Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [99]
“So, I was telling you about the meetings, I go—”
“Bob, why don’t you sit up front. Leah doesn’t mind. I can catch you up on the business news. And, hey, what's happening with the Saints?”
“Oh, let me tell you this … Is this the seatbelt buckle? Leah, honey, you see the buckle back there?”
“Here, Dad.”
“Oh, thanks. You know, they’ve gotta do something in that running back position. You agree?”
Carl nodded and drove down three levels of the concrete corkscrew, stopped at the parking booth, and we were on our way.
I looked out the side window. My dad and Carl hit words between them like a friendly game of air hockey. After every four or five words from my father, Carl slipped in a few of his own. Sentence completion rarely occurred in conversation with him.
Ron's words, “You loved him because he reminded you of your father,” didn’t ring true tonight. How was Carl anything like my father? I didn’t remember this dismissive side of my father. The token attention to an uncomfortable topic, like my rehab. Once I told him I was fine, he didn’t want details. Not that there's anything wrong with his not wanting me to drone on and on about AA when he just landed. And I didn’t mind sitting in the backseat. It's miles more comfy. Besides, when Mom was alive, we’d always sit women in the back and men in the front.
Don’t compromise yourself, Leah, you’re all you’ve got.
Now where did that come from?
40
Carl was Landon and Gloria Thornton's only son when I met him. Their only living son.
Vic, Carl's brother, died in a car accident at the age of eighteen. He and his new Mustang convertible left home one Monday evening so he could start college at Louisiana State University's Baton Rouge campus. Neither one of them made it. The details, over the years, have faded as has the mention of his name. For whatever reason, the song on the radio, the sun in his eyes, Vic didn’t know two lanes had been narrowed to one as he exited the Atchafalaya Bridge. By the time he realized he’d run out of a lane, he’d run out of a life. His Mustang careened into the boggy ditch. They found his body, a crumpled mess, several feet away.
If the subject of Vic or the accident broke hallowed ground, there were two taboos.
Never to be discussed in the Thornton house:
1. That Vic was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident.
2. Empty cans of Amber Beer covered the floor of the car.
Carl was eight years old when he became an only child. His parents, for almost ten years after Vic's death, built their business with a vengeance. By the time Carl was Vic's age, his parents had accumulated lots of stuff purchased by lots of money.
When I first met Carl he told me his parents were in sales. There's in sales and then there's IN SALES. His parents were the second. They appeared entirely too squeamish to be making major drug or weapons runs. I knew people with oodles of money who built Amway businesses, but their products were all over their homes, their faces, their bodies, their cars. I didn’t understand what pipeline the Thorntons had located, and I still don’t. But it worked, and I don’t have to understand how. Now that I’m in AA, I can wrap my brain around that a little better.
Landon sold things to people who needed things—sort of a one-man offline eBay, moving larger commodities. Let's say you have ten thousand whatevers and you need to sell them. Landon found someone who wanted ten thousand whatevers or two people who wanted five thousand each, and he hooked them up. He earned a commission. He never had to touch the products. Personally, I thought it was brilliant. Landon and Gloria did, too; if you asked them, they’d tell you.
Carl graduated from college (not LSU) and thought he would work in his father's business. The machine hummed along, and Carl figured he’d play a tune or two. Landon and Gloria thought Carl needed to serve time in the “real world of work.” I guess for the truly wealthy, that's a sort of prison.