Read Online A Conflict of Interest by Adam Mitzner - Free Book Online Page A

always. Luckily for me, there always seems to be something to do. I play bridge with these other ladies on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I was just asked to help plan the Halloween party at the clubhouse. So, I’m keeping busy. I sometimes wonder how your father would have been without me if I was the one who died first.” Her eyes roll down and to the right, which I learned in a depositionseminar is a sign of engaging in an internal monologue, but then she gives her head a slight shake, pushing whatever she was considering out of her mind.
    “I know, Mom. I think about Dad all the time. Every time Charlotte does something, I can imagine how happy it would have made him, and then I feel this wave of sadness because I can’t tell him.”
    “I just wasn’t prepared. Not that you’re ever prepared, but …” She chuckles, more to herself than to me. “You know, I don’t even know how to pump gas. That’s something your father always did.”
    “I’ll show you,” I say, even though I know that wasn’t her point. “I know it doesn’t feel like this now, but you have a lot of life ahead of you. Dad would want you to be happy, to do the things you want to do.”
    “Like what?” she says, almost as a challenge.
    “You always said you wanted to travel, right? So, now you can.”
    It was a constant complaint of my mother’s during my childhood—that she could never get my father to take a vacation. He was a one-man operation in the store and claimed he couldn’t trust anyone else to run it, even for a few days. Vacations were put on hold until “someday.”
    My mother sits there, staring into her glass for a long time before finally saying, “Alex, do you think your father was happy?”
    “Yes,” I say, out of reflex more than anything else. In truth, I always felt that my father was a difficult man to read. Some of that I attributed to sons never truly knowing their fathers, but her posing the question means that she also found him to be something of a mystery.
    “No, really,” she presses me.
    I sigh, signaling that I’ll take the question more seriously, although I’m still going to answer it the same way. “I know without a shadow of a doubt that he loved you very much. And me, too. He often said that was all that mattered in life. Loving your family. So, on the measure that he deemed most important, he was the happiest person I know.”
    She shows a wan smile.
    “I’m glad you think that,” she says.
    “It sounds like you disagree.”
    “I just don’t know. Can you imagine anything sadder than that? I was married to the man for more than thirty-five years, and I don’t know if he was happy.”
    For a moment I wonder if Elizabeth would say the same thing about me, and then an equally jarring thought strikes me—I’d say the same thing about her. I really have no idea if Elizabeth is happy.
    “He was,” I say, as if my father’s happiness is a fact not open to dispute.
    “Did you know that when your father was a boy, maybe ten years old, your grandparents sent him to foster care because they couldn’t afford to feed him?”
    “Uncle Sam too?”
    “No. Can you believe that? They decided that they could feed one of their sons, but not the other, so you father pulled the short straw. I’m not sure how long he was there, but at least a year.”
    “How could I have never heard that before?”
    “You did,” she says, smiling. “Your father referred to it as going to camp. He thought of it as an adventure. He got out of the Lower East Side, spent some time in the country. Made new friends. If your father could convince himself that being sent to foster care—which back then probably looked pretty grim—was camp, I always thought he could delude himself about anything.”
    “I don’t think he was deluded about loving you, if that’s what you’re getting at. You could see it in his eyes, Mom. He would light up when you entered the room. Did I ever tell you what he said to me right before