gesture.
There was a gas station after a few minutes, and I stopped beside some landscaping and pulled up two flowers.
“Here.”
She relented. “I accept your apology.” We got back out on the road and she held them, treating them with far more respect than they deserved. “Why did I marry you, anyway?”
“For my money,” I said.
“Then I made a big mistake.” She said it with a smile, though, for which I was very grateful. “I don’t know if your money is worth putting up with you. If you worked with those people-Nathan Kern and all the rest of them-you could be rich.”
“I am rich.”
“Not as rich as you could be.” The edges of the smile hardened a little. “He’d put you on the board of the foundation, and you could get control of everything your father had.” She looked out the window. “It should have been yours anyway.”
“Look, all I did was get born into this family,” I said. “It wasn’t my choice. As long as they send my check each month, nobody gets hurt. If they want anything else I’ll inflict damage.” I waited until she looked back at me. The two daisies in her hand were a little damaged. “You like your flowers?”
“Yes.”
The road was bending through hills, away from the ocean. I stopped again, just off the edge, where the guardrail actually was bitten through. Out of the car, I stood and looked down the hillside at the scraped dirt and torn bushes and the broken tree at the bottom. They’d cleaned away the wreckage, every piece of it.
Katie got out with me.
“Why am I here?” I said. “What is the point?”
She pulled a knot of wildflowers from the ground, much nicer than the daisies, and handed it to me.
“Here.”
“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” I said.
“I just want to give you some flowers.”
I stood for a moment. Then I tossed them down the steep hill and the wind caught them and they landed just where his car had. I’d seen it there, with yellow police tape and spotlights, and the trucks pulling it up the embankment.
“He’s gone, Jason,” she said. “It might really be different now.”
2
Fred was stacked behind a desk as big as he was in his thirtieth-floor corner office. I didn’t know if he had any other clients. I avoided the big armchair in front of the desk and settled with Katie into a sofa at the side.
“Good morning,” he said as he took out a pile of thick folders, a formal greeting for the official occasion. “These are copies for you and Eric to take. We will not be reading the whole thing today.”
“I guess I just want to get it over with,” I said. “Is there anything we don’t already know? Tell me the bottom line.”
Pause. “We will just wait for Eric.” It was making me uncomfortable, the way he was staring at me. The whole office made me uncomfortable, the way it was a little dim, a little worn, just a little disorganized. But it was still just Uncle Fred.
And then Eric blew in, his helmet under his arm. He dropped it and his leather jacket on the floor next to the armchair. “Sorry. Construction.” He was dressed like a peasant, in khakis and a lime polo.
“My suit better still be in three pieces,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s okay.”
He wasn’t looking good. His eyes were red and his face was pale, and the green shirt made it look worse.
“Are you okay?”
He blinked. “I guess so. I was out late.” He had no extra fat on his body, but now he even seemed gaunt. The shirt was loose.
“It shows.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Come over this afternoon,” I said. “We’ll feed you.”
“I’ll call Rosita,” Katie said. “She’ll have lunch.”
“Thanks.” He yawned and then straightened up in the armchair. “All right, Uncle Fred. I’m ready.”
“Yes,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Fred went. “The first step is just a little legal exercise to make everything official.” Fred looked at me. “You are Jason Rove Boyer, the son of Melvin Howard Boyer and his first wife, Ann Rove Boyer, deceased?”
“That’s what they always said. I wouldn’t remember.”
I hadn’t meant it to be funny, but he laughed, just like a family lawyer was supposed to, relieving the tension. He should have been in movies. “You are twenty-eight years old, you have been married once, to your present wife, Katherine Sevildray Boyer, and you have no children. That’s all correct?”
“Unless there’s something I don’t know. We only got married once, didn’t we?” I said to Katie. That was supposed to be funny.
“Just once.”
I would do it again, though, and she would, too. The first time she really did do it for my money. But we’d come to know each other, even in just three years. I’m not much of a companion, and she has other friends for talking and spending time. It was deeper than that, something between two complex people. I hadn’t known how much I needed someone like her.
Fred chuckled again, breaking my thoughts. Sometimes I wondered what he was thinking. “I need to know if someone is going to come out of the woodwork.” Just a tiny edge on his voice. “No children?” “Not a one,” I said.
“And you are Eric Melvin Boyer, also the son of Melvin Howard Boyer and Ann Rove Boyer, deceased?”
“Yes, sir. They’re both deceased now.” This was bothering him more than the funeral. Or else he just wasn’t feeling well.
“Yes, of course.” Fred shifted into deep sympathy mode. “It will be fine, Eric. Now. You are twenty-five years old, you have never been married, and you have no children. That’s correct?”
“No children, no wife.”
“If there was a wife, or child, that I did not know about, it would be… well, a difficulty.” Fred paused and gave us both a few seconds to have any sudden memories. “And to the best of your knowledge, you are Melvin’s only children?”
“I’m probably not the one to ask,” I said.
“But to the best of your knowledge?”
“We’re the progeny.”
“Well, then, we’ll get to the main part. Jason, Eric, your father was very wealthy, as you know. Your father had discussed with you what he planned to do with his assets?”
“He was leaving them to his foundation,” Eric said. “Jason and I would get enough to live on.”
“Yes, that had been his original plan.”
Original? What was the man saying? Katie stirred beside me.
“Eric, you will be getting a sizable income. I suggest you get advice on investing it. You are a young man, and you will have the opportunity to build up substantial wealth if you don’t waste it.”
Every kid needs an Uncle Fred. And maybe Fred knew how much Eric needed advice about money.
“What is ‘sizable’?” I asked.
“Fifty thousand dollars per month, from a trust created for the purpose.” He’d been living on twenty. No, he’d been getting twenty, but he’d been spending about twenty-five. BMWs were so expensive these days. Fifty would
