Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 68390 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68390 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
“All our lives, it was me against those three. I knew my aunt and uncle would never be a mother or father to me, and I’d never be one of their kids. They didn’t treat me like that, but it felt like it anyway. I never wanted to ask for anything, and I never wanted to need them for anything. I didn’t want to do a single thing that’ll ever give them a reason to get rid of me, which I understand now is super fucked up logic, but when I was a kid, that was how I thought.”
“Were they mean? Or just like kind of obtuse? I can’t imagine being in a family where you didn’t know you were loved beyond anything. We’re all so close, my mom and dad and brother, even though he’s so much younger.”
Beans stops and lifts his leg against a bush like he’s pissing all over my aunt and uncle’s idea of raising me.
“I think more obtuse. They had four boys to raise. That’s a lot for anyone. Maybe it was too much for them because when I was thirteen, my uncle literally ran off with this young girl from the bank. He left my aunt the house, half their savings, the car, and four boys when he moved to Switzerland to start his life over. And my aunt, to her credit, held us all together. I got a job when I was fourteen, just washing dishes at a restaurant close to the house. I held the job until I was eighteen. I worked my ass off in high school to make sure I could get a scholarship, and I did. I studied business, but music was always my passion. None of us had music lessons. My cousins were more bruisers than they were anything else, and they loved sports above all, but I had a good ear.”
Weland pulls a face. She’s already reading between the lines here. “More like one of those people who can just play anything after hearing something, am I right?”
“Kind of. I don’t know where it comes from. My aunt says my mom wasn’t musical. That she never played anything. But with genetics, it’s impossible to know. Maybe my biological father was the same way.”
“Do you sing?”
I lift a shoulder in a shrug. “Not really.”
“That would be a yes.”
“I have this kind of freaky talent for finding the perfect voice, and by perfect, I mean a voice people are going to love. I also have a really good talent for business, so I turned both of those things into a company and then into a career. I couldn’t have done it without investors, though, and my aunt saw potential in me, I guess. Because she bought most of the shares I was offering when I started my company. I needed an investor, and she had some savings. She was the financial backing, and I was the…well, everything else. My company started off with one person, me. I saw a need and I wanted to fill it. A lot of artists don’t want to work with big labels. They don’t want to lose control of their work. I never wanted to take someone else’s music from them, but I did want to help get them out there, help the world to see what I saw and hear what I heard.”
“Who do you work with, or who have you signed?” Weland pauses right there on the sidewalk. “Never mind. I don’t need you to name-drop. Your company obviously did well and is doing well because you have lots of money now.”
“Even after it took off and I tried to pay my aunt back, she never wanted to sell her shares. She was proud she invested in me when no one else wanted to. She and my uncle had put away money for their kids’ college since they were born, so she didn’t have to spend money on that. Then, she got the house from my uncle, and it was mostly paid off. As such, she wanted to keep the money invested.”
“Except her shares were worth almost nothing, and then suddenly they were worth a lot when the company blew up,” Weland says.
“That’s right. She wasn’t my mother, but she was always telling me that I should find someone to be happy with. That special someone.”
“Was she a hardcore romantic?” Weland asks.
I wrinkle my nose, but this time, there isn’t any bad smell. We might be in the middle of the city, but this particular neighborhood smells as fresh and clean as any other summer morning, and there are trees here and there lining the street. We might not be in a park or the country, but it doesn’t feel closed in or too busy here.
“You know, she wasn’t. At least, not that I ever knew. She was practical. She had ideas about how things should be done. All my cousins are married now. She liked all their wives, even if they were unlikable. She wanted them to be happy, and in her mind, that meant finding that special person. Maybe she was sad it never worked out with my uncle, or maybe she never got over that. It could be that it all stemmed from there. She never remarried or dated, so either he was it for her, and she mourned their broken relationship for the rest of her life, or she never truly loved him and regretted never finding the one for herself, and she didn’t want to see her kids make the same mistake. She was a hard lady to read.”