Guilt consumed me as I opened it up. The note was short and sweet. One page, maybe. In handwriting that threw me into the past. I shook my head and bit down on the inside of my cheek. I should have called the man more often. Should’ve kept up with him more. Hell, at least I could have hired someone to check up on him.
Then I remembered his will.
He had plenty enough money to do that himself.
That estate meeting left more questions than answers, and maybe those answers were in his note.
Grayson,
I want to start by saying I’m proud of you.
I couldn’t go past that first line. I read it over and over until my stomach felt sick. Proud. The one word I’d wanted to hear from my father for years as he beat me with his closed fist.
Anton was proud of me.
I cleared my throat and kept reading.
Grayson,
I want to start by saying I’m proud of you. I always knew you were a special boy, even if we didn’t always see eye to eye on some things. You were always sneaky, fusing my want for your college days and your own want to play football. Watching you get that scholarship was one of the proudest moments of my life.
But Grayson, I’m not sure if the boy has turned into the man just yet. And I know you’re probably rolling your eyes and preparing a pointless argument, but keep reading. Stay with me for a second. You need to stop isolating yourself in that vineyard of yours. I know your success hasn’t been easy to come by, but you have to stop burying yourself in your work. Stop using work as an excuse to not get close to people. Take stock of your life and the people you want in it. Because in the end, you can’t take that money with you. You can’t take that vineyard with you. Those grapes won’t hold your hand at the end of your life and your memories won’t be reflected in that mansion of yours.
Stop hiding away, Grayson. Step out into the light and become the man you were born to be.
Anton.
I didn’t like how those words made me feel. I looked up and watched the waitress replace my empty beer with another, and I was thankful for it. I was ready to drown those words out of my mind and keep on trucking. I wasn’t isolated. I got out plenty. The problem with wealth, however, is that I never knew who was getting close to me for my money and who was getting close to me because of, well, me.
Surely Anton understood that. Which was why he’d hid his millions away in the first place.
I chugged back my second beer. I needed to relax. To get my mind off this agonizing
trip. My heart hurt. My soul hurt. My mind kept spinning. I needed to get out of this town. It was making me think too much about my past. My success was in the future. Not back here. I needed to wrap this shit up and keep pressing on. Just like I’d always done with my life.
Then, a familiar face walked into the bar.
“Gray? Is that you?”
Holy shit. It was Andy Prentice.
That asshole had been my closest comrade in high school. We’d gotten into more than our fair share of trouble, what with drinking at this same bar and running the streets at night after football games. Pulling the best ‘April Fool’ pranks on anyone that crossed our paths. He looked a hell of a lot different, though.
His hair was longer. Not the buzz cut I remembered from high school. Dark blonde and wavy. All the way down to his fucking shoulders. He still had that dangerous brown stare, though. That stare had shocked more than his fair share of teachers into their place. I stood and clapped his back, grinning at all of the great memories bombarding my mind.
“What the hell are you doing in this shithole?” Andy asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.
“Ah, the oil fields in North Dakota were good to me for a while. But they started laying people off, so I gravitated back towards my roots a few months ago.”
“Sounds like a shitty thing to do,” I said. “Why come back here?”
“I don’t know. It’s familiar. Home. It’s shitty, but its home. Why the hell are you back here?”
He held up his hand and the waitress soon appeared at our side with a beer he chugged back in seconds. Then he handed it off to her and she went to get him another one. It was the motion of someone who was here often. And who frequented a bar more than someone ought to.
I narrowed my eyes at my old friend and watched him prop his feet up on the table.