No Turning Back (The Traveler) (9 page)

It was a ridiculous hook and bait game played exquisitely. Gary recognized it and continued to grin. It was indeed a preposterous predicament, but what else did he have to look forward to?

“So … what does he want me to do to gain his trust?”

In his routine cockiness, Gary told Taylor everything he had just learned about his missing-in-action father during his confidential meeting that morning.

Taylor searched his friend’s face with wide eyes, feeling both astonished and amused at his best friend’s story. For a moment, he even thought Gary was joking.

“You’re kidding me, right? You’re bullshitting,” he responded doubtfully. “That didn’t just happen to you this morning. No fucking way! The same woman who was in your store last week?”

“Dude, I’m telling you, it’s her. And get this: She looks even
fiercer
with a suit on, like a private eye or something.”

Taylor nodded, imagining it. “I can see that. She looks like she can kick ass too.”

“Yeah, well, apparently, she works for my father.”

Gary stopped his feverish rant and issued a warning: “Taylor, I swear to God, man, you are
not
to tell anyone about this. She was serious. My old man is loaded, and he’s very particular about how he wants to help me. Keep this quiet, or I am screwed.”

Taylor began to shake his head at the improbability of it all. “Un-fucking-
believable
!” he exclaimed.

This guy gets all the breaks, while I continue to bust my ass for everything!
he told himself.

He asked, “So, what are you going to do? It sounds like your dad is serious enough to mean what he says. Rich people don’t mess around when it comes to protecting their assets. You cross them and they’ll bury you. So, does Burnett know about all of this?” “He doesn’t want to know,”
Gary replied. “He says he wants to handle my mother’s estate and that’s it. I don’t think he even wants to deal with me now.”

“Yeah, I don’t blame him. He would never be able to represent another wealthy family in his life if he screws this up. And he had nothing to do with it. Your mother kept it to herself for all of these years. Amazing,” Taylor concluded.

Gary shrugged and said, “Yeah, but I’m twenty-six now. So legally, he doesn’t owe me anything. This new deal is just to see if I’m willing to play ball with him. I guess he sees some kind of potential in me or something. But I need time to figure everything out in my head. It’s all coming at me too fast.”

Taylor stood in Gary’s loft, gawking, and thought about what could come next. “So, what does he want you to do?” It was the golden question.

“First he wants me to go back to school,” Gary answered. “He says I should keep the record store as long as I hire the right people to run it. He likes that I have my own business in the downtown area. And get this: He’ll give me twenty grand a month as long as I remain in school and finish. And he wants me to learn how to invest it, like you’re doing.”

Taylor heard all of that and repeated, “Twenty grand a month. Wowww! Only with Gary
Stevens
does this kind of thing happen. I mean, what are the odds?”

Gary frowned and said, “Come on, man. If I got it, you got it. I’ve always shared everything with you. Well, not girls, but you know what I mean.” He chuckled for a second, then his smile melted. “Yeah, but … I had to lose my mom before finding any of this out.”

Taylor read the sudden confliction and pain in Gary’s eyes and briefly looked away. He wondered how hard it could be for his friend to handle so many unexpected emotions in such a short period of time.

How would I handle all of this?
he asked himself.
You never know unless you’re in his position. But I would never be in Gary’s position. I’m just a regular guy with a regular family. But Gary’s life has always been … a little bit different.

A week later, Gary walked through his mother’s four-bedroom home in the St. Matthews section of east Louisville. The elegant, two-story house held many fond memories for him. He stopped at the bottom of the hardwood staircase and looked up toward his mother’s master bedroom with an overlooking catwalk. He imagined a moment from a dozen years earlier, his mother’s pretty young face smiling down at him.

“Gary, could you please wash your hands and face. I can see that you’re filthy from up here. What were you and Taylor doing out there anyway, having a dirt fight? Gee-zus!”

Gary smiled at his memories of her.
She always said gee-zus,
he recalled.

He stood there at the bottom of the staircase and thought of walking up to her room. He hadn’t walked through the house alone in months, and without the warmth of his mother around, the house felt unusually cold and ghostly.

Gary clicked on a few more of the lights to see everything clearly. It seemed like too big of a house for just two people. But he had accepted it as a part of Louisville, Kentucky, politics. The politicians all had big houses, or at least Gay thought so.

After another few minutes to contemplate, he took a deep breath and decided to look through his mother’s room.

“Hell, it’s only a room,” he grumbled, forcing himself up the stairs.

Once he arrived at the top of the staircase, he paused and took another breath to compose himself. He strolled into his mother’s well-kept master suite and clicked on the light to look around. Crowding her dresser tops were the many framed pictures of them in happy times. They were spread out all over her room, like a shrine. A few of their pictures included Taylor.

Gary hadn’t paid as much attention to all of his mother’s pictures before. They were a normal part of her room. Now he realized how much they meant to her.

Gary looked at their framed pictures with a new interpretation and felt disheartened.

After all of these years,
he noted.

He took one of the larger frames down from the tall cabinet and sat on his mother’s floral-quilted bed to look at it. The picture was from nearly two decade ago in the late 1980s. Gabrielle had graduated from Louisville’s Bellarmine University on the same day as his junior league lacrosse game. So he wore his uniform to her graduation before they hustled off to make his late afternoon game. Never missing a beat, Gary scored seven goals that day, just for his mother. It was one goal short of his single-game record of eight.

Seeing a picture of his mother in her graduation cap and gown blew the cork from his bottled-up emotions. He finally began to cry for his mother, his head bobbing as if it were spitting out the tears one by one. He caught his tears and wiped his face with his right hand as more tears poured out. He was finally overwhelmed, succumbing to a wave of heaving sobs.

“I miss you dearly, Mom,” he wept into her picture. “You raised me all by yourself, and I love you so much.”

“You raised me to be as strong as you are. And I will be. I can handle this. I
will
,” he muttered aloud.

He wiped the tears from the glass frame with his right arm and elbow while sniffing and wiping his runny nose with the back of his left hand. He then stood to his feet and returned the picture to its place on the tall cabinet. He nodded to himself with conviction. He figured he still had a long and productive life to live, and he planned on living it.

Before walking out, he took a second look at a few of his mother’s pictures, paying closer attention to the ones where they had traveled out of the country to the Caribbean islands, Hawaii, Mexico and Canada. They had taken Taylor along with them on a few trips to keep Gary company. The two boys had once dreamed of traveling to farther away places—China, Australia, South Africa and Italy.

Gary recalled their youthful dreams of travel while staring at his mother’s proud pictures of them, and he remembered her top dresser drawer, where she stored all of her brochures from travel agencies. Gary walked over and pulled open her top dresser drawer to take a look. And there they were—booklets filled with exotic destinations around the world.

Gary perked up just from looking at them, and felt he had nothing to lose.

“Wow, we’ve forgotten all about this,” he mumbled. He took another seat on his mother’s bed to look through them all, and stopped at Colombia, South America, with an epiphany.

“Mom, we’re gonna travel the world now,” he told himself with confidence. He saw no reason not to travel. He was young, single and wealthy, with no family or children. He and Taylor were both free to travel. So it made perfect sense to him. He needed to get away from it all with the only family he really knew.

As soon as Taylor visited Gary at his loft that evening, Gary suggested, “Dude, let’s go to Colombia.” The suggestion seemingly dropped out of nowhere.

Taylor cringed and repeated, “Colombia? Are you serious? You just want to take off to
Colombia
?”

“Yeah,” Gary answered casually. He had been thinking it over for hours.

Dressed in a business suit and a tie, Taylor had returned from an important job interview at an investment firm. He couldn’t help but notice the positive resurgence in Gary’s outlook. Travel was a good thing for his friend to think about. He just didn’t know if he would have chosen Colombia.

Gary looked him over and asked, “So, how did it go on your interview?”

Gary was still dressed in his company T-shirt after closing his shop earlier.

Taylor smiled and said, “I think I aced it. They even invited me out to a happy hour.”

Gary nodded and smiled back. “That’s good. So let’s go enjoy a mini-vacation before you start the job. My treat, bro.”

Taylor had gone on vacations with Gary and his mother several times before, but they had never gone as far south as Colombia. The trip didn’t sound safe either.

He said, “Gary, I understand your need to get away for a spell, I really do. But why Colombia? I mean, come on.”

Gary frowned and picked up on his friend’s concern for safety. He said, “Taylor, we’ve been talking about going to Colombia for years.”

“Yeah, but that’s when we didn’t know any better. We were fantasizing about the models there. Heck, we’ve talked about going to Russia, Cuba, and Antarctica, but that doesn’t mean we’re actually going to go.”

“Why not?” Gary asked him. He had returned to thinking about the more adventurous ideas of their youth. Their college years seemed to have taken much of the exploration out of them.

Gary said, “This isn’t the age of
Scarface
and Colombian drug dealers. It’s a new day now. Stop being a wimp. It’ll be an adventure—sun, drinks, hot Latin chicks. I don’t even believe you’re acting like this. Colombia has its good parts and bad parts like anywhere else, New York City even. Hell, my mother was killed right here in Kentucky by a couple of guys from West Virginia. So anything can happen anywhere.”

Taylor countered, “Yeah, but there’s a lot of other safer places that we could go to get away without the extra stress. How about the Dominican Republic or the Bahamas? We haven’t been there yet.”

Gary blew him off. “Aw, man, that’s chicken shit. They’re both tiny, little islands right next to us. Let’s go for the big fish countries now: South Africa, China, Australia. Let’s see the
world
! We have the money and the time to do it. I mean, why not?”

Taylor eyed his friend as if he had gone mad. “Wow, is this how you respond?” he asked rhetorically. He was alluding to his friend’s delayed emotions after the recent lost of his mother. “And what about the record store?” he added.

Gary thought about his record store staff members. “My guys can handle it. We’re only talking about a week or so. It’s not like we’re not coming back.”

Sure enough, his staff continued to run his record store business efficiently. With good recommendations and advice, Gary had hired a few new people, including a few older veterans of the retail industry. So Taylor nodded and began to warm to the idea of travel. He just didn’t trust the places where Gary wanted to go.

He said, “Okay, I get the travel part, but what’s the deal with these faraway places, especially for a quickie? Outside of this new position at the investment firm, I still have graduate school to finish up.”

Taylor realized, however, that Gary had much less to return to. He wasn’t excited about returning to school at all

Taylor added, “What about Melissa? Are you planning on taking her with us?”

It was a valid question. But Gary grimaced at the idea. “Come on, man, I can’t do that. I already told her how I am. I just need to get out there and spread my wings a bit. Then I’ll see where we are when I get back. This is a buddy trip, for just me and you. I want to chase some babes and soak up some drinks and sunshine.”

Once again, Taylor was forced to play the role of Gary’s conscience. He had been the little voice who sat on his friend’s shoulder while trying to talk sense into him. In some ways, he had been more thoughtful and protective than Gary’s mom had been.

“Melissa’s been waiting on you to come back around for weeks now,” Taylor hinted.

Gary sighed. “Are you trying to hold that over my head? I mean, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend here.”

Before Taylor could respond, Gary told him, “Look, I don’t even want to think about that right now. Do you know I went down and saw the man who carjacked and killed my mother today.”

That stopped Taylor cold. Gary had not spoken about the carjacking at all. The West Virginia survivor would surely be forced to pay for his part in his mother’s murder. But what more did Gary want from him?

“I mean … for
what
?” Taylor asked him.

I hope he isn’t becoming vengeful now,
Taylor thought.
I couldn’t blame him if he did, but—

Gary cut Taylor’s thoughts short with his answer. He said, “It just got me thinking about how tragedies can stop us from living our lives the way we really want to. It stops us from doing
what we want to do, and being who we are. Then I thought about my mother and how she could have just … I don’t know, stayed in Tennessee and gotten married. But she was strong enough to choose her own path. And I’m not saying that everything my mother did was right, but I kind of get why she did it now. And you know what, I was looking at her pictures of us all at the house, and she was just like me,” he commented. “Or I’m just like
her
actually. You gotta be your own person in this world no matter what.”