Chapter Two
Adam
"Mr. Wallace, your father will see you now," the young woman behind the desk said as she flashed me a smile that told me if I stopped and asked for her number after the meeting, she'd definitely give it to me.
"Thanks, Miss.." I grinned as I trailed off waiting for the curvy brunette to fill in the blank.
"Carson. Kimber Carson, Mr. Wallace," she said as she stood up and prepared to usher me into my father's office.
"Please, call me Adam," I said offering my hand as I gave her the once over and then flashed an appreciative grin to let her know I liked what I saw. "Why haven't I noticed you before, Kimber?"
"I'm new here, Mr. Wa—Adam," she said with laugh. "It's been about a month now."
"Ah, I see, he got rid of what's-her-name," I said nodding knowingly. My father had a reputation for hiring and firing secretaries more often than most people changed their bed sheets. Some speculated that it was because my mother would get wind of the newest pretty-young-thing and then storm into the office demanding the he get rid of the girl. I knew it was because my father was a miserable, self-righteous bastard who was unforgiving when it came to mistakes and often used other people as scapegoats for his own.
"I don't know who was here before me, but your father has been quite lovely to me since I arrived," she said with a wide smile. I couldn't tell if she was lying or just naïve; either way I knew she'd figure it out sooner or later.
"That's wonderful," I said smiling as she turned and walked toward the office door. I watched the sway of her hips, encased in a skintight dress, as she walked and imagined what it would be like to push that dress up over her hips and take her hard and fast against the door to my father's office. The image of being buried deep in Kimber made me hard, and the idea of flipping my father the bird by screwing his secretary made me smile.
"Here you go, Adam," she said as she pulled the door open and motioned me in. "Have a good meeting."
"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," I said as I stepped inside my father's office and looked over to find him on the phone yelling orders into it before slamming the receiver down hard enough to make the desk vibrate. I looked at my father and said, "I'm not marrying that Vasquez girl."
"Don't get smart with me, Adam," he growled. "I'm in no mood."
"Are you ever?" I asked knowing that this would push him a step closer to the edge. My father, Gordon Wallace, was known for, among other things, having an extraordinarily short fuse. Unfortunately, this was something I'd inherited from him, so when we butted heads, it tended to be explosive. This morning my mother had called me and broken the news that she was planning my wedding to Veronica Vasquez, and that I needed to go see my father at his downtown office to secure the large ring I'd be offering the girl at the dinner my parents were throwing at the end of the month. I'd laughed loudly at my mother before hanging up the phone and felt fairly sure that my father might be on my side in this one, but now I wasn't so certain.
"What the hell do you want?" he shouted as he dropped down into his enormous leather chair and leaned back staring at me. "Why the hell are you here?"
"I told you: I'm not marrying that Vasquez girl. Also, I've come with a proposal for something that will require an investment, but has the potential to make you an enormous amount of money," I said invoking the magic word. When it came to making money, my father would listen to anything that had the potential to make him a profit.
"Is this another one of your harebrained schemes that is going to lose me more than it makes?" he asked as he shifted his attention to the computer on his desk and began tapping the keyboard. "Aren't you happy with your little job in R&D? It'll set you up nicely for that nice girl your mother has chosen for you."
"No, this is one of those ideas that is going to revolutionize the market," I said ignoring his reference to the girl and my mother. I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket and pulled it out so I could see who was calling. It was my best friend, Bugsy Wiseman. I hit the button to send it to voicemail before I responded. "The job is boring; it's not what I want to do and you know it. You knew it when you forced me to take the position."
"You should be grateful that you have any job—put that goddamn thing away," my father ordered in an irritated tone as he sorted through the paperwork on his desk. "The whole world has gone insane over those damn things. If this is another one of your ridiculous ideas, I'd rather you kept it to yourself."
I stood stock-still and fumed as I waited for him to stop fussing with his computer. What I wanted to do was walk around the desk, grab the computer, and toss it out the window. I knew he'd never actually agree with anything I proposed unless he could take full credit for it, and I already had the feeling that this wasn't going to be something he'd want to take credit for.
"Bugsy and I want to sell our idea for individual renewable energy turbines to farmers in the Midwest," I began. "We've started Agape Resources to work on establishing the wind farming program. It's a renewable energy source that has the potential to feed millions of kilowatt-hours back into the electrical grid and generate profits unlike anything we've ever seen before. We've researched the market and we think that we can make a killing in the Midwest states that big turbine companies have ignored. "
"Over my dead body," he said without looking up. The hard tapping of his fingers on the keyboard let me know just how angry my father was. For a moment, I stood looking out the vast expanse of windows that ran floor to ceiling across one side of his office contemplating how I could get this stubborn man to listen to me when he spoke again. His voice was entirely too calm as he asked, "What in the hell is wrong with you?"
"Nothing's wrong with me," I replied as I felt the knot in my stomach twist. With my father, no conversation that began this way ended well. I continued, "Bugsy and I want to help create opportunities for renewable energy and make a lot of money doing it. If you look at our financial projections—"
"The hell you do," he said as he raised his head and finally looked at me. His meaty hands were clenched in tight fists and I could see the color rising in his cheeks as he fought to keep his rage contained.
By no stretch of the imagination was my father a calm person, and I learned this lesson very early on. As teenager, I'd had several run-ins with him, but none as bad as the one that had marked my sixteenth birthday. He had raged out of control over my failure to show up on time for mass and rained holy hell down upon me for failing to put God first in my life. I ended up confined to my room with a broken arm and two broken ribs and missed the first month of the next semester.
No one had reported him because he'd made it clear that the price of disloyalty would be extremely high, and after seeing what he would do to his own son, no one dared test the waters. My mother had been traumatized by the incident, but we'd never spoken about it, and from then on, I made it a point to steer clear of my father unless there was a large audience of potential witnesses present. I had even gone so far as to make sure that I'd been invited to spend all school breaks with classmates or relatives, and although she never said anything about it, I always thought my mother had had a hand in those arrangements.
I'd been away from him for the past six years working on my degrees at MIT, and in that time, I'd grown taller and worked to develop the kind of bodily strength that would give me a fighting chance against the man. I was now 6'4" and a triathlete who could bench-press more than four hundred pounds. At sixty-seven, my father had lost some of the muscle that had made his 6'2" body seem so intimidating.
"Son, I am an oil man," he said, looking up at me with his steely, gray eyes. "I have worked my entire life to provide you with the resources and opportunities that would ensure your success. I have run myself ragged building this company and keeping it running smoothly knowing that someday my son would take over and run it even more successfully. I have gone to church every Sunday and prayed to God our Father that you would grow up to be the man you need to be in order to run the business successfully. Your mother and I have ensured that you will marry a girl who is rich, educated, and beautiful, and whose connected to a Venezuelan oil business will ensure the continued success of the company I've poured my blood, sweat, and tears into. And now you walk into my office and feed me this bullshit about some hippie-dippy, little startup that wants to harness wind?"
I clenched my jaw and looked straight at him feeling my own anger and resentment begin to rise.
My father angrily slammed papers onto his desk as he muttered under his breath finally looking up. "What son-of-a-bitch put you up to this? Tell me and I will have him hunted down like a dog and shot!"
"No one," I replied through clenched teeth. I tried to remind myself of all the reasons why it was a bad idea to lose my temper with my father as I explained, "I worked on a project like this at MIT and I can see the potential for wind power. It's my idea."
"Bullshit; you're not smart enough to come up with something like this," he scoffed. "Someone is putting you up to this. How much are they paying you to betray your family?"
"Is that what you think?" I asked as I realized that my father's anger at me was pathological. He hated me and his paranoia about a hostile takeover of his company was his primary focus. My value was only in what I could do for him: how I could run his company, carry on his legacy. I was irrelevant. The realization felt like a physical blow and I inhaled sharply as it hit me.
"Damn right that's what I think!" he shouted as he stood up and pushed his chair back before striding around the desk to stand inches away as he continued. "I think you've enjoyed all the benefits of my money and that your education has made you a weak-minded, little weasel who would sell out to the highest bidder. You have been nothing but a disappointment to your mother and me. I told her we should have had a second child just in case the first one was a loser, but she assured me that you would be the perfect son. What a joke. You're the exact opposite of everything I wanted."
I felt my pulse racing as the accusations and insults flew. It was one thing to think your father hated you, but quite another to have him openly and aggressively confirm it. I clenched my fists at my side, trying to remind myself that he was just a mean, old man who hated everyone and everything. I was nothing special in that area, but as he continued to pile on the insults, I felt my resolve weakening until finally I couldn't hold back anymore.
"Wow, you really have a low opinion of me, don't you?" I sneered. "I'm choosing work I believe in—unlike what you did, Father. You're the weak-minded fool who trusted God and his father to guide him in the right direction, and look where you ended up: Old and mean and angry at the world because you didn't get to do what you wanted to do with your life, isn't that right? I mean, how pathetic are you that you didn't even get to marry the woman you actually loved?"
"Son, you're pushing the outer limits of my patience," my father said as his face turned pale. I'd brought up history that he thought he'd buried and even though he felt free to dig deep into my life, he didn't like it when the tables were turned.
"You're not the only one who uses information as currency in this family," I said pulling myself up to my full height as my father stood a foot away glowering at me. "And I would have thought you'd appreciate the fact that I am looking to build a new business and tap into new veins of profit. But I guess your ego and your ignorance drives most of what you do these days, don't they?"
"You are an absolute disgrace to this family," he growled. I could see him clenching his fists and I knew that I was dangerously close to provoking a physical outburst. As I stood silently, waiting to see where this would go, I breathed deeply and reassured myself that this time I would not end up on the losing end of a fight with him. After a long while, my father's rage seemed to recede a bit, and he spoke terse tone, "I don't know what made you want to pursue this ridiculous line of work, but I'll tell you something right now, son: If you and that friend of yours want to pursue this little fantasy, you have one month to do it. Then you'll come home and marry the Vasquez girl or you will be cut off from any and all financial support. I'm not allowing a dime of my money to go toward the business of putting me out of business or to the impudent action of disgracing this family. I am a business man and a man who believes in God; you are a good for nothing, ungrateful rebel without a cause, and I will have no difficulty cutting you out of everything."
I stood completely still, staring into my father's eyes as I thought about my response. I knew what I wanted to do and I knew what would happen if I chose it. I'd thought about this moment for years, and in all my fantasies about this type of showdown, I'd always imagined myself heroically throwing punches until I had weakened him to the point that I could slam him to the ground and put my boot on his throat as I demanded an apology for all the pain he'd caused. I imagined that I would scoff at his weakness and then walk away feeling vindicated. What I had not imagined was this: Standing face to face with my tormenter and realizing that he was nothing more than a frightened, old bully who had lost the ability to terrorize me with his mere presence. I felt my stomach begin to roil as I stared at the man who called himself my father.
"You're so damn ungrateful," my father muttered shaking his head in disgust, but I could see that he'd backed down and was not going to go any further than using words to try and wound me. "I don't know how we managed to raise a son that is so disloyal to and disrespectful of his family. You're pathetic and sad."
I could feel the blood rushing to my face as he read off the list of ways in which I'd disappointed him and my mother. I could feel the shame threatening to engulf me, but I didn't look away. Instead, I absorbed the bricks he threw knowing that I'd later use them to build an even stronger wall of defense. I knew my father was a predator who used words to weaken his prey, but in his rage, he seemed to forget that I'd had a lifetime of practice in deflecting his attacks.
"One month of freedom and then you come back and do as you're expected to or you will forfeit all inheritance rights and you will not receive a dime from me or your mother," he continued as he stood and circled me. For a moment, I wondered if he might actually be thinking about physically hurting me, but then he went in for the kill. "Think long and hard about this choice, son. If you choose this wind business over your family, it will be the last choice you make as a Wallace."
As he said this, an invisible thread broke. I'd spent a lifetime cowering and hiding from this man, and now I'd had enough of his bullying. I might find myself dirt poor after this encounter, but I was damn well going to make all the choices about my life. Because when I looked ahead, I saw that if I gave in now, I might have all the money in the world, but I'd never be free of my father. I'd spend the rest of my life groveling on my knees as I did his bidding. I swallowed hard and made my decision.
"Well, since you put it that way," I said as a smile spread across my lips, but did not reach my eyes. "I'll pack my things and be out of my apartment by morning."
My father's eyes narrowed as he looked me up and down. He drew a deep breath, and as a cruel grin spread across his own lips, said, "No, you'll take what you've got right now. Everything else is mine. Now get the hell out of my sight. You have one month to make your decision. If you're not back and engaged to that girl, then you'll be out for good. Oh, and you're fired."
I opened my mouth to argue that this wasn't fair, and then quickly closed it and simply nodded. I smiled, shrugged, and said, "You can't fire me. I quit," then turned and calmly walked out the door.
As I walked past the front desk, Kimber called, "Have a good day, Mr. Wa—Adam!"
"Kimber," I said quietly as I stopped and turned to face her. "If you're smart, you'll get out while you still can."
A look of confusion crossed her unlined face, and then she smiled brightly and said, "Thanks for the advice, but I'm happy here."
"It's your funeral," I muttered as I turned and walked out the door.