The knock that sounded on my door wasn’t later that night. It was the following morning, or afternoon I realized once I squinted out the window. The sun looked mid-sky.
Wrapping a bathrobe around myself, I took my time getting into my chair and going to answer the door. It couldn’t be anyone I was interested in seeing. Welcome visits generally happened after darkness fell. Finally making my way over, I hit the switch to open the doors.
The place hadn’t been updated much, but five years ago when I’d announced my intention to move into the Douglas ancestral estate, my parents had insisted on a few modifications. I hadn’t wanted them, but they hadn’t listened to me. As well they shouldn’t have, I realized once I arrived. Bathrooms enlarged, ramps installed, they’d made the first floor wheelchair accessible. Miserable wretch that I was, I hadn’t thanked them. I’d retreated and sulked.
It looked like I had a new opportunity to thank—or sulk—with my parents. My father stood on the doorstep. He looked like he’d just ingested a hornet’s nest. In my experience, he looked like that a good fifty percent of the time.
“Do you know what time it is? Are you just getting up?” He barged in, on full-throttle attack mode from the outset.
“Hey, Dad. Got a light?” I didn’t even smoke anymore, but I knew it would drive him crazy to ask. Like I said, sometimes it was the little things.
“When was the last time you had this place cleaned?” He looked around with disgust. I surveyed the scene, seeing it from his eyes. It had been a while. I’d fired the cleaners after they woke me up at eight a.m. one morning.
“What happened with Annie? She called me and told me you sent her away.”
“Let’s make some coffee, shall we?” I wheeled into the kitchen. No way was I going to deal with my father until I had some caffeine in my system. Pacing like a raging bull in a pen, he gave me a few minutes. I guess even he knew to bow down to the coffee gods.
Settling at the kitchen table with a steaming mug plus one for my father, I met his eyes for the first time. He looked good for pushing 60, freshly shaven, his hair in a trim cut and wearing a custom-made suit. Thirty years younger, I knew I looked like shit.
“You look like shit,” he told me. Funny how sometimes we thought alike.
“Thanks, Dad. Good to see you, too.”
“What have you been up to?”
The tone, alone, implied that I was a complete fuck-up. There would be no satisfactory answer. So, I did what I had to do. When you knew trying to climb out of your hole would be impossible, sometimes you had to dig even deeper.
“Drinking, popping pills, fucking a few girls, you know, the usual.”
“When I was your age, I had my college degree, my MBA, and I was breaking my back every day on Wall Street.”
“Sorry, Dad, I broke my back at 14. It’s kind of slowed me down since.”
He winced at his poor choice of words. But he didn’t stop. “What’s your plan, Ian? Do you expect to sit around here gathering dust for the rest of your life?”
“Well, that. Plus the drinking, the pill-popping—”
“Try, for once, to take things seriously.”
“I’m dead serious.” I sipped my coffee. I didn’t have my plans mapped out on a spreadsheet, exactly, but any vague sense of my future was deeply enmeshed with my day-to-day life. Pain—drink—pain—pills—pain—drink—fuck—pills. The order of my recipe could change, but the ingredients would not.
My father looked at me with deep disappointment, shaking his head. “You disgust me.”
“Thank you. That’s both encouraging and productive.”
“What about the distillery? Five years ago that was why you moved to Scotland. You were going to run it.”
“Yeah, well, I got sidetracked.” Or never exactly intended to do it in the first place. Douglas Scotch was the best bar none, absolutely no question, and at times in the past I’d had flickers of ideas. What if we tried different marketing strategies? We could leverage social media, sponsor more tastings or competitions and giveaways. And our logo? Aengus Douglas’s face should be reserved for the family album, not relied upon to sell whisky.
But then a wave of pain would wash over me, so intense I’d have to grip the arms of my wheelchair and try not to groan. Before long, the cycle would begin again.
“Son, I’m sorry it’s come to this.” My father rested both palms on the table and gave me the look I was sure he used when about to fire someone from his hedge fund. “You turn 30 at the end of this year. This is your final warning. Clean up your act, or I’m cutting you off and selling all of it. This estate, the company. Everything.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” He was deeply attached to this place, the distillery, our family heritage. He loved referring to it with Americans, as if our bootlegging past somehow gave us aristocratic blood.
“Yes, I would.” He went on to say a bunch more about how I was wasting my life, sponging off of the money he’d made, doing nothing with my talents, etc. It washed over me in a negative drone. But the meaning sunk in. Fuck.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continued. “You have nine months before y
ou turn 30. You have time to clean up your act and make a change.”
“What, have you got me scheduled for another surgery?” He hadn’t tried to pull that on me since I’d turned 18. Frankly, because he legally couldn’t anymore.
“Well, since you bring it up. There is that reconstructive surgery you could have on your foot. And stem cell injections.”
“Enough!” Now I brought my palm down on the table. “I’m not a guinea pig to test out new experiments.”
“It’s not mad science. It’s on the forefront of science. There’s new technologies, new research. If you just opened your mind—”
“I know it’s hard for you to stomach looking at me.” In the past, I’d seen both my mother and father grimacing when they caught a glimpse of the charred flesh on my back and legs, or my mangled left foot. I knew I revolted them, the hideous son that marred their perfect ideals. In all the family photos my mother had around the house, not a single one showed me in a wheelchair, even though I’d been in one for the past 15 years. “But just because you can’t handle what happened to me—”
“I did not come here to argue with you.” He stood from the table, re-assuming his CEO demeanor. “I’ve hired you a caretaker.”
“I don’t need her.”
“You are not going to chase Annie away like you’ve done with all the rest of them.” It was true. My past was littered with caretakers, nurses and home health aides and cleaners I’d roared, sneered and railed at until they refused to work with me anymore. I was great at being worth no amount of money to be around.
“This time, you’re going to let her come here and do her job,” my father decreed. “You can’t do everything yourself. You need help. But it comes down to you, Ian. You have nine months to turn things around. Clean up your act and show me you’re doing something with your life.”
“I get it.” I looked up at him, weary and lazy-eyed. “You want me to assume the throne.”