When Matt Williams was nine, he had lunch at Ray’s Boathouse in Seattle with his father, just a few weeks before the restaurant would burn to the pier. That morning, they’d visited Matt’s grandfather at an exclusive facility where the wealthy could die without the burdensome presence of the poor, whose similar conditions would only remind them of the frustrating equanimity of death. His grandfather had recently and suddenly transitioned from the jolly Santa Claus period of old age to the confused Crypt Keeper phase that thanks to modern medicine would continue for another five years.
Matt was wrestling not just with the idea of death but that dying might surpass living. He’d calculated how long he could expect to go on and was young enough to consider eighty-five (the average life expectancy for an extremely privileged white male) an overwhelmingly large number, but now he wondered if life was like a gallon of milk where the last quart was rancid and you’d have to drink it anyway.
He twirled his spoon in his clam chowder. It had the same consistency as his grandfather’s handshake.
“Do you worry about getting old?” he asked his father.
“No,” Mr. Williams snapped in response. He peeled open his can of Rainier beer and Matt felt a sudden cool dampness on his arm. “See... getting old is like ... well, getting married.” He pointed to their young waitress. “You see something nice you’d like to pork and you can’t do anything about it. You feel powerless.” He paused. “That’s why you should get married, though. It’ll prepare you for getting old ... for dying. With single guys, it’s like a sudden stop.” He slammed his broad hand against the table to demonstrate.
This was the sort of question Matt would have asked his mother, and her answer would’ve sedated him, but she’d stayed behind at the nursing home. She could tell her husband wasn’t willing to remain longer than the agreed-upon hour, as that would inconvenience him, and he didn’t like having his routines upset, for anyone. There was, after all, local news to watch and complain about. But she enjoyed being alone with her father. He barely recognized her, though, and gradually started confusing his youngest daughter with his late wife. This was understandable. The Elliott women were uniformly small, quiet, blonde, and distinguishable from one another only in ways they’d been taught to conceal. However, Matt believed his mother might have appreciated those few hours each week when someone, even through a cloud of dementia, treated her like a loving spouse.
Marilyn Williams had two older sisters: Samantha, known ironically as “Sunny” because she never laughed, and Frieda, lovely but clumsy, like a doll with a manufacturing defect that had escaped detection. Neither had much interest in what was left of their father, who they felt lingered tackily like a Christmas tree after New Year’s, and neither were shocked or concerned when after their father finally passed away, the bulk of the estate and control of the family business went to Marilyn. There was no need, as their stipends continued to arrive uninterrupted, and Marilyn even increased their amounts — not so much to appear emotionally reckless but just enough to not seem vindictive.
“Granddad knew how special you are,” Matt said. They were in the study and he watched his mother sign her name to a document heavier than she was. “That’s why he put you in charge.”
“She was the prettiest,” his father bluntly declared as he passed by the room.
Mark Williams believed his wife had spent the past decade kissing up to her “old crow” of a father — just like the mousy reporters promoted over him at The Times kissed up to management. He’d recently been transferred — a word he consider euphemistic feminist double-speak; you were either promoted or demoted, and this was obviously a demotion — to the style desk. He edited stories he didn’t understand and believed no one else could understand because it was all bunk. His writers were the type of women and men for whom gender was an afterthought, and his Newsroom Barbie boss was so demure and prim, so irritatingly polite, that he felt like he left one wife at home only to take direction from another in the office.
No one quite knew what the Elliott family business was or had been, but it somehow had roots in most Seattle businesses older than Amazon and Microsoft. Matt’s father offered to help his mother, but as usual, his assistance was never an expression of sympathy or compassion but his firm belief that she was useless — like an antique clock, “expensive and pretty to look at but a newer, cheaper model does the job just as well if not better” (his own grotesque words). Sensing this, Marilyn Elliott asserted herself in business, which for her meant extended sessions in tall, black office buildings with officious men who kissed her hand as she disarmed them with smiles and nods, and they made that massive sum of hers even more ridiculous ... without sweating or straining or contemplating the sweating and straining of the people whose labors made it all possible. She never had to know their names, their (many) struggles, their (limited) successes. She was only told about “dividends” (downsizings) and “returns” (more downsizings and occasionally outsourcing).
After a day of meetings, his mother would retreat to the study and quietly drink Macallan Scotch while seated in a leather club chair facing the tough yet refined portrait of Matt’s grandfather, whose resemblance to Matt became more apparent each day. Matt thought it was like glimpsing the future and remembered the rheumy shell of a man at the nursing home.
Matt never commented on his mother’s nightly ritual, which after a while became unrooted from any specific time and place. It eventually ensured that Marilyn would avoid her father’s fate.
One early September day in 2011, the maid discovered Marilyn’s body alone in her room. Gasping at the sight of the still, cold form lying on the canopy bed’s marble white sheets, she allowed herself a short break to recover from the presence of death before she returned to the business of her life, and soon the body was removed, along with the bottle of Grey Goose on the nightstand, which was the only witness to Marilyn’s departure from the world at sixty-four.
At her funeral, everyone commented on how Marilyn looked more like fifty-four, which was true, but it ignored the reason they were gathered together that fall day: Peering underneath the surgically smooth skin and the artificially blonde hair, a physician might put her age more accurately at seventy-four. The doctors called it an illness, her sisters called it suicide, and her son Matt called it murder.
Matt resented that his father phoned him with the news, because it underscored the inescapable intimacy between them. He refused to speak to him in the days leading up to the burial, and fortunately, his mother’s final, knowing gift was to leave detailed instructions for her services so father and son wouldn’t have to debate her wishes.
Their friend Cindy drove Matt and his wife Sara to the funeral in her red Honda Prelude, which she’d received just after college when her famously frugal uncle finally splurged on a new automobile and promptly died the next day. Her friends jokingly named it “the death car,” an appellation that was only reinforced when she struck a deer on her way to the Williams family cabin.
Sara’s lean arms draped around Matt in the backseat, and Cindy chattered soothingly from the front as they pulled into the church parking lot, which resembled a luxury car showroom. The Prelude sheepishly passed wellborn Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses before stuttering into a free spot.
“I don’t think I’ve been here since my grandfather died,” Matt said to Sara, who exited the two-door’s backseat with the deft ease that came from more than a decade’s practice.
Matt ignored the rain and his father, who lumbered out of the stretch limousine that had contained only him and the driver, and he strode across wet pavement to his friends Charlie and Gina Merrick. Charlie’s light hair had gained a damp color, and he held an umbrella over his wife, who grasped Matt’s hands as he approached.
“This is the most well-attended funeral I’ve ever been to,” Gina said proudly, “and my Grandpa Payton knew Ted Turner.”
Matt was supposed to say some words to sum up his mother as a person and not as an industry, but anger clouded his thoughts since her death, so Gina graciously volunteered to speak on his behalf. Behind the pulpit and on top of three-inch heels, she told those assembled about the “great lady” she had the “honor to know.”
“Marilyn Elliott was not exceptional because she had attempted to be a force for good in Seattle.” Gina paused to adjust her glasses like his mother did when about to stress her point: “Marilyn Elliott was a force for good because she was exceptional.”
Gina’s reference to Matt’s mother by her maiden name, and the source of her wealth, caused Matt to glance in his father’s direction. He sat at a separate pew with Matt’s aunts Sunny and Frieda and their latest husbands (after the second round, Matt had stopped thinking of their partners as uncles). His father’s black suit, which he’d last worn at Matt and Sara’s wedding, strangled him like a boa constrictor. Matt was appalled that his father hadn’t cared enough to bother buying a new suit for the occasion, as he had.
Before leaving for the cemetery, Sara took Matt aside as he was about to enter the “death car.”
“Mark would like to speak to you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He told me.”
He looked at his wife and, for a moment, could only think that she was wearing black for the first time since he’d met her.
“I have nothing to say to him,” Matt declared, and he said nothing to anyone as they went to bury his mother.
The only asset Marilyn Williams bequeathed to her husband was the antique clock from her bedroom. That was a master stroke, like leaving behind a single penny as gratuity on a check — clear recognition and indictment of poor service rather than the neglectful stiffing of the working class. Everything else went to her son. Early in November, after the will was read, he met with his mother’s two trusted financial advisers (there had been three originally, but the third was indicted for securities fraud in 1993). Mr. Lovejoy filled him in on the specifics, and the more obsequious Mr. Dinsford would turn to Sara and repeat everything slowly as if the original transmission had been scrambled in the static of her blonde hair. Her informed and confident responses assured him that his condescension was not necessary, although Matt, who thought Lovejoy spoke Latin, appreciated it.
Mark Williams liked to plug his thick fingers into his hairy ears regarding the fact that anyone might have authority over him, which was a trait that had not served him well at home or at work — a difference, he thought, that grew harder to discern as the years passed. He’d been “offered a package he couldn’t refuse” from The Times in 2006, a year before he turned sixty. His was a generation, perhaps the last, whose men believed they would work until they were sixty-five and then go off to fish with grandsons. He didn’t mind so much the early dismissal. That was business, but he wished he could have been fired ... like men once were, before political correctness corrupted the word, suffocating it under fluffy layers of euphemism.
His severance was not worth discussing. The job had provided him with a sense of worth, and reduced to just numbers, it sagged limply next to the Elliott fortune. He bought a boat, which he planned to take up to Edmonds but never did. Now, he was sixty-four and unemployed, and his security, his freedom, his life all belonged to his son. Not even putting both fists in his ears could block out that reality.
“He’s gonna try to bully you like he did Marilyn,” Gina Merrick told Matt at Thanksgiving. “Keep your guard up.”
“I’ve gotten pretty good at that,” he said and wished he believed.
They sat on a white sofa in a rosy patch of light from the living room fireplace. Regardless of who came to Gina’s for Thanksgiving each year, the twilight of the gathering always included the same core people. Matt could hear Sara and Cindy in the kitchen hand-washing and drying the fine china, as Charlie Merrick put them away for Gina’s next dinner party.
“You know, I’ve invited Marilyn to Thanksgiving for years.” Gina’s blue eyes sparkled at the thought. “But she ....”
“Wouldn’t come without my father,” Matt finished and he wished for all those lost holidays with his mother that his father had cost him.
“Well, I suppose she thought it might’ve looked odd. Anyway, you’re the boss now. You’re in control.” She sipped her sherry. “It’s delicious,” she murmured, “Savor it.”
Matt and Sara met his father Sunday at a restaurant Mark had selected downtown that was loud, with a lingering aroma of cigars, and whose menu was a single worn page listing different cuts of steak. There was silence, long and confused, as if a band that had broken up years ago reunited for a concert without its lead singer. Finally, after chugging his first Rainier beer, Mark spoke.
“Just wanted to tell you, I’m selling the house. No reason to stay there by myself.” He added with presumptuous generosity, “You should stop by and decide what stuff you want for yourself.”
“No,” Matt said.
“What?”
“Mom left the house to me. Sara and I will decide if we sell.”
Mark turned to face Sara, who he believed was the source of his son’s resistance.
“You want to live in the house, Ms. Richter?” Sara had kept her surname when she married Matt, so Mark called her nothing else. “Why? To fill it with all those kids you’re not having?”
Having previously confirmed that his lack of grandchildren wasn’t just a matter of his son “shootin’ blanks,” Mark considered Sara’s refusal to procreate a rejection of utility, like a fireplace that refused to burn wood.
“This isn’t my choice, Mark,” she said, as though speaking to a small child, “or yours. It’s Matt’s.”
Sara reached for a warm towel from the tray in the center of the table and cleaned her hands without intending or considering any symbolism behind the action. Matt delivered his next words like a valedictory speech.
“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense for you to stay in that house by yourself. I’m going to sell it, and then I’m donating every dime to alcoholism treatment.”
Mark’s broad flat hand patted an imaginary yawn.
“This again?” he barked in weary anger. “Your mother was a lush, and that was her choice, not an illness. But I see what this is about. You want to blame me for it, like I stuck a funnel in her mouth and poured gin down it.”
“You might as well have.”
As the meal continued on its rancorous path, Sara picked shards of bacon out of her salad, and Matt detailed every slight, dig, and insult he’d witnessed his father commit against his mother. It was a scathing closing argument to the jury and the defendant cut into his T-bone with deliberately controlled incisions and ate each bite, dripping grease onto his plate, without indicating whether he was listening or was so moved as to demand that Matt stop.
Finally, Sara placed cash from her wallet on the check she’d requested.
“We’re not getting dessert,” she said sharply, calling the meal officially at 10:07 p.m.
“See, Ms. Richter, you’d make a great mom. You’ve certainly been able to handle my son better than his mother ever could. Now, that’s what really ate at her.”
Sara’s hand clamped around Matt’s wrist, which was all that prevented him from lunging across the table.
Mark Williams moved out of the house the following week. Matt said he could stay for as long as the house was on the market, and Mark’s rejection of that offer was firm and obscene.
The fireworks of that last meal with his father subsided, and there was an extended refractory period before he could move on. Gina’s friend at Keller-Williams showed the house to prospective buyers, most of whom found his mother’s death in the gilded bedroom an appealing selling point. Marilyn Elliott was important enough for the circumstances of her death to escape the messiness of her actual life and assume the role of tidy historical footnote.
Once a contract was signed, and expensive set pieces from his childhood transported to his Capitol Hill home, Gina invited Matt and Sara over to celebrate. After dinner, while Sara and Charlie talked to the Merrick children in the playroom, Gina toasted Matt on her deck.
“Freedom is a fragile thing,” she pronounced, “and is never more than a generation away from extinction.” On Matt’s puzzled look, she added, “That’s Ronald Reagan. See, you’ve defended your freedom and put your father out of your life.”
They clinked their wine glasses together. Gina sat in a chair near the fire pit, and its flames sparked hot and glowing against her tan skin and sandy hair.
“Good riddance, I say. He was awful to your mother ... and to Sara. She must be thrilled.” Gina was personally thrilled on her friend’s behalf, so she assumed without question that Sara shared her sentiment.
“Just make sure you don’t fall into the glasnost trap,” she continued. “He’ll try to reach out to you or Sara and pretend to be all humble and pathetic but he’s just trying to guilt you into giving him money, which your mother definitely didn’t want Mark to have.” She shook her head at the prophesied skullduggery. “Basic extortion tactics.”
Another Seattle winter passed in leaden darkness, and then spring drizzled meekly over the city — all without any news from Mark Williams. Matt had no desire to see him, but he was curious as to what had happened to him without resources, either financial or social. The closest he had to friends were the old newspaper buddies he kept in touch with through regular emails (forwards of stories they deemed awful and not up to their standards), but none of their wives would ever allow Mark’s bombast and pomposity into their house.
Gina’s words nagged at him: She’d predicted that Matt’s father would contact him or Sara, not both but one or the other. And Matt recalled how at his mother’s funeral, his father had approached Sara by herself.
“Have you heard anything from my father?” Matt finally asked Sara. They were walking home from dinner, and uncertainty had nodded his head when their waitress offered him a third glass of wine.
“Yes,” she said as if reciting the time.
“And when were you going to tell me about this?”
“You’ve said repeatedly that you don’t want to talk about Mark.”
“This is completely different. You don’t like to talk about TV, but if Downton Abbey was going behind your back and talking to me, you’d want to know, wouldn’t you?”
Matt had stopped in the street while making his not-quite-drunken but still possibly insane analogy. He now had to run to make up the distance Sara’s long-limbed stride had put between them. When he’d reached her at Prospect Street, Sara spoke with the calmness of someone who never drank and had grown accustomed to the logic gaps of escalating blood alcohol levels among those who did.
“If you now wish to discuss Mark, I am happy to do so.”
Sara paused near a tattooed man walking an Airedale. She folded her arms and calmly explained how weeks earlier, Matt’s father had provocatively added her to his email group, perhaps eager to see how his daughter-in-law would react to the heated exchanges, especially the “joke” forwards, where the subjects of mockery were never the same race, gender, sexual orientation, or political party as Mark and his friends.
She would respond, never goaded to anger, and carefully catalogue all factual inaccuracies. Mark would reply in all-caps (he’d reached the age when all his emails were in all-caps, but it fit him): YOU DIDN’T GET THE JOKE, MS. RICHTER.
“How dare he!” Matt shouted, startling the Airedale, who barked in shared frustration. “How dare he come to me through you!”
“Is that what you think he’s doing?”
“What else? Think about it! Gina said this would happen. Has he asked you for money?”
“No,” Sara replied. “He’s living in Kent now. I haven’t inquired any further.”
They left the topic on the street with the Airedale, now happily urinating on a parked car, but it followed them home and into their bed.
“I hate him,” Matt said. “Is that wrong?”
The lights were off, and Sara had turned over on her side, which indicated that she was done speaking for the day. She bristled at conversations in bed, and Matt was irritated enough to pretend he didn’t know this.
“Your feelings are neither good nor bad,” Sara said flatly. “You have no obligation to him.” She sat up. “However ...”
Matt sulkily tugged on the sheets until they covered his chin. He’d learned to dread this adverb whenever his wife wielded it.
“You’ve always disliked him ...”
“Hated him,” Matt insisted. He had gone all in and wasn’t willing to fold politely on the confessed emotion.
“Very well. It seems like you’ve always hated him because he was not someone else. That has never made sense to me.”
“He married my mother and he never liked anything about her. He spent their entire marriage picking away at her!”
“That was her choice.”
“What are you talking about? She didn’t choose to be bullied.”
“She chose to stay with him. He didn’t fool her. How could he? He’s hardly complex.”
“You’re defending him? After the way he treated you?”
Sara pressed on, steering the conversation forward without distraction.
“Look, he has no right to your love or your money. But if you think he’s just after your money, that’s simple enough to resolve — just give him some. You have more than you could ever need. You’ll probably spend more funding Frieda’s Scientology pursuits.”
“You didn’t know my aunt before she discovered something that worked for her. She was lost.”
“Well, they’ve gone to great expense to ‘find’ her.”
She flipped over on her side, ending the conversation, but Matt wasn’t finished.
“This is why he always liked you more than me.”
It was a strange comment, and it separated them as a couple and pitted them as rival siblings, fighting for approval from a distant parent.
“Mark doesn’t like me ...”
“Really? He never put me on his email list. He’s always wanted a reaction from you, and he could never get it. He’s in unrequited hate with you.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I believe you are avoiding a reasonable solution to your perceived problem.”
“No!” Matt shook his head angrily in the dark. “He’s not getting a cent from me. That’s not what Mom wanted.”
“According to the terms of the will, Marilyn only specified that you inherit her money. It’s entirely your choice what to do with it.”
“Fine! And I choose to give him nothing! Just like what he gave Mom.”
He waited for another volley but his partner had fallen asleep on the other side of the net. Matt went downstairs to sleep on the couch. It was the first time it had come to this and he could’ve just gone across the hall to the guest room, but he felt compelled to fulfill the cliche.
He woke with a start the next morning when Sara entered the living room, freshly showered and already dressed. She patted down a wild thatch of brown hair that jutted out sideways from his head.
“Was I snoring?” she asked tenderly, without any sign of resentment. “Did I keep you up?”
“No, no, I ...” He seized the opportunity that presented itself. “I couldn’t sleep, so I just watched some TV and must have dozed off.”
Matt quickly concluded that it wouldn’t diminish the sacredness of his vigil if he never actually told his wife about it.
Loved the short story. But didn't care for Ms. Richter, she's driving Matt to drink.
I really love how you write.
Also enjoyed how many places I recognized in the setting. Very well done!