Reunion. Therese Fowler

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       Chapter Four

      After climbing the jet’s steps and greeting the flight crew Saturday morning, Blue took a seat in the spot she preferred, left side, just in front of the wing. The jet, customized to the most demanding celebrity standards, wasn’t hers. She could not do it, could not transform the numbers on her accounts statement into one of these sleek white and silver aircraft. They’d chartered this Gulfstream G500 for the week, a $65,000 expense. That was far less than the $50 million or so she’d pay to purchase one. How many times could they charter luxury jets before they even approached that figure? She was too tired to do the math, but surely it was many, many times. Buying one seemed wasteful—and imagine what Melody would say if she owned a Gulfstream, when Mel and Jeff still drove a ’95 Chevy pickup.

      In a meeting last year, when Jim, her business manager, spoke about capital investments and appreciable assets and tax advantages of ownership, Marcy had said, “Buy one. What else are you going to do with the money?”

      “More of what I’m doing already.” An assortment of charitable endeavors selected and implemented by Jim’s partner, who briefed her about them monthly.

      After ten years in syndication and almost as many spent watching her finance manager diversify her holdings in a series of double-up ventures, of seeing her net worth mushroom with the energy of an atomic blast, she still could not quite match the numbers to her life. She could not quite believe—even as she inhabited them—what those numbers meant in concrete terms. If she had known things could turn out like this, chartered jets with hand-stitched leather seats and burnished walnut tables; silk twill pants suits and everyday diamond earrings; twenty-eight full-time employees whose houses and cars and designer martinis were bought with paychecks she signed … If she could have forecasted her success the way her old WLVC-TV colleague Carl Newman forecasted the weather, she never would have given up her son.

      —Or so she liked to think, when the truth was that she wouldn’t have stepped onto even the first rung of this ladder if she’d had a child. The whole idea of working as a television journalist was about avoiding Harmony Blue Kucharski by keeping her attention on anyone, on everyone, else. If she had not given up her son, an uneducated single mother with little support and no prospects is what she would have been. Worse off than her mother at nineteen, the child worse off than the child she’d been.

      Yet the doubts persisted. How could she really know what her life with a child would have been like? She had never even tried—but why would she have chosen to try when she’d known that her mother couldn’t help her out? Why get attached to a child whose life you could only ruin? In that hand-to-mouth life there would be no time to love the child properly, and all that would come of it would be a kid who hated her and hated his life, she’d been sure of it.

      But what if … what if she had gotten hooked up with the social services she now knew would have given her—them—options? Someone could have directed her, surely would have, if she’d been brave enough to expose her foolishness to someone who, unlike the midwife, had no directed agenda. If she had not been too embarrassed, too proud to go looking for unbiased help.

      Well, even if she had, she’d still have been a lower-class single mother whose good intentions simply could not come close to providing what that upper-class adoptive home could. Did. Love by itself was not enough to make everything come out happily, she didn’t care what all those feel-good movies claimed. She’d loved her son—loved him so much that she had sacrificed her relationship with him. It was the right thing to do.

      She was pretty sure.

      She snapped her seatbelt closed. Stupid conundrum, why couldn’t she let it alone?

      Sometimes, when the heartache and guilt overwhelmed her, she pared off a piece for her mother, whose own questionable decisions had led to hers, and for Mitch, because if he’d hung on to her there would have been no other man, no accidental son. Still, the remaining portion was too large to swallow; she could only cover it with a pretty napkin and act as if it didn’t exist.

      She would not СКАЧАТЬ