Grady
Okay, as long as you’re good.
Esme
We all missed you tonight. The kids were wishing you were here for spaghetti dinner. Other than your stinky cheese.
Grady
Someday Madison will learn the error of her ways when it comes to parmesan cheese. Listen, young lady, you should be asleep. It’s late. I just wanted to touch base.
Esme
I’m glad you did. Willet Cove feels pretty lonely without you.
Grady
Get some sleep. I’ll text you tomorrow.
Esme
Night. And thanks for texting. I was hoping you would.
Grady
You can reach out to me anytime, you know. If you need anything or if you just want to talk. I’m always here for you.
Esme
I know. Thank you.
I set the phone aside and lay back down, resting my cheek against the pillow, staring at the wall until finally fatigue set in and I fell asleep, only to dream about riding a wave so large it knocked me off my board and into the riptide.
12
GRADY
The morning after we met with the attorney, Mara and I decided to visit our mother’s grave. We stopped first at a small flower shop in Brentwood for white daisies and pale pink roses. Our mother had loved daisies, often saying they reminded her of her own mother. The clerk wrapped them in brown paper and tied it with string and soon we were back in Mara’s Range Rover, headed east on Sunset Boulevard. As we drove, the neighborhood shifted from the massive gated estates of Brentwood into Beverly Hills, past the iconic pink Beverly Hills Hotel, then into the grittier energy of the Sunset Strip with its towering billboards advertising the latest films and albums. The palm trees that lined the boulevard stood tall against the brilliant blue sky.
This had once been my world. Yet it felt as foreign as Mars to me now. My life in Willet Cove was quiet, filled with ordinary, simple joys. It was the life I’d chosen. Had it been the right choice? One never knew, I guess, about the decisions we made along the way. Were they right or misguided? Would a different choice have brought everything we desired? Or was it simpler than that? Our destinies preordained and it was only self-delusion that thought otherwise?
As we turned north toward Glendale, the dramatic brown peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains came into view, rising against the horizon. The landscape shifted again, becoming more suburban, hillier. Spanish-style buildings gave way to residential neighborhoods climbing the foothills.
If I took the money, I could buy Esme a house. That was a fact. I could send Robbie to a good college, one worthy of his intellect. Robbie could do so much good in the world with the financial foundation beneath him.
But would it take the ugly pit out of my stomach? The one that had been there since I learned the truth about my father? It had faded in the years since I’d left L.A. but only like a dormant illness. All of this brought it all back. The trial. The reporters following us.
“What’re you thinking about?” Mara asked as we wound higher into the hills.
I turned to look at her. She wore jeans and a blouse but still managed to look like a movie star. “The twenty-million dollar question.”
“Any decisions?”
“Does it make us bad people if we take it?”
“Hank says no. I say maybe. I’m not sure,” Mara said. “But I do know that money in the right hands can do good, even if we’re not good.”
I thought about Esme’s favorite Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese.” “What’s the Mary Oliver line? We don’t have to be good.”
