One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (20 page)

It took a moment for Rick to realize the man who had barged into his office wasn’t his father; his father was dead. But he was a dead-ringer for the man Rick hadn’t seen in fourteen years.

“Rick!” the man called out. “I’m so happy to finally meet you.”

Before Rick could rise from his chair, the young man bounded across the room and stuck out his hand. He looked like he couldn’t even be twenty yet, dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and hiking boots as if he’d just come off a job as a lumberjack. His hair was long and unkempt, and he wore a beard that nearly obscured the entire bottom half of his face.

Rick pulled himself to his feet. “I’m sorry, you can’t come in—”

“I’m Beau,” the man announced, still holding his hand out for Rick to shake. “Your brother. I’m thinking you might have a job for me.”

~

Four hours later, Rick walked in the big wooden door of his mother’s house and found her in the kitchen, nursing a martini at the breakfast bar. A pot of green chiles and a pot of pinto beans were cooking on the stove, and Rick could smell carnitas browning in the oven.  His mother must have suspected that he wanted to discuss something fairly contentious if she was fixing him his favorite food.

“Hi dear!” she called out with prophylactic sweetness. He wondered if she thought it would work: by being especially nice to him, she could shield herself against his anger.

“How is Amy?” she trilled, leaning forward for a kiss.

“Why do you ask about Amy?” He ignored her cheek and kept his distance.

“Because I like her.” His mother’s back straightened, and he saw her quickly adjust her attitude to match his. As usual, she would be ready to engage in any battle he wanted to wage. “Although she has a bit of a temper. But then, you probably know that already.”

“And you met with her recently, right?”

“Yes, I did. We had coffee.”

“I guess you told her about my father. But, whatever else you told her, it apparently convinced her she had to leave. She quit today.”

“Well, that wasn’t my intention!”

“What did you intend?”

“Nothing! She called me and asked if I would meet her for coffee. It seemed like a perfectly innocent thing to do. She asked me why you couldn’t work with women, and I told her I thought it had something to do with your father leaving us. I have always known you blamed that on me. That’s no secret.”

“You are right about that.”

“So, Amy must have figured she wasn’t going to change you.”

“No one is going to change me. And the reason she left was because I wouldn’t let her engineer a takeover of my company,” Rick said, finally sitting down at the bar across from his mother. “She was even using sex with me as a way to weaken my defenses.”

“Oh, that is absurd,” his mother retorted. “She quite clearly loves you.”

“No, mother.
That’s
absurd!”

“Is this what you wanted to talk about tonight? You wanted to yell at me because Amy left? Did you want my advice, or did you just want to accuse me of interfering? I don’t see where this is going.”

Rick closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The moist odor of carnitas filled his lungs. “Yes,” he said. “That
was
what I wanted to talk about, although now that we’ve gotten into it, I don’t see where I thought it would lead. And, I’m sorry to say, I think we have bigger problems on the horizon.”

“We? We have problems?”

“Today a man who calls himself Beau D’Matrio showed up in my office looking for a job.”

His mother sat up straighter and grabbed her mouth and chin with one hand.

“I’m guessing from that reaction that you are not surprised that I have a brother—or a half-brother, I guess. When were you going to tell me about this?”

Janet stood up and reached for Rick’s hand. He pulled it away, but she grabbed it and held on.

“Let’s go sit down someplace comfortable,” she said, reaching over to turn off the oven. “This is going to be a long story.”

~

“There was a time when I loved your father as much as Amy loves you,” she started after leading Rick to one of the big leather couches in the living room.

Rick brushed off the suggestion with a dismissive wave.

“But,” she continued, “he never really settled into the marriage. Perhaps it was the exclusively male cohort he worked with—union guys, other contractors, state and county highway officials, you know, the guys I work with today. Or perhaps his nature just wasn’t monogamist. Whatever the cause, as I started managing more and more of the business, he took more and more time out of the office. At first, I thought it was just PR, you know—doing public relations on his feet. He was gregarious, you know. Very good at meeting people. He could talk to anyone about anything: Schopenhauer or what brand of beer cans he found in the ditch.”

Rick had a vague memory of his father at a baseball game, his back turned toward his son as he pumped the arms of big men seated all around them. He knew his mother was right; his father never met a stranger.

“Then, it went from PR on his feet to long lunches, and then to long lunches with martinis, and then …” She paused. “It hurt so much back then because I still loved him so much. He wouldn’t come back to work for hours. Finally, it got to the point that once he left about eleven in the morning, I knew he was done for the day. I thought he was just going home to sleep it off, but he wasn’t going home. First it was Al’s wife, then Ron’s secretary, then it stopped mattering who it was. It was as if the alcohol and the sex were parts of the same addiction—an addiction he couldn’t satisfy at home.

“Finally, I had started to understand what was happening, but I was so busy running the business, I made a deal with the devil. As long as he was always there for you when you got home from school, I would let his philandering go. By then, I had stopped loving him anyway, and if he never touched me again, I was better off. But then one day, Julie showed up at my door with little Beau on her hip and demanded money.”

By the time his mother had reached that point of her story, Rick was already feeling adrift—unmoored at least from the world he thought he had known. He sat, wordless and trying to remember his father, but his brother’s brand-new visage kept blocking his memory.

“So, you didn’t kick him out,” he mumbled.

“No, I kicked him out. But first, I gave him a choice, and he chose Julie and Beau. He chose them over me and you and the business, and I never wanted to tell you that.”

If that was true, then Rick knew he had years of assumptions and decisions and attitudes to rethink. If his mother hadn’t forced his father out, then he had built a bulkhead against an enemy that didn’t exist: the venomous, acquisitive, lecherous female executive. Could he get rid of it? Did he even want to?

“Does Elaine know any of this?” he asked. Surely working closely with his mother, his sister had to have learned the story long ago.

“Yes,” Janet said. “She’s known since high school. She was too young when he left to have revered him the way you did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You had already lost your father. I didn’t want you to hate him too.”

“But if I had known, maybe I wouldn’t have started Buen Dia,” he said. “Maybe I would have come to work for you.”

“And what a shame that would have been, Rick. Heavy road construction is hard and complicated but in the end, it’s just engineering. It’s boring work. It’s fine for your sister and me. We’re not the creative types. But if you had joined the company, Buen Dia and all those beautiful projects you’ve done never would have happened.”

“Is that why you continued to lie to me about why dad left? You didn’t want me in the company?”

“No,” she said. “I never lied. You assumed. That’s different. In fact, at first I was disappointed that you didn’t want to come into the company with me. But then, I saw what you were capable of doing, your vision, your calm management. I’ve been so proud of you. None of that would have been possible if you had been reduced to building roads.”

Rick didn’t know how to react. He had never heard his mother express any appreciation for his work or his business. Was that because she was afraid that eventually this very conversation would result—that eventually, she would have to tell him the truth about his father?

He stood up and thrust his hands deep in his pants pockets. Had he already stopped worshiping the man, like his mother had fourteen years ago? Maybe, but it would take time, and it wouldn’t be easy, he knew.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” he said softly. “I need to step outside to clear my head.”

“Fine,” his mother stood up and walked over to hug him quickly. “I understand. I’ll go get dinner ready. I made your favorite: carnitas and beans.”

~

When they sat down in the dining room to eat, mother and son said little to each other. They had already talked more that evening than Rick could ever remember, but it was clear to Rick that his mother understood him a lot better than he had ever understood her. If she was telling him the truth, then he had assumed so much about her that was wrong. And given the fact that Beau was now available to counter any lies, she would have been foolish to embellish history to make herself look better. If there was anything about his mother that would never change, it was that she was not a fool. 

“I’ll take care of Beau,” Janet finally broke through the silence. “If he was driving a lumber truck, I can undoubtedly use him on my heavy equipment crew.”

“Thanks,” Rick said. “I don’t really think he’s my kind of guy. I can’t imagine him as a finish carpenter. Although that’s probably unfair. What do I know?”

“What are you working on next?” His mother offered a change of subject.

“God, I don’t know,” Rick said, relieved to move on. “My projects are nearly all finished, and I’ve been working on trying to get a small deal done up in the Movie Colony. But then, today, I got this letter from the woman in Mexico who owns those three empty lots in Warm Sands that everyone has lusted after forever. Maybe there’ll be something there.”

“Really?” Although most of her jobs involved highway construction out of town, his mother knew Palm Springs well enough to know exactly what property he was talking about. “That’s wonderful. But how did that fall in your lap?”

“Unfortunately, it was Amy. She went to Mexico behind my back and somehow convinced the woman that I should develop her property for her.”

“How the hell can that be unfortunate?”

“Well, even if I was right for the wrong reason, the woman’s letter proves that Amy is power-hungry, manipulative, and not to be trusted. There’s no way I can go forward with it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The woman wrote that she wouldn’t do the deal with me unless Amy was project manager. I don’t think she would have included that provision if Amy hadn’t told her to.”

Janet put down her fork, got up and left the dining room. She walked back in with a bottle of Malbec and started to remove the cork.

“Here, Mom, let me do that,” Rick said, standing up and reaching for the bottle.

His mother shooed him away, and Rick sat back down.

“You need to do some new thinking, here Rick,” she said, turning the corkscrew into the bottle with practiced ease. “Back when you thought I pushed your father out for no reason other than my greed, that was the filter you were seeing Amy through. That’s the filter you saw all women in your business through. But, now you know better. Maybe the señora liked Amy. Maybe Amy is just really good at negotiation.”

“Well, I have no reason to believe that,” Rick said.

“Let me tell you this, son,” she said, popping the cork out of the bottle and refilling Rick’s empty glass. “If it turns out that the provision wasn’t Amy’s idea, that she was only trying to help you, you owe her an apology. I hope you’re man enough to deliver it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rick said. “It’s too late. She’s gone to L.A. She’s gone back with Rob.” Rick tried not to let his mother see how much it hurt to say that, to know that, to accept that. He shook his head and met his mother’s eye. He could see he hadn’t succeeded. His disappointment must have been why she walked around the table, put her arms around her son's shoulders and held him tight.

~

Rick got to the office earlier than usual the next day. He couldn’t sleep anyway, and it seemed there was so much to figure out: how to respond to Marlena Benavides, how to break in his new COO—if he accepted the job offer—and how to find a replacement for Amy. He also needed to make some progress on his Movie Colony plans, or his contractors would be moving on to other companies’ projects to keep busy.

Sandra had not yet arrived to occupy the reception desk when he heard the bells on the front door jingle and a woman’s voice called out, “Is anyone here? Is Rick D’Matrio here?”

More surprises? Rick wondered. He questioned whether he wanted to get up and see who was looking for him before eight o’clock in the morning. Beau’s arrival the day before was enough to satisfy his need for surprises for several months.

Before he could decide, a tiny grey-haired woman stood in his doorway and peered in. She was dressed in a neat Chanel suit and carried a small clutch that hung on her arm by a delicate chain.