At first, it had been very hard. Yet at the same time, it had been very good between him and Bonnie—they had been held together by young love and poverty. It was by chance that a foreman at Grantham Engines had taken a look at Aaron’s application, saw that he knew how to operate a cotton gin, and put him behind the wheel of a semi, driving line-haul between Dallas and San Antonio. With a little money, Aaron and Bonnie had found a tiny one-bedroom clapboard house on the east side of Dallas, and they were happy.
When Robin came along, Aaron immediately fell in love with her dark blue eyes and dark curls. He had worshipped that baby doll, had taken her everywhere he could, doting on her. Two years later, the same year Aaron bought his first truck, Rebecca had joined them, another beautiful baby girl with crystalline blue eyes. By the time Rachel was born three years after that, laughing and gurgling beneath a head full of black fuzz, he had a dozen of his own trucks running between Dallas and San Antonio.
Lear Transport had been born along with his daughters, but grew much faster. Aaron intuitively understood the fundamentals of a success in the business, and he quickly earned a reputation for delivering freight fast and cheap. As the business grew, so did his ambition. He moved the family to Houston to take advantage of the transatlantic shipping lanes that ended there, successfully bidding on several over the-road contracts to move a substantial amount of ocean cargo that did not end up on the rails. By the time he moved to New York and added air transport to LTI, Bonnie had long gone.
At what point, exactly, the arguments had started, he could no longer remember, but it seemed that was all there was in those last few years together. According to Bonnie, he was never home, never interested in them, had left the raising of their daughters to her. She never understood that building an empire for those three girls took all his energy. Bonnie was right about one thing, however—both of them had left the girls flailing about, throwing wealth and more wealth at them as they tried to sort out the mess of their marriage. The result? In spite of all outward appearances to the contrary, they had managed to raise three daughters who each carried the burden of their parents’ failure in their own way.
For Robin, as Bonnie had so brilliantly pointed out, it was the need for his acceptance and approval. She’d flailed about until Aaron took her on at LTI. Except that he didn’t really take her on. He didn’t teach her the business like he should have, but had given her a cushy position that had nothing to do with the running of company. She was a pretty woman, eye candy with a powerful name, and she made a great asset for entertaining his bigger accounts around the world. But in the last couple of years, as Robin had sought more influence and responsibility at LTI, he had found her business decisions to lack the maturity that solid experience would have given her. She was, in a word, a management disaster.
Rebecca, on the other hand, had, for reasons Aaron would never understand, latched on to the first loser to pay her compliments. It was mind-boggling to him, for Rebecca was the most beautiful and refined of his daughters. She could have had any man with the mere crook of a finger, but she had chosen Bud Reynolds. Bud wasn’t all bad—he was perhaps one of the best high school wide receivers Houston had ever seen—but he was a sorry excuse for a man. When Aaron had left Bonnie, Rebecca had latched on to him and held tight all the way to college, foregoing what had all the markings of a promising career in the arts to be the bastard’s doormat. Now, Bonnie said, Rebecca drifted from one social event to the next, miserable in a marriage to a man who would fuck his neighbor’s wife in the garage while she was inside, nursing their son.
And of course there was Rachel, sweet Rachel, the most hapless child a man might hope to have. She was still in some nebulous graduate program at Brown University, the same graduate program in which she had been enrolled four years now. The subject of her study? Ancient British languages. He had to shake his head in wonder every time he thought of it. The one time he had asked her what she intended to do with her graduate degree in languages—ancient British languages at that, the poor girl had blinked and looking very bewildered. “Well . . . research,” she’d said. She seemed to have no direction, no ambition, other than to poke around musty old manuscripts.
Yet Aaron continued to bankroll her.
It astounded him in an odd way, because his three daughters had grown up in the lap of luxury, had never wanted for a damn thing. But each of them was as forlorn in their own private way as if he had abandoned them at birth. If the goddamned doctors were right, he had precious little time left to right that wrong.
That knowledge had created in him a desperate sense of urgency like he had never felt in his life. If there was one thing he had to do before he left this earth, it was to make them face the voids in their lives, make them understand what was truly precious. Teach them to stand up to life and meet it head-on.