He stared at me for a long minute but I knew from the brackets around his mouth he was using this time to curse the day he sat me down to say he was making plans to step back, to transition into semi-retirement. He was cursing the assurances he'd made that I'd be able to bring his work up to the present century and court the kind of clients that interested me. He was cursing his promise to allow me to work as I saw fit and not exactly as he did because he respected my training and experience, and he didn't expect me to abandon that when I teamed up with him. He was cursing the whole damn relationship we'd brokered to bridge our worlds.
"We're not about to agree on this matter," he replied. "My priority is meeting the needs of my clients. I'd like it to be yours too though it's clear you find that boring."
This was how he played itevery time. It was never about smart decisions but me rejecting his world, his clients. More to the point, it was about me rejecting his approach. In the beginning, I'd humored him on this. I'd allowed him to feel his feelings. But instead of him seeing my side of the argument, he leaned deeper into his. Another one of my madly successful strategies working out for the worst.
"It doesn'tboreme." I glimpsed at my watch. This conversation was a terrible use of a billable hour. "It isn't what I signed on for. It's not the reason I opened an office in Boston and went after new business opportunities rather than spending time on your client roster."
"I don't know why you can't service my existing clients using the systems that haven't failed me once in thirty years and leave these projects of yours on the side."
If it were that simple, I would've already taken that route. But the audits and consulting contracts I was going after wouldn't leave time for wading through handwritten notes and dot-matrix printouts. I couldn't spend three hours on round trips from my office to Dad's because he accepted more work but didn't have the capacity for it given his mule-and-cart process.
"I can't do that, Dad. I hate to say this but I'mnotgoing to do it. I thought you were going to start declining new clients since you've pulled back. I figured you'd offload some existing clients onto another firm or—"
"There has never been talk of sending clients elsewhere," he snapped. "If that was what you expected, you didn't get that idea from me."
"Fine. Great. Hearing you loud and clear now." I ran my fingertip over my eyebrow in a feeble attempt to ease the tension headache coiling there. "Then I'll hire and supervise a junior accountant to manage those clients. Is that acceptable to you?"
"When did you become so dismissive of these family operations? These people who are our neighbors and friends, they're our community. And you want to cast them aside to consult for big corporations."
"Not that it matters here but Shadyside and many others on my rosterarefamily businesses," I said, mostly to myself.
Too engrossed in his own argument to my counterpoints, he continued, "Why would you think I'd want these clients, the ones I consider family, handled by some no-name twenty-four-year-old in your Boston office? They come to us because they trust us and that's a fact you refuse to accept. You just don't understand this business and I don't think I can try to teach you anymore."
The thing about wars was they weren't fought over one thing. It was never the pinpoint reason found in history books. Wars exploded out of a sequence of events that built over time, a series of pressure points twisting and closing in, a process of buckling down and hardening up. Then a line was crossed and there was no going back.
It seemed, in my throbbing-head view, we'd crossed several lines in the span of this hour.
"I don't want to say this," I started, "I haven't wanted to say it for months. A year, even. But I don't have any other choice. If you are determined to be the only person who makes decisions, if you want to continue focusing on your client roster while working fewer hours, and if you're going to block my way at every turn, I can't grow a future for this practice. It's time to stop forcing this arrangement and let me walk away. I'll call my attorney in the next few days and get her started on revising the LLC."
Without pausing to breathe, he replied, "That's not an option. You have to get these ideas out of your head and do the real work of—"
I didn't hear the rest because I made good on my promise and walked the fuck out. Storming down the hall, through the kitchen, out to the backyard. My feet carried me forward without conscious thought, skirting around my mother's raised vegetable beds, past the old cherry tree, down the mossed-over brick path to the brambly section of the yard my siblings and I long ago claimed as our hideout. It was the space at the far end of the lot, where the property line was cornered with two granite markers and the land gave way to the woods, where bushes and vines and trees gathered together to form a quiet, protected understory.
I walked out because I couldn't take it anymore. Because I'd heard it all before. Because the path forward was clear to me but not my father. No, the path was an offense to him. At once a dismissal and an indictment of his practice. But that wasn't it. I wanted to build something for myself—and by myself—just as he'd done. I didn't know why I had to do the same thing he did and I didn't know how he'd convinced himself I'd want that.
I didn't startle when I felt an arm slide around my waist or a head nod against my bicep. Part of me knew Zelda would follow. The other part wished for it.
"How much of that did you hear?" I asked. "The walls in that house are tissue paper."
"Enough," she replied, her knuckles gliding over my flank. "How are you doin', Ashville?"
There was a split second where I considered lying to her. Blowing it all off and insisting I was fine, this was fine, everything wasfine. But I'd never succeeded in telling Zelda anything but the absolute truth. Every single one of my lies and omissions came back to kick me in the ass. "It's frustrating, you know?"
"Yeah. I know." She paused, probably waiting for me to disembowel myself further but when I didn't say anything, she continued, "I think the hardest part is the doubt. You let yourself believe that people understand you, they get you. You let yourself believe they trust you to do the right thing too. But then someone says they don't get it and they don't trust you, and maybe you're wrong for thinking you could be trusted or understood. And you just doubt that anyone will ever be able to do those things for you."
She ran her hand along my spine in elegant, artful passes like she was drawing a map to my salvation there and all I had to do was open my eyes and see it. I felt a tremendous surge of emotion, as if pins and needles and goose bumps had colonized my skin and now I was a man-sized nerve ending hiding in an overgrown canopy of summer green with a woman I fully and irrevocably required in my life.
"Yeah, Zelda," I said, turning my gaze away from the woods for the first time since I'd marched out here. "The doubt."
I hooked my arm around her shoulders, yanked her tight to my body, and kissed her. I wasn't especially kind in the manner I took her. There was no gentle brushing of lips, no respectful hand placement. It was rather unhinged—Iwas unhinged—and my body seemed to interpret this as the proper moment to calm down and tighten up all at once. I could breathe again, I could think beyond the headache behind my eyes, and I also wanted to burn down anything that dared to separate me from this woman. I already knew her subtle scent and the way she felt against me, and now I knew I should've done this a long time ago.
She flattened her hands on my chest and bunched my shirt in her fists, forcing me closer, pressing me harder to her torso.
"Yeah?" I murmured against her mouth. I needed her to want this the way I did. Unhinged and fiery and all this overwhelming relief.
She reached up, cupping her hand around the back of my neck."Yes."
"Thank god."
