The Lie (37 page)

And so on my graduation day,
instead of having a conversation with my father about my need to be free to pursue my own path in life, I took my first step down the one he had walked before me.

After spending a few hours at Heather’s sorority house, I was forced by her to attend a celebratory dinner with her mother, her sister, my father, and my father’s wife. My nausea during the entire event was extreme. The smiles on the faces of each person present, mine included, betrayed the actuality of the circumstance. I wondered who my next wife would be.

At some point in the evening my father took me aside and told me that he was extremely proud of me and that he hadn’t even known that Heather and I had been serious for long enough to think about marriage. He told me that he couldn’t wait for his first grandchild, and he hoped it would be a boy who would run the company when I got too old to do it—which brought him to what he considered to be further cause for celebration. He told me that one of the positions of junior vice president of regional sales had just opened up and I was to begin work at the company headquarters in Las Colinas as soon as I wanted to. He impressed upon me that there was no real rush and hoped that I would spend some time with Heather in order to relax and enjoy life a little bit, maybe go to Europe, but when I was ready in a month or so the position was mine. He claimed to be excited to work side by side with me.

I told myself there would always be time to change my life, to have the conversation with my father that I should have been having with him on that day, to find my own path in the world. But I knew that was a lie.

Chad Kultgen
is the author of
The Average American Male
. He graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and lives in California.

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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE LIE
. Copyright © 2009 by Chad Kultgen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Mobipocket Reader February 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-177555-0

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