Remember When by Judith McNaught
“Good.”
“What I mean is, I’m not going to argue with you about the decline of American civilization, the value of marriage, or the desirability of having children—”
“Good!” Cal interrupted, heaving himself out of the threadbare rocker-recliner. “Then get married and get your wife pregnant, so I can give you the other half of your company. Marry that Broadway dancer you brought home two years ago—the one who had red fingernails two inches long—or marry the schoolteacher you liked in the seventh grade, but marry somebody. And you’d better do it quick, because we’re both running out of time!”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we’ve been having this discussion for two years and you’re still single, and I’m still without a baby to dandle on my knee, so I’m settin’ a time limit. I’ll give you three months to get engaged and three more months to get married. If you haven’t brought me a wife home by then, I’m going to put my fifty-percent share of your company into an irrevocable trust in the names of young Ted and Donna Jean. I’ll name Travis as administrator of the trust, which will make him your unofficial business partner, then when Ted and Donna Jean come of age, they can help you run the company themselves. That’s assuming you still have a company left after Travis tries to help you run it.” Cal tossed the Enquirer on the table and another warning into the charged atmosphere. “I wouldn’t take all six months to get the thing done if I were you, Cole. My heart could give out at any time, and I’m changing my will next week so that if I die before you’re married, my fifty-percent share of the company goes to Ted and Donna Jean.”
Cole was so incensed that he actually considered trying to have the old man declared incompetent. Failing that, he decided he could try to have the will overturned . . . but that would take years after Cal’s death and the outcome wouldn’t be certain.
His thoughts were interrupted by Letty, his uncle’s cook-housekeeper, who appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Supper’s ready,” she said.
Both men heard her, but neither acknowledged her presence. Cole had risen to face his uncle, and the two men stood in the center of the room, their gazes clashing—two tall, rugged, unyielding men separated by three feet, one generation, and a decision that one couldn’t fight and the other wouldn’t retract. “Are you capable of understanding that I may not be able to find a woman and marry her in six months?” Cole said between his teeth.
In reply, Cal jerked his thumb toward the stacks of magazines beside his chair. “According to the surveys in those magazines, you have five of the seven most important qualities that women want in a husband. You’re rich,” he said, listing the qualities in the order he remembered them, “you’re intelligent, you’re well-educated, you have a bright future, and Donna Jean says you’re a ‘hunk,’ which I guess qualifies you as handsome.”
Satisfied that he’d won the battle, Cal endured Cole’s icy silence for a moment, then made an effort to discharge some of the animosity that he’d created. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious about the two qualities you lack?”
“No,” Cole snapped, so furious that he almost couldn’t trust himself to speak.
Cal supplied the information anyway: “You lack a desire for children, and I’m afraid that even I would have trouble describing you as ‘tender and understanding.’ ” When his half-hearted attempt at humor failed to evoke any reaction from his enraged nephew, Cal turned toward the kitchen and his shoulders slumped a little. “Letty has supper on the table,” he said quietly.
With a feeling of utter unreality, Cole stared after him, so filled with bitterness and a sense of betrayal that he was actually able to observe his uncle’s thinner frame and bent shoulders without feeling the shocked alarm that such a sight would normally have evoked. Cal looked far less frail a minute later when Cole strode into the kitchen, carrying a tablet and a gold fountain pen from his briefcase. Cole sat down across from him and slapped the tablet on the table in front of his uncle. “Write it down,” he ordered icily while Letty stood at the stove, looking apprehensively from one to the other, a ladle full of chili forgotten in her hand.
Calvin automatically took the pen that was thrust toward him, but his brow wrinkled in confusion. “Write what down?”
“Write down the terms of the agreement and include any specific ‘requirements’ you may have for the woman I marry. I don’t want any surprises if I bring someone home—no last-minute rejections because she doesn’t meet some criterion you’re forgetting to mention at the moment.”
His uncle looked genuinely hurt. “I’m not tryin’ to choose a wife for you, Cole. I’ll leave all that to you.”
“That’s damned big of you.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“And does it look to you like all this is making me happy?”
“Not now. Not right now, but that’s because you’re riled.”
“I’m not riled,” Cole retorted with scathing contempt. “I’m disgusted!”
His uncle winced as the verbal thrust found its mark, but it didn’t sway the stubborn old man from the course he’d set. He tried to shove the tablet back to Cole, but Cole slapped his flattened palm on it. “I want it in writing,” he stated.
In a desperate attempt to soothe the situation before it erupted again into a battle, Letty rushed to the table with a steaming bowl of chili in each hand and plunked them down in front of the men. “Eat while it is hot!” she urged.
“You want what in writing?” Cal demanded, looking stunned and furious.
“Eat now,” Letty interjected. “Write later.”
“I want you to write down that you will turn over your fifty percent of the company to me if I bring home a wife within six months.”
“Since when isn’t my word good enough for you?”
“Since you stooped to extortion.”
“Now, see here!” Cal exploded, but he looked a little guilty. “I have the right to decide who gets my fifty-percent share in the company. I have the right to want to know that someday your son will benefit from my money and my holdings.”
“A son?” Cole countered in a dangerously low voice. “Is that part of the deal? A new condition? I’ll tell you what, why don’t I marry a woman who already has a little boy so you won’t have to wait and you won’t have to worry?”
Calvin glowered at him, then hastily scribbled out what Cole wanted written and shoved the tablet across the table with an indignant grunt. “There it is, in writing. No stipulations.”
Cole would have left at that point, but he was held back by lack of knowledge of his pilots’ whereabouts and by his own inability to believe Cal would actually betray him by carrying out his threat. Cole’s mind easily provided him with dozens of examples of Cal’s temperamental intractability that indicated he might indeed do the unforgivable, but Cole’s heart rejected them just as swiftly.
They ate in uneasy silence, finishing quickly; then Cole returned to the living room, turned on the television set, and opened his briefcase. Working, he reasoned, was safer and far more rewarding than getting embroiled in another argument, and the television set made the silence between them seem less ominous.
Despite the agreement he’d made his uncle write out, Cole was still far from willing to yield to his uncle’s bizarre demands as a way of regaining permanent control of his own damned businesses. At the moment he had no idea what he was going to do. All he knew was that his temper was still simmering and that thus far his options where Cal was concerned ranged from civil court battles to mental competency hearings to a hasty marriage he didn’t want to some woman he didn’t know. All of them were distasteful in the extreme, not to mention grotesque and even painful.
Across from him, his uncle lowered the newspaper he was reading and regarded Cole over the top of the Houston Chronicle’s, front page, his expression innocently thoughtful, as if everything were happily settled to both their satisfaction. “According to what I’ve been reading, a lot of young women are d
Cole pointedly ignored him and continued writing notes.
“And watch out that you don’t pick some gold digger who pretends she wants you and only wants your money.”
Cole’s simmering temper rolled to a full boil. “How the hell do you expect me to find out what a woman’s true motives are in six months?”
“I figured you must be an expert on women by now. Wasn’t there some sort of princess who traipsed after you all over Europe a couple of years ago?”
Cole stared at him in frigid silence, and Calvin finally shrugged. “You don’t have to know a woman inside and out to be sure she’s not interested in marrying your money instead of you.”
“Really?” Cole drawled with deliberate insolence. “And based on your own vast experience with women and matrimony, how do you propose I find out what motives some future wife may have?”
“If I were you, I guess I’d figure the best way to avoid being trapped by some gold digger is to look for a woman who already has money of her own.” Having said that, he raised his brows and waited, as if he honestly expected Cole to applaud his solution, but Cole ignored him and returned his attention to the notepad.
For the next quarter hour the silence in the room was uninterrupted except for the occasional rustling of newspaper pages being turned and folded; then Cal spoke again, on the last subject Cole wanted to discuss. From behind the pages of his newspaper barrier, Cal remarked in a desultory voice, “It says here in Maxine Messenger’s column that you’re attending the White Orchid Ball on Saturday night, and that you donated the most expensive item to be sold at the auction. Maxine says the ball is ‘Houston society’s most glittering social event.’ You won’t have to worry about latching on to a gold digger at a thing like that. Why don’t you take a look around, find a woman who appeals to you, and bring her right back here so I can have a look at her, and,” he put in slyly, “at the marriage certificate. On your first wedding anniversary, I’ll sign over my half of your company to you, just like I said I’d do on that piece of paper.”
Cole didn’t reply, and a short time later, Calvin yawned. “Guess I’ll finish the newspaper in bed,” he announced as he stood up. “It’s ten o’clock. Are you going to work late?”
Cole was studying a letter of intent that John Nederly had drafted at his request. “I’ve worked late for the last fourteen years,” he said shortly. “That’s why you and Travis are as wealthy as you are.”
For a moment Cal stood looking at him, but he couldn’t argue the truth of that, so he started slowly out of the room.
Chapter 16
COLE DID NOT LOOK UP until he heard his uncle’s bedroom door close, and then he tossed the documents he’d been reading onto the coffee table with a sharp flick of his wrist that was eloquent of his black mood.
The sheets of paper landed on top of the National Enquirer—right beside a picture of the woman who’d been jilted by her fiancé.
Right beside a picture of Diana Foster.
Cole lurched forward, picked up the paper, and read the short article with a feeling of grim sympathy for its victim; then he tossed it back where he found it, and his thoughts returned to Cal.
Cole was moodily contemplating his alternatives when a movement on his left drew his attention and he looked toward the kitchen doorway, where Letty was standing with a mug in her hand and a hesitant smile on her face.
For as long as Cole could remember, whenever he disagreed with his uncle, Letty Girandez, who was a terrible cook, had appeared soon afterward with something for Cole to eat and drink—a gesture of comfort from a kindly woman who knew she was a bad cook. In her early sixties, Letty had a plain, round face that managed to convey her inner gentleness and a soft, Spanish-accented voice that lent her an aura of quaint gentility. Cole’s expression softened as she made her way across the living room and put the steaming mug on the coffee table.
“Hot chocolate?” he guessed. Letty’s prescription for a bad mood was always the same: hot chocolate for evening and lemonade for daytime. And cake. Chocolate cake. “Where’s my cake?” he teased, reaching for the mug, knowing he was going to have to drink the entire cup to avoid hurting her feelings. The hot chocolate was traditional, and since Cole had experienced precious little family tradition in his life, he held it in particular reverence.
What familial warmth he’d known, he had mostly found here, with his grandfather’s brother and his housekeeper. Letty turned and headed for the kitchen. “There is some chocolate cake left over from yesterday. I bought it at the store.”
Although that last information made the cake more, not less, desirable, Cole wasn’t hungry. “If you didn’t bake it, it isn’t worth eating,” he teased, and she beamed at the compliment, then turned and started back to the kitchen. “Stay and talk to me for a while,” he said.
Letty sat down on the chair his uncle had occupied earlier, but she did it rather gingerly, perching on the edge of the seat, as if she felt she shouldn’t be there. “You should not argue with your uncle,” she said at last.
“You’ve been telling me that for twenty years.”
“Does your uncle’s desire to see you married very soon seem unreasonable to you?”
“That’s one way of describing it,” Cole said, struggling to keep the bite from his voice.
“I think he believes if he does not force you to marry, then you never will.”
“Which is none of his business.”
Letty lifted her face to his. “He loves you.”
Cole took another swallow of his hot chocolate and set down the cup with angry force. “Which is no consolation.”
“But it is true, even so.”
“Love is not an excuse for blackmail, even if he’s bluffing.”
“I do not think he is bluffing. I think your uncle will leave his half of your company to Travis’s two children if you do not marry.”
A fresh surge of fury rocketed through Cole at that. “I don’t know how he could possibly justify that to himself, or to me!”
The remark was rhetorical and he hadn’t expected an answer, but Letty had one, and he realized that she was absolutely right, that she had seen through all the bluster and excuses, straight through to Calvin’s real motivation: “Your uncle is not concerned with money now; he is concerned only with immortality,” Letty said as she straightened a precariously high stack of reading material on the end table. “He desires immortality, and he realizes that immortality can only be his through his son.”
“I am not his son,” Cole pointed out impatiently.
Letty gave him one of her sweet smiles, but her reply was quietly emphatic. “He thinks of you as such.”
“If immortality is what he’s after, then Travis’s two kids have already provided it for him. Travis and I are both his great-nephews. Even if I had children, they’d be related to him in exactly the same way that Travis’s are.”
Letty bit back a smile. “Travis’s son is lazy and sullen. Perhaps he will outgrow that someday, but for now your uncle does not desire to risk his immortality on such as Ted. Donna Jean is shy and timid. Perhaps someday she will show spirit and courage, but for now . . .” she trailed off, leaving Cole to conclude the obvious—that his uncle did not wish to “risk” his immortality on Donna Jean, either.
“Do you have any idea what brought on his sudden obsession with immortality?” Cole asked.
She hesitated and then she nodded. “His heart is growing weaker. Dr. Wilmeth comes often now. He says there is nothing more that can be done.”
Cole went from shock to denial in the space of moments. He already knew it was futile to try to get Cal to go to Dallas to see other doctors. Once before, after months of arguing, Cole had finally accomplished that, only to have them all concur with Wilmeth. From then on, Cal had refused to even discuss having another consultation.
&
Leaning forward, Cole braced his elbows on his knees, overwhelmed by a terrible sense of fear and foreboding. With his shoulders hunched and his hands loosely linked, he gazed at his uncle’s vacant chair while memories of the cozy nights and animated discussions they’d shared over the past three decades drifted through his mind. It seemed as if the only domestic warmth and happiness he’d ever known had been contained in this one shabby-cozy room. All of that would die when Cal died.
If Letty was correct, that time was not far away. His mind went black when he tried to contemplate a life without trips here to see his uncle. This man, this ranch, they were the original fabric of Cole’s life. He had discarded the cowboy boots and jeans of his youth for supple loafers of Italian leather, custom-made suits tailored in England, and handmade shirts of Egyptian cotton, but underneath all that exterior polish, he was still as rough and rugged as the denim jeans and scarred leather boots he had worn. In his youth, Cole had hated his roots. From the day he went to Houston to college, he’d worked diligently to banish all traces of the “cowboy” he’d been. He’d changed the way he walked and the way he spoke, until there was no trace of the horseman’s loping gait or a west Texas drawl.
Now fate was threatening to take away the last link he had to his roots, and the adult that Cole had become wanted desperately to preserve everything that was left.
Cal’s threat to leave his half of the company to Travis and his family was forgotten as Cole tried desperately to think of some action that would forestall the inevitable, that would breathe life into his uncle and brighten his last remaining years. Or months. Or days. Cole’s thoughts revolved in an unbroken circle of futility and helplessness. There was only one thing he could do for Cal that would make his remaining days happy.