Millennium - 21. Chapter 21

November 26, 1999

 

Nick walked through the door and paused to escort his wife, Linda, in with him. They both looked nervous. JP moved forward gracefully to receive them and put them at ease, while Stef watched him a little more dubiously. Our recent business issues and my recent relationship issue had made us a lot less trusting. I stood alone in the background, waiting for him to get through the niceties. The door opened again and two young guys came in, carrying some bags. Harry and Barry, no doubt. Nick hadn’t inherited the classic Schluter looks, and Harry and Barry looked even less like my father or Steven. Instead, they resembled each other. They had the Schluter reddish-blond hair, but their faces were a little rounder, with rounder features. I looked at Linda and noticed that, in fact, they looked a lot like her.

Nick was looking around, obviously for me, so I stepped forward slowly, putting this off until the last possible moment. He smiled nervously, and that helped melt the ice. He walked up to me, Linda in tow, and let her hand go. “I think I’m going to have to test the limits of your forgiveness,” he said. At least he asked, I thought cynically. Robbie never really seemed all that sorry for the shit he did.

I moved forward and gave him a hug, swallowing my doubts, and letting him back into my good graces. “Our relationship is like a roller coaster,” I said. “I’m tired of it. Maybe we can stay on an even keel for a while.”

“I hope so too,” he said. Linda looked at him, as if wondering if what he was saying was real.

“It’s good to see you, Linda,” I said, and gave her a warm hug. She was a nice lady, a school teacher, someone who seemed to maintain her sense even when Nick lost his.

“It’s good to see you again too, Brad. It’s been so long since you’ve seen the boys I don’t think you remember each other,” she said, motioning them forward.

“You must be Barry,” I said to the younger one. “Welcome!”

“Thanks Uncle Brad,” he said. He was more focused on the other kids who just appeared.

“Darius!” I called. He came over slowly, because he was a teenager with an attitude. “This is your cousin Barry. Be nice to him.”

“Duh.”

“You’re Harry?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said shyly, looking down. I smiled at him, and even lowered my head to make him look at me.

“And do you know who I am?” I asked, pretending to be an idiot.

“I know who you are, Uncle Brad,” he said, smiling a little. He was cute when he smiled. That shy smile would melt a heart or two.

“I met your friend John this summer,” I told him. He got really nervous, almost panicked, and looked to his father, who just nodded. “He seemed like a nice young man. Of course, Stefan flirted with him mercilessly.”

It was funny to see him get a little pissed off about that. “I really like him,” he said.

“I understand. You are welcome here.” I turned to Darius. “You think you can introduce your cousins to each other?”

“It’s so hard to remember everyone’s name,” he said, being a smart ass. “Come on,” he said to Harry and Barry.

“You see what you have to look forward to in just a year?” I teased Nick and Linda.

“Honey, we get that attitude all the time,” Linda said, cracking me up. Robbie finally made it upstairs. He looked flushed, but I knew it was because he was working out. JP gave him a dirty look, assuming he’d been fucking someone.

“You both remember Robbie?” I asked. They greeted him nicely, and for Nick it was a lot friendlier than the last time.

“I’m sorry I’m a little late. I was down in the gym. I can show it to you later if you want,” Robbie said.

“I’d like to see it,” Linda said, giving Nick a weird look. He didn’t say anything. Mother appeared and led them off to their rooms.

“Man, she sure is pissed at him,” Robbie said. “I wonder why?”

“Nick was having a pretty intense affair when all of this happened,” JP observed. “They are trying to repair their relationship. It is an uphill battle.” Everyone stared at Robbie, and I felt sorry for him, then I felt like an idiot for feeling that way. I suddenly felt smothered by all of them, by JP and Stef, by Robbie, by Nick, by all of them.

“I think I’ll go for a ride,” I said.

“On whom?” Stef asked. I smiled. It was hard to be moody with him around.

“On a horse,” I said.

“Maybe Nick would like to ride with you,” JP suggested. I glared at him for invading my time of solitude, but this was important to him, and I was flattered that he valued my opinion. I went downstairs and heard arguing voices outside their room. I sighed: Another rocky relationship. I knocked anyway.

“Come in!” Linda yelled, louder than she wanted to.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said as I opened the door. I looked at Nick. “I was going to go riding, and I wondered if you’d like to join me. We have tack that will fit you.”

“Sounds great,” he said. I wondered if riding with me sounded great, or getting away from Linda sounded great. He followed me to the stables and the hands there helped us saddle up the horses. I took JP’s stallion, since I was used to him, and I didn’t know how good a rider Nick was. We trotted out across the hill, over the land that JP owned. “This is quite a spread he has,” Nick said, as if we called our land “a spread” out here in California.

“It is,” I agreed. “We can go down the hill and across some Stanford land. It’s wide open, and nice to ride on.”

“Lead the way,” he said. “So I guess you heard me getting chewed out?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Linda caught me with my secretary. How clichéd is that?” he asked. I chuckled. “She still hasn’t forgiven me.”

“Have you said you were sorry?” I asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked me, a little pissed off.

“Robbie recently asked me to open up our relationship so we could fuck other people. It really devastated me,” I said, opening up for some idiotic reason. “Only he didn’t just want to fuck people, he’d found some boy toy that he’d fallen in love with.”

“But he’s still here,” Nick said.

“He’s still here because I love him. But we’re not even close to where we were before.”

“Did he say he was sorry?” Nick asked.

“Not really. When you damage a relationship like that, sorry isn’t enough. The analogy the shrink used is that our relationship is like a house that fell down a hill, and it’s lying there in pieces. I’m looking at it, seeing the damage, and wondering if it’s worth the effort to rebuild it. Robbie just thinks it needs a new coat of paint.”

“It’s hard when you fall in love with someone else,” he said.

“It is. It’s very hard. Especially if you’re the one who didn’t. Here’s where I am. I’m staring at the shattered house, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to bust my ass to put it back together. If it gets rebuilt, it’s mostly going to be Robbie that does it.”

“So it’s all his responsibility?” he asked. We weren’t talking about Robbie and me, we were talking about him and Linda.

“Yep. Ninety seven percent,” I said, like I’d calculated it. “No one is a perfect partner, but to suddenly go off and fall in love with someone new is a horrible thing to do.”

“You can’t control it,” he said.

“Bullshit. You can fucking control it. If I didn’t make him happy, he could have said so. But you know what really pisses me off? I did make him happy. And I didn’t go out and find someone else to fall in love with. No, I was loyal as a dead dog. Well not anymore.”

“So you’re sleeping with other people?” he asked.

“Yep. As many as I can. It makes me feel like I’m attractive and desirable, and it really pisses him off. That’s a recipe to make me happy, at least right now.” I saw him digest that sadly.

“So what does he have to do to get you back?”

“He has to prove that he loves me.” I thought about it. “When he was dating this bitch, he planned weekends to Cancun and Palm Springs. When we went somewhere, I had to plan it. I called him on it. So he planned this quick trip to Vegas for us. We flew in one night, had a romantic dinner, shopped, and fucked. I felt so loved, because he showed me that he cared enough to spend the time, money and effort to make me happy.”

We rode on in silence for a while. “You heard about Harry and John, I see.”

“I understand Harry and John. I don’t understand you. Tell me what your deal is.”

“It was like the perfect storm. Linda caught me and Susie fucking and flipped out. Then the next day the cops call me and they’ve got Harry in jail for having sex with John in the park.”

“How come you couldn’t get John off?” I asked.

“Harry already did that,” he joked. I stared at him, not laughing, so he got serious again. “I tried, I really did. But the cops told me that they’d already filed charges. They’d waited on Harry because he was my son.” He sighed. “So I had kind of a teachable moment there. Here I was, damn near an alcoholic, fucking my secretary. My oldest son is gay and I don’t even know it. And when I asked him why he didn’t tell me, you know what he said?”

“He said he thought you’d hate him,” I said.

He stared at me. “Yeah. That’s exactly what he said.” We rode along a bit. “So that night we had some charity thing to go to at the performing arts center. It’s the one named after Tonto. I walked into the Center and there was her portrait, and it’s fucking huge. I looked up, and I swear to God, Brad, she looked at me. Maybe it was the DTs from not drinking for a few days, but I swear to God she glared at me. I ignored it, or tried to, but then the dreams started, and they were never the same, but they were similar. Tonto was there, yelling at me.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “Those aren’t dreams, those are nightmares.” He chuckled with me.

“She kept telling me to get my shit together. To take my place in society. To take responsibility for myself, and to save the city. And it’s that last one that she kept on with. Save the city.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “I did some research on her, she impacted me that much, and found out about all the things she’d done. She almost single-handedly integrated that city. And here she’d left this legacy of progress for Claremont, and none of us had picked it up. It’s my role, it’s my job, and I failed.”

“So you’re going to rebuild your marriage, help your son come out, try to make things safer for John, and rebuild Claremont?” I asked. “What are your plans for next year?”

He chuckled. “There’s more reason for optimism than you may think, at least for the city. The mayor is stepping down next year, and he’s going to appoint me to step in. He’s an old bastard, but he sees that I’m the city’s best hope. There’s a core of good people in the local government just chomping at the bit to make things better. And people are pretty fucking sick and tired of assholes like the Reverend White and his flock of dickheads. They’ve been a plague on the city with their intolerance for too long. Still, I looked at the challenge and thought it was pretty hopeless. Then John writes to Stef, and JP’s involved.”

“You think JP makes that big a difference?”

“He is really respected in Claremont. People think highly of him. He’s smart and classy, and they seem to think of him like they thought of his mother. Jim is a good man, but he doesn’t make people feel good like JP does. They trust JP. They think that even though he’s not there, he still cares. He sends money for the festival and sometimes shows up, and he’s always got a check for a good cause.” I stared at him, amazed. I didn’t know JP was that active in Claremont.

“We’re all trying to figure out if this is the real you, or if the drunk asshole we saw in July was the real you,” I told him.

“If I were that asshole, I would have been a lot more inquisitive about the box you found, the one that led you to Steven’s old Packard,” he said. I smiled. Nick was no fool. “So what do you think?”

“I’m inclined to give you a chance, but there’s one thing that I’ll watch to see if you’re on the level or not.”

“What?” he asked nervously.

“Your relationship with Linda. If you’re serious about her like you say you are, you’ll be able to win her back.” He nodded, and we rode back up to the stables. Right before we got there, he stopped me.

“You think JP and Stef would mind if I left Harry and Barry here for a few days?”

I chuckled. “Take her to the City and stay at the Fairmont.”

 

November 29, 1999

 

“Will you be late?” Robbie asked me.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I’ll touch base with you later today, OK?” He nodded sadly. “You’re out of your gilded cage at the end of the week.”

“But not out of the doghouse,” he said glumly.

“One break out at a time,” I said, trying to be cheerful. I was really exhausted, and it was starting to mess with my mind. Yesterday everyone finally left, and as much as I loved my family, I was glad to see them go. Nick and Linda had gone up to the City for a few days and had come back like young lovers. I guess my advice had worked. I’d told JP that I thought Nick was sincere, at least as far as I could tell, and both he and Stef seemed convinced. Probably even more importantly, Cody had bullshitted with him on Sunday and came to the same conclusion.

Lou and Marcel left at about the same time as Nick and his family, while Cody and Max headed back last night, flying home with Jeanine and the kids. All of the cousins got along well, not always a given. All in all, it was a really nice Thanksgiving. But I was worn out by all the people, and I just craved solitude.

Robbie was like a lost puppy trying to latch on to someone, but unfortunately I couldn’t be that guy, not right now. He’d done that with Kevin, or tried, but Kevin was pretty fixated on Lou. So that left me. I’d be with people all day long, dealing with them and their issues, and then go to bed and find my needy boyfriend, waiting for me to nurture him and fuck him. It would have been nice if I weren’t so fucking tired.

I headed to the kitchen to grab some breakfast, hoping I’d run into Stef, but he’d already gone. The older he got, the earlier he got up. JP came rambling into the kitchen and smiled at me. “Stef let you sleep in?” I asked.

“I wish he’d pretend he was still a teenager once in a while,” he groused.

“I’m so fucking tired I could use a vacation,” I said.

“You did a really nice job of making everyone comfortable,” he said.

“Me? That’s Mom’s job, or yours.”

“We didn’t have to do it this year, you did. Now you see why you’re so tired?” I laughed. I guess I did do that.

“Do you think I’m too dominant, too pushy?” I asked him.

“What makes you think you are?” JP asked.

“Robbie told me that in Hawaii, that he’d found Carson attractive because he was submissive and let Robbie take charge.” JP looked irritated, but only for a second.

“Do you think that if I wanted to seize control from you this weekend, I could have?” he teased.

“Yeah,” I said, not getting it.

“Or your mother, could she have ousted you from control?”

I was following his line of reasoning now. “I know, I told him that. I told him that if he wanted to be in charge, he should take charge.”

“Brad, sometimes things are just not your fault. Sometimes you’re not responsible when things go bad,” JP told me.

“Tell that to Robbie.”

“I might just do that,” he said. I smiled and headed to work. The drive was marvelous, just me, all by myself, with my cell phone turned off and the music turned up. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell came on the radio, and I laughed my ass off as I sang along.

My good mood was to be short lived. As soon as I walked into the office, there was tension in the air. “Brad, Stefan needs to see you in his office as soon as possible,” the receptionist said.

“Terrific,” I grumbled. I headed up to his office. It was beautiful, of course, big and tastefully decorated. Stef was our front man, so we made sure he could put on the show. I found the Director of Personnel, Stef, Luke, and Brandon, all sitting around a conference table, looking very upset. Did they fire Brandon? Did they blow this thing up already? I started to get pissed off, and then calmed myself, waiting for the story.

“Do you not answer your cell phone?” Stef snapped. That was unusual. I looked into his eyes and smiled to myself. I could read him like a book: he was acting.

I played along. “Not when I don’t have it on,” I snapped back, something I never would have done if I’d thought he were serious.

“Well we have a situation, and it involves you,” Stef said. “You and your inability to keep your own staff in line.” I looked at Brandon and the Personnel Manager, a guy named Craig: They were nervous.

“Well what is this latest crisis that is so important it couldn’t wait twenty minutes, but you can spend half an hour bitching at me about?” I demanded, trying not to have too much fun with this.

“Gentlemen, this is a serious issue,” Luke said.

“What is a serious issue? Someone tell me, goddammit!”

“Your secretary has been leaking information to our competitors,” Stef said with a sneer.

“Grace?” I asked, panicked. “Not Grace.”

“Grace,” Stef said, pretending to be smug. “Brandon found this fax receipt. It is a copy of our bid proposal to Elkstone sent with Grace’s fax code.”

I stared at it and thought about what a little shit Brandon was. “This went to Tri-partners!” I said. He’d framed Grace, and sent the fax to a different company than Amphion.

“We have learned that they out bid us, even though they did not get the deal,” Luke said.

“I recommend that we terminate her for cause, and escort her from the building,” Craig said officiously.

“I see no other option,” Stef said. They all looked at me, as if they were expecting an argument.

“I’ll handle it,” I said resignedly.

“I’ll be happy to accompany you,” Craig said. Clearly he was clueless about the whole thing.

“I’ll handle it.”

“It would be better from a corporate standpoint if someone else was present,” he persisted.

“I’ll handle it,” I snapped. I glared at him, warning him to shut up.

“Thank you Craig,” Stef said, dismissing him. As soon as he was gone, Stef continued. “I think under the circumstances we need to tighten up security surrounding our bids,” Stef said. “From this moment, only those of us in this room will be allowed to deliver them or handle them.”

“That’s going to be tough when we’re in the City, trying to polish off those last-minute deals,” I said. “I’ll have no staff support.”

“Brandon is going up with us,” Stef said. “He will help us out.”

“Well that will work then,” I said while I looked over at Brandon and forced myself to smile appreciatively. “If you will excuse me, I have something to take care of.” I saw the look of malice in Brandon’s eyes. This was all coming together this week, all coming to a crescendo, and he loved it. Fucker.

I headed down to my office and asked Grace to come in. I closed the door behind her. “What’s going on? Everyone’s nervous.”

“They found a fax of our bid on Elkstone, sent to Tri-Partners,” I said.

“Someone here sent it?” she asked. “Who would have done that? Everyone here is so loyal.”

“Evidently not,” I said. “Do you want to know whose fax code they used?”

“Brandon’s,” she said with a sneer. “He’s a little asshole. He’s the only one I can see doing it.”

“Are you a good actress?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Are you a good actress?” I repeated.

“I was in a few school plays,” she said. “Why?”

“Your code was on the fax.”

“Mine? Brad, you know that’s not me. You know I’d never do that. Please, you have to believe me,” she begged. The poor woman was overwrought, and she may be a good actress, but not good enough to fake that sincerity.

“I know. I know. That’s why I asked you if you could act.”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“I need to trust you with something very important,” I told her. “No one can know.”

“You can trust me,” she said.

“You were framed, and I know who framed you,” I told her.

“I know who framed me too, that little bastard,” she said. “I’ll have his legs broken.” I laughed.

“So when’s the last time you had a vacation?”

“A while, why?”

“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?” I asked her. “And keep in mind it’s November.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Stockholm. My family’s Swedish. I guess November’s not the best time to visit there though. Why do you ask?”

“You’re going to be fired today,” I said.

“Brad…” she started.

“It has to be done so our rat doesn’t suspect anything.”

“I’ll be embarrassed, humiliated in front of everyone,” she said, and that really upset her.

“Well, this termination of yours is going to last for a week. During that week, you can go anywhere you want to. I’ll pay for it.” She smiled. “Oh, and did I tell you there’s a hiring bonus, effective a week from today, and only for the person I hire as my assistant. $50,000.”

Grace smiled. “I’ve been a very bad girl.” I gave her one of my credit cards. “You’re trusting me with this?” she asked, surprised.

“Yeah, and I’m actually trusting you with a lot more than that.”

“I won’t let you down,” she said firmly.

“I never doubted it for a minute. Now, let’s put that acting talent to work. We’re going to pretend that I just came in here and lectured you about loyalty, told you how pissed off I was, and fired you. No severance, you rat fink.” She smiled. “How would you react?”

I watched her think about it, visualize it, and then get into character. “I’m ready. I’m going to call you some bad things. I’m sorry,” she said.

“Knock ’em dead, Grace,” I said. She stood up, stomped around the room a few times, and then burst out of the door. She stopped and looked back at me.

“I can’t believe after all the years I’ve been here you’d treat me like this! I’ve done everything for you, you asshole!” Then she grabbed her purse and ran out of the building. She stopped right outside the front door, pulled out her key, and ran back in, slamming it on the counter, and then left.

“I’m really sorry about that Brad,” Brandon said, standing next to me. “Anything you need, you let me know, and I’ll take care of you.” He leered at me. “Anything.”

I reached down and grabbed my crotch in what could have been a meaningful gesture, and smiled at him. He was positively giddy.