New Beginnings. Jill Barnett
Burton.”
“Phillip!” March said.
“I was only joking. Trying to lighten things up for him. The kid looks like he’s going to cry.”
Mickey spun around, the skin on his neck and face instantly bright red, eyes still moist, and pinned his brother with a hard look. “Good thing I’m not wearing your SkiStar logo, Phil, since everyone says your part of the company isn’t doing shit.”
For the longest, stunned few heartbeats, the room was dead quiet, the unspoken just spoken, and the family itself suddenly cracked in half. Two of her sons looked like junkyard dogs, facing each other and ready to pounce.
Scott grabbed Phillip’s right arm as he pulled it back, hand in a fist. “Don’t.”
Mickey started to move toward his brother.
“That’s enough, you two,” Mike said, stepping in between them.
March couldn’t move. Yes, the SkiStar division had been losing money for the three years, but there was a longstanding, solemn rule that the family only discussed company business together at the office and in the board room. Mickey might be seventeen, but he knew the rules.
In family business lines had to be drawn to separate family from profit and loss, especially when the company and the strong-minded, strong-willed Cantrells were all tied so tightly together, with every one of them having a stake in the business, in its red and black, and its future.
“The table’s ready, Mom.” Renee walked in with Tyler, started to give him to Scott, then stopped, looking around. “What’s going on?”
March handed her the salad. “Put this on the table for me, dear, and get the girls to come eat.”
Renee left, but not without exchanging a questioning look with Scott who said, “Come on, Phil. Get your wife and let’s eat.”
Mickey stood in the middle of the room, alone on his battlefield after trying to cause a war when no one else wanted one. He was confused, angry, embarrassed, full of young male emotions that needed blowing off. “Go wash up, Mickey,” Mike said, talking to him as if he were ten years old without realizing it.
Mickey scowled at Mike, turned away and walked toward the heart of the house. “I’m not hungry.”
Mike started to go after him but March placed a hand on his shoulder. “Let him go. He needs to work things through and get the salt out of those wounds of his.” Through the wide kitchen archway, she watched her youngest run up the stairs.
“He’s trying to pick a fight with anyone he can,” March said. “Did it work?”
“Close, but not quite. Not with me, anyway. And he called me an asshole. Phil almost took the bait, though.”
“Mickey’s embarrassed. He can’t control his emotions.”
“He’d better control his impulses pretty damn quick or I’ll show him what an asshole I can be.”
“Mike. Come on. That’s not how you do things.” “I took the car away. No driving till he changes his attitude.”
She had seen the tears glistening in her youngest son’s eyes. Times like this were when she remembered that not even for a reflection without a wrinkle would she want to be seventeen again. March picked up the dish of lasagna. “Come on. Let’s eat.”
Four hours later, Mike flipped the light on in his wine cellar carved into the bowels of the three-story house, found the bottle he wanted from the racks and headed upstairs to their bedroom. In the corner of the sitting area, near an original slate fireplace flanked by mahogany bookcases, he’d had a private bar installed. Over the years, for birthdays, Father’s Days, Christmases, his kids made certain it was stocked with any and all the high-end wine paraphernalia.
He was just pouring the red wine into stemmed bubble glasses from a Baccarat decanter etched with his initials when March came out of the bathroom, freshly showered, hair slightly damp, makeupless, creamed up and wearing something black and lacy and barely there, with a tiny pair of matching panties.
It seemed almost another lifetime ago, and perhaps only yesterday, when he’d first spotted her dancing to music loud enough to shatter the pricy wine decanter in his hand, under the flash of a Sixties’ psychedelic light show that captured every movement of her incredible body.
He had been raw, kind of half finished in the way all young men were at some point, a kid in the Sixties, still hampered and driven by dark and uncertain coming-of-age edges, with a free heart and a ton of baggage, and even more bravado that hid the fact that his father had killed any natural belief he had in himself.
Saved by a golden girl in a Golden State, Sunshine, amazing and dancing in a rapid squall of colored light that night. She captured his heart and became the woman who believed he could do anything, gave him his family and pride and would grow old with him, always still the single most beautiful thing in his lucky life.
She took the glass of wine he offered her and sat down on the sofa by the fireplace, settling back, her long legs drawn up beside her. All golden skin and black lace in the firelight, she patted the sofa pillow. “Come sit.”
He set the carafe on the coffee table as she took a sip of wine. She frowned slightly at the glass and looked at him first, frowning, then at the bottle sitting on the bar. “Is that Opus? What’s the occasion?”
“A really shitty day.” He sat down and put an arm around her, then added, “And those panties.”
A car horn honked in the distance. A truck changed gears up a nearby hill. But those were the only sounds around them after a day filled with noise: football, his sons, a sleepy, cranky toddler of a grandson and chattering granddaughter he adored, even though she could talk the ear off of an elephant. The family all talking at once. The sour words and fights started by his youngest. The empty place at the table that said more than stern words could.
At that moment, it felt so damned good to sit there next to March, saying nothing at all and not feeling like he had to. One of the things about a marriage of over thirty-three years was you could live in long silences without either of you feeling like you had to fill them. “On our anniversary this year…It’s thirty-four years, right?”
“Thirty-five.”
“Is that one of those important ones?”
March started laughing. “What?”
“You know, tenth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth—the ones that mark some irrational, special numbers—the ones you get in really deep trouble for forgetting. Is thirty-five important?”
“Every anniversary is important, you stupid fool,” she said. “You’ve never forgotten our anniversary.”
“That’s right. It was your birthday I kept forgetting. How many years was it before I realized it wasn’t in July?”
“About five. But I didn’t care. I always made out like a bandit those years, with two birthday gifts. The makeup present was a really, really good one. You should forget again, honey. I want that Cartier bracelet.”
“What bracelet?”
“The one I’ve been dropping large hints over for a good five years.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m waiting to surprise you.”
“I hate surprises.”
“No, you don’t. You just hate not knowing the surprise.” He rested his head back and took a deep breath, staring up at the ceiling, the vagaries of his business running through his head after Mickey’s words to Phillip.
After a few minutes he said what was bugging him out loud. “I