This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental
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Chapter 1
I had a really nice plan for my life. Unfortunately life had other plans for me. In the last year I had lost my dream job, my prized apartment, my hot girlfriend and had somehow gotten stuck back in my parents old house, living with a fifteen year old girl that I was certain hated me. It was difficult to take it all in stride.
I remembered back in high school living in this house with my parents and my older brother. That was the sweet life. Mom was the stay at home creative type and dad was the enterprising high powered lawyer. Both of them always found time for me and my brother, even if we didn’t always find time for them. Eventually mom organized family night on Wednesday nights. That brought us all closer. I still missed those days.
The Thayer brothers were immensely popular in school and I, for one, usually kept a full academic, sports and social life. My brother was much the same. We both played soccer in the fall and ran track
for the winter and spring. By the time I was a sophomore and Paul was a junior we were both on the varsity teams. We played like we could read each other’s minds. Good didn’t even begin to describe our abilities.
The Thayer brothers though didn’t just excel on the fields. Both of us were also very good students. Paul was more science and math oriented, like our dad. I was better in languages and arts, like our mom. We helped each other whenever we could, and in the end we always kept our grades up in all our classes. Paul had a way of softening up the teachers so that when I got them the next year they almost automatically liked me.
Probably the only place we were different were in our choices of girlfriends. Paul started going out with a friend of mine early in his junior year and stayed with her until the summer before he left for college. He though a steady girlfriend balanced him. I dated half a dozen girls in the same time frame. Some were from our school and some were not. All of them were drop dead gorgeous and all of them were rather lightheaded and ditzy. I wasn’t in search of arm candy. I just saw a girlfriend as a distraction to my academic and athletic endeavors. Therefore I never stuck around for very long nor did I date girls that were seeking a long term thing.
When it was finally time for my brother to decide on which of the colleges he would go to he chose an out of state one instead of the one in the city. He said that it was high time he left the suburbs of New York to go see the world. I didn’t want to crush his dreams so I let him believe that going to Ohio would be equal to seeing the world. His foray lasted less than a year.
The spring of my senior year dad had to go to Japan on business and had set up the trip to take mom with him. Unfortunately he didn’t think ahead. They would both be in Japan for my eighteenth birthday. Mom was a bit disappointed with dad but I told them we would just celebrate when they got back. I knew that mom had always wanted to go to Asia and dad had made a tiny error. I didn’t make a big deal of it.
While in Japan mom had been driving the rental car with dad and had gotten confused at a highway exit. She had thought it was an entrance. The head on collision at high speed killed them both instantly.
Shortly after the accident dad’s firm had sent a lawyer to Ohio to get Paul and had sent two of my dad’s partners to tell me. The firm took care of bringing the bodies back to the States and making the arrangements for my parents. I was in total shock and couldn’t have done any of it anyway. Paul was the one to man up. He dropped out of college temporarily and came home to be with me. It was him that pushed me to return to high school after about a week so that I could finish up and get my diploma.
My father, as a lawyer, had prepared well for any eventuality, just in case. Each of my parents had million dollar insurance policies. Dad’s financial investments, his 401K, the cars, the house plus all of mom’s possessions would all be split evenly by Paul and I. The firm dad had been a partner in took care of the paperwork for free. It was all a small consolation. With no cousins, uncles, aunts or living grandparents, we were now each other’s only family. I knew then that I would never celebrate my birthday the same way again.
Paul and I spent that summer making plans. We both decided to keep the house and go to college locally. Since it was too late to apply to any decent university, Paul decided that I should take my first semester at the community college. I purposely took the same classes he had taken in his first semester in Ohio. He decided to take on a job while we both applied to universities, though financially he didn’t have to. We had a house and cars paid in full, no other debt and a lot of money.
In the spring semester we both became second semester freshmen at a large university in New York City. Whenever we could we took classes together. The rest of the time we concentrated on our majors. That first semester at the university was tough for me and it was nice to have Paul around. Neither of us let up for the summer and we continued taking classes year round. That’s when I finally stared to open up.
Even for the summer semester I didn’t take a full load of classes. That afforded me a lot of time to go out and party in the city. I hit all the hot nightclubs and bars, when I could get in. I dated a couple of women that summer but nothing really lasted, nor did I want it to. I started getting to know the city and all is people. There were days when I wouldn’t show up back home until the morning hours.
Late that summer, during a barbeque in which we had invited several friends, I met Anne. She was a junior and was really pretty but certainly not the type of woman I would ever date. She had piercing steel blue eyes and flowing strawberry blond hair. She wore a light summer dress with a blue bonnet print. The dress wasn’t see through, per say, but it was light enough that when she stood in the sunlight any young man would give a quick check.
When she finally made her way to me, I couldn’t help but to like her immediately. We spoke about majors and school in general. She was studying communications in an effort to enter the advertising field.
“Paul tells me you’re a party animal and a playboy,” Anne teased me.
“I don’t know if I would describe it that way. I like to have fun and I’m opportunistic with my romantic relationships,” I replied.
“Yeah, he also said you were very good in using the English language to your advantage.”
We talked for a little while longer until it was time for me to go tend to the barbeque.
I stood outside with my spatula wearing my “kiss the cook” apron flipping burgers, watching the hot dogs and preparing the chicken. Paul leaned against the railing nursing a beer. The apron had belonged to our dad and was only used for barbeques. After their deaths Paul had taken over the finances and the bills, I did the cooking and we both cleaned.
Anne came over to us as Paul was telling me a joke. She moved up to my brother and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. She wrapped her arm around him and him around her, as the telling of the joke continued.
And so it came to be that as Paul’s relationship with Anne grew I became closer to the both of them. Anne turned out to be what Paul and I really needed, a woman’s perspective.
When Anne graduated she moved on to another university in the city to continue with an advanced degree. By that time Paul was already deep into his pre-law studies and I had decided to follow Anne into communications.
Anne and Paul got married right after my brother finished his undergraduate degree but before he entered law school. They both thought I would have a problem with her moving into the house but I was al
l for it. Their primary worry was that I would feel like a third wheel. I assured them I was okay with it but the subject resurfaced a year later when I decided to buy a small place in the city. They wanted me to stay but the suburbs felt too much like the country. I needed to be in the heart of the city.
With a master’s degree in hand, I began working at the very bottom of the fourth largest advertising company in the world. I wasn’t paid very much, so for the first couple of years I had to supplement my income with my investments. It took eleven years of seventy five hour work weeks and a move to the second largest advertising agency in the world until I was a vice president and raking in six figures.
In that time my brother and his wife had their first and only child, Christine. The baby was an absolute joy. I wasn’t sure if she knew who exactly I was back then, except that I would visit twice a month and always brought her some sort of gift. In time I saw that Christine was a combination of my mom and Anne. She was a stunningly beautiful child.
My brother never put in the hours I did, at least not on a regular basis. One night when Paul was thirty two he had stayed late in the office preparing for a case. He finally had decided to go home at nine in the evening but he never made it. Paul was robbed and stabbed. He was still alive when he made it to the emergency room. Both Anne and I were called to come see him. Being in the city, I was there within twenty minutes. About half an hour before Anne got to the hospital my bother died in my arms. The last thing he whispered to me was “Christine, as if she were you own.” I knew what he meant.
Losing my brother was gut wrenching for me. I felt so alone, as if suddenly I was now an orphan at age thirty one. Anne took it worse than I did. For the first time in my working career, I took some time off to take care of my brother’s arrangements and to see to the needs of his family.
Anne and I had a long discussion about finances. She wanted to sell the house and give me my half of it. I had finally convinced her to stay. The house was mortgage free, I would pay half the property taxes as I was a half owner and the schools in the area were unbeatable. I don’t know if she finally stayed because of the great deal or because there really was no better place for Christine to grow up.
Because of the lack of mortgage on the house, Anne had never really had to work. Paul’s money had more than met their obligations. Having learned from our parents both my brother and I paid premiums to have large life insurances. Even that money combined with the leftover investments our parents had left Paul would not be enough to carry Anne and Christine through their lifetime. With my connections in the industry I got Anne several good interviews with small and medium size ad agencies in the suburbs. She finally took a part time job as an account executive that would allow her to take and pick up Christine from school. I regularly sent Anne a few hundred dollars every month and I also contributed some money to Christine’s college fund.