The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery Read Free Book Online Page B

isn’t the one we wanted in the first place.
    The conviction, though, is the end of Petey’s formal education. The school’s expelled him, and his family ships him off to a facility in Cincinnati, close enough that they can check on him whenever they want, too far away for him to bother trying to get out. There’s nowhere for him to go. Petey’s surprised by this; he’s still a teenager, and not big on the personal responsibility thing in any case. He assumes that since he’s going to rehab, his family will treat him a little bit like he’s sick, like he’s suffering from impulses beyond his control. Part of him wants to wail like a small child; he has the balls to feel like he’s the victim of something, even if it’s himself. It all just got away from him. In hindsight, he can see the moments it happened, the thousand ways he got sloppy. The way he started selling to people he didn’t know as well. The things he sometimes just left out for everyone to see. He wants to be able to convince his parents that maybe he’s a little crazy, that he needs a lot of help. Don’t you see? I don’t know what I’m doing. His mother could be convinced, he knows, if he could divide her from Terry, but he has no idea how to do that. And Terry’s having none of it, makes arguments impossible right from the start. In the car on the way home from the trial, Petey says one word— Dad— and the man cuts him off.
    â€œI can’t believe you think you have anything to say, Pete,” Terry says. “Why do you think I’d believe one word of it?”
    The words hurt, though it takes Petey months to settle on how to feel about it. One half wants to become a model of upright citizenship. Get a haircut, buy a new blazer and three ties. Finish school with the best grades, volunteer at nursing homes and soup kitchens. Go back to being the kind of kid who shares his dessert with a great uncle. The other half wants to tell his father and the rest of his family to go fuck themselves. The second half wins.
    He gets out of rehab at the end of 1986 , just in time to turn eighteen and walk into his inheritance, the money from his grandfather Muriel set aside before he was born and gave to Henry to invest because she never imagined she’d have a son like Petey. He skulks around the house, not bothering to pretend to care about the possibility of finishing school or looking for a job. Terry doesn’t know what to do; being the kind of man he is, his love for his son pulls him in opposite directions. One wanting to hand him a job, give him something, anything to do. He could just call a friend for a position in a mailroom, on a construction site. Thanks. I owe you one. It’s still possible, Terry thinks, for a man to make himself. Eighty years ago, everyone did. Some of the rail barons around here didn’t have any schooling; they were just smart, creative, ruthless when they needed to be. They hopped from sales to real estate to railroads, put it all together to build the city as we know it while they laid out estates for themselves outside of it, mansions of plaster and dark woodwork, horse stables, wide fields, deluxe versions of the farms they’d bought up and converted to suburbs and apartment complexes. You could still do that around here, still do it anywhere. Once a man has the money and has made himself, the father thinks, no one cares what else he has. But Terry doesn’t want to hand Petey that kind of life. There are alarms in his head when he thinks of doing it, warning him that Petey would just squander it, squander whatever he has, and ruin Terry, too, if he were too involved. So Terry’s stuck, and it makes him irritable, because he’s not willing to face the guilt for having given up on his boy. He gets too impatient with Petey, too verbal about it, and at last there’s a fight that starts with screaming and moves to a broken