Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [60]
“Mr. Sutter will see you in the bar,” the clerk said, turning to face me again. “I’ll call someone to escort you.”
“I know where it is,” I said. I moved toward the elevator hidden in the side wall.
“Miss!” the clerk called out. “Club rules!”
I groaned and waited a full minute before another bespectacled academic took me into the elevator and upstairs to the bar, which was more like a library. Paneled with inlaid bookshelves that housed leather-covered tomes, the room was my favorite in the club since it actually seemed somewhat inviting rather than pompous. I saw my father immediately, sitting at a game table with another man at the far side of the room. When he spotted me, a wide smile formed on his face.
“I’ll take it from here,” I said to my escort. But he insisted on walking me over to my father and formally announcing me.
“Miss Hailey Sutter,” the man said, before he gave a short bow and disappeared.
My dad laughed at my annoyance. “Hi, sweetie,” he said. He stood to kiss me on the cheek.
He introduced me to Mack Randall, the head of a trading operation, which my father had represented for about fifteen years. Mack excused himself almost immediately, saying he had to get home to his wife.
“You came to have a chat with your old dad?” My father gestured toward the chair Mack had vacated.
I sank into it. “Yes, actually, I did. Are you trying to catch the ten o’clock?”
“I can get the next one.”
“Great,” I said. But didn’t know where to start. Luckily, a waiter came over, and I ordered a coffee with skim milk.
I shifted in my chair, and as I did so, I noticed that a glass with ice and amber-colored liquid sat before my father. Whiskey, I realized.
This was truly odd, a sign of something off, because my dad never drank. He had grown up in Kansas on his parents’ farm. It was an ideal childhood until one particularly bad flood killed the farm, and his parents started drinking. The alcohol wrecked them, he had told me. It had wrecked their family, and he wouldn’t continue that legacy.
I looked at the glass again, then met his gaze and raised my eyebrows. What’s up with that? Sometimes we didn’t have to talk to communicate.
He shrugged, then again. Nothing. Nothing important.
I let it go. While I waited for my coffee, we made light conversation, my father telling me about a lawsuit Mack’s company was involved in. My coffee seemed to arrive too fast, and my father stopped, waiting for me to begin.
“I have some questions,” I said. I took a sip from the porcelain cup and tried not to make a face. The Van Newton Guild was not known for its culinary excellence.
“Okay. What’s this about?”
I fell quiet. How to summarize this? Just start at the beginning. “It’s about Mom.”
My father didn’t respond immediately. The word Mom hung in the air.
“All right.” His voice sounded wary, or maybe I imagined it.
I took another sip of the coffee, but this time, I barely noticed how horrid it was. Instead, I was simply happy to have something to do with my hands, anything that could pass a little time until I figured out how to broach this topic that had been hidden for so long.
“I guess the first thing I want to know is how she died.” There. I’d said it. I stole a glance at my dad over the rim of my cup.
He blinked once, then twice, then again. He slid his hand across the game table and touched my upper arm. Something about his touch startled me. I put my cup down immediately, looking from his hand and back to his face.
“Honey,” he said, his voice agonized, “you know this.”
“What? No, I don’t. We’ve never talked about it. You never wanted to.”
He sat back, and the spot where he’d held my arm suddenly felt cool without his hand there. “Well, I don’t know if that’s true.”
I felt a flash of anger. “Yes, it is true. You wouldn’t ever talk to me about this, and so I stopped asking. I’m an adult now, though. I want to know.”
He shook his head. “Of course. I mean…well, I know we didn’t talk about this often. For so long, it was too painful for me, but I thought