of this final word it felt like a nail being hammered into him and he visibly shuddered, throwing his head into his hands.
“That’s more like it,” Claire said to him in a fierce whisper as Joe sat holding his ears while shaking his head. “You have too loose a rein over your emotions, Joe. Your mouth lies all too easily. But your face gives away the pangs of your mind. It’s good that you appear to be guilty. It’s at least one thing that’s noble about you: your guilt. You should carry that guilt upon your back for the rest of your life. You should let that guilt eat you up until there’s nothing left. You should redeem yourself in the eyes of the world every day to appease the worst of that guilt. For what you’ve done, the sun’s rays will never fully reach your face again.”
“Can’t we just forget,” he wept quietly into his hands. “Can’t we just forget…”
“I will never forget,” Claire said to him settling herself back down on her bed. “People like you leave scars. These scars never completely heal. You’ve imprinted your lecherous, filthy self onto me. Back in your study that day you threatened me with violence—with the destruction of everything that means anything to me—you needn't have bothered. I could never destroy ma with this. So you just tell me one thing, Joe—and look at me when I ask you this.”
