Something to Prove Read online

  I’m going to make him sauce. Her mom was Italian-American, and that was what they called tomato-based spaghetti sauce in her house. She picked up the bottle of Brody’s jewel-toned Barolo, opened it, and poured herself a glass. Just to ease her nerves while she cooked.

  She opened the cabinets, but her absent hosts didn’t share Brody’s organic fetish. So Amanda pulled on her boots and trudged outside to the motor home, following the shoveled-out path Brody had made.

  Mother Nature had dumped close to three feet of snow on them. The frigid air was cold to her bones. Inside the motor home she blew on her hands and rummaged through his cupboards. Bingo. She sat back on her haunches and stared at Brody’s stockpile: cans of organic tomato paste, organic tomato sauce, organic stewed tomatoes. A head of organic garlic. A bottle of organic olive oil.

  Back in the kitchen, she was relieved to find that the organic tomato paste looked and tasted exactly like the tomato paste her family used. Mom would be so proud. Her heart cried a little more, so Amanda sipped some wine. To Mom, she thought, sniffling as she downed the Barolo. To all the good stuff she taught me.

  She was standing over the stove, frying the garlic, plus an onion and a pepper she’d found in Sarah’s pantry, trying not to bawl her eyes out on account of the stinging onion fumes, when Brody walked into the kitchen, hours earlier than she’d expected.

  He’d dressed up for her interview as though he was attending an important press event and the consideration touched her. Her eyes teared, and this time not from the onion. His hair was damp and combed. He’d shaved. He wore a preppy dress shirt and corduroys.

  She wanted to hug him, but held back. “What about your walk?” she asked.

  “This smells too good. I couldn’t leave.”

  She put down the spoon she’d been stirring the sauce with. “It’s far from ready.”

  “Can I help?”

  She rubbed her arms and tried not to cry. “Yes, please.”

  He gazed at her, those gorgeous blue eyes drinking her in. Then he poured himself a glass of wine and topped hers. “Just when I have you pegged, you surprise me,” he said, passing her the glass.

  But he avoided touching her. He leaned toward her slightly as if he was going to kiss her, but then caught himself as if he could never do it again.

  An ache swirled in her chest. But she couldn’t dwell there.

  Still cradling her glass, she turned to flick the light switch. Nothing happened. “Why isn’t this working, Brody?”

  His low rumble of a laugh sounded so sexy. “Did you forget the electricity is out?”

  “It’s not out. My laptop is charging upstairs, remember?”

  His gaze never left hers. “Because I set up the generator to power Sarah’s office for you.”

  “You…?”

  He smiled sadly. “There’s only one circuit on the generator, Manda. I needed to make a choice.”

  Her heart felt as if it was about to pound its way out of her chest. Do you see how good he is for you? Why are you doing this to him?

  Oh, God.

  She took a deep drink of her wine.

  Without a word, as if he could read her mind, he pulled open a drawer and rummaged until he found a box of matches. Lighting two beeswax candles on the table, he motioned for her to sit.

  She wanted this pre-meal time with him, the calm before the storm. Proof they could enjoy everyday rituals other couples took for granted. Even if it never happened for them again.

  Over the glow of the candles, he told her about his friend Hans. “I met him on my rookie downhill race, when he was beside me doing course inspection. I was completely in awe of him, because I’d been watching him on TV for years. But he ended up taking me under his wing, teaching me what it meant to be a professional.”

  “I wish I knew someone like that in my business,” she said wistfully.

  He nodded. “It’s hard to find in any business.”

  “Do you talk with him out of season, too?”

  “Yeah, two summers ago he helped me buy a house.” He smiled, remembering. “I’ve been thinking of remodeling it after this one. Building a bathtub and shower like his.”

  Oh, Brody. “I do love that bathroom.”

  “I visited him here once, right after he got together with Sarah.” Brody looked at his hands. “They were as different as fire and ice, and I didn’t understand it at the time. To tell the truth, I figured it had to be sex that bound them, you know? What else could it be, unless there’s a big cosmic joke. And sometimes I’m sure there is.”

  They were veering into dangerous territory. She should have known their peace couldn’t last.

  He sighed and stared into his wineglass. “I’m beginning to see that in spite of the surface differences, they had bedrock beneath the relationship—an understanding that their commitment to each other is more important than anything else.” He looked up at her. “The stuff with our fathers—what if none of it matters?”

  She suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  He shook his head. “Take out the tape recorder. You know what, let’s just get the interview over with.”

  “But what about dinner?”

  “We’ll put it on hold. I don’t want to eat anything right now anyway.”

  Amanda laughed, trying not to let the tears leak through. “You’re not on some crazy race diet, are you?”

  He raised a mock brow at her. “I’m a downhill skier, Amanda. We drink, we eat. Do we look like figure skaters?”

  Impulsively she leaned forward and brushed the hair from his eyes.

  Brody stiffened at her touch. “Don’t.”

  “Sorry.” She forced herself to smile weakly at him. “I’m going straight to hell, aren’t I?”

  “No.” And then he lifted a hand to curl her hair behind her ear. “You’re just prolonging the pain, is all.”

  “Then let’s end it.” Because the real pain was knowing she could never make love to him again. She wanted that almost as much as she wanted her interview.

  “All right,” he said. And stood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BRODY FOLLOWED AMANDA to a sitting room overlooking the dark, snowy mountain. A full moon shone overhead, so close he felt he could almost touch it. With a fire blazing in the woodstove, she sat on a cushioned chair. He dropped onto a couch facing the windows and stretched out, fully prepared for the inquisition.

  He’d brought in the wine bottle. Now he tilted it to his lips and took a long draw.

  In vino veritas.

  Tell her the damn truth, Brody.

  His background. He’d spent so much time blocking it, it was like taking a blowtorch to a sealed steel wall.

  “You want to know about my father?” he said, as a way of setting her on track. No more tiptoeing around it, no more harmless half truths. “Well, he’s sitting in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, locked up for income tax evasion.” He let out a dry laugh. “All the cheating and conning he’s done, and this is what they convict him on. Tax violations. He’s a regular Al Capone.”

  “Have you ever visited him?” Amanda asked softly from across the room.

  He was aware of her digital voice recorder, its red light shining like a steady beacon on the edge of the coffee table. This wasn’t a conversation between them, not like they’d had in the kitchen—it was a formal interview. It would always be a formal interview. He closed his eyes and let in the anger that suddenly engulfed him.

  “No,” he answered, his voice sounding flat even to his own ears. “I do not visit him. You could say I even disowned him.” He snorted at the absurdity of it, and he glanced at Amanda. But she, who really had been disowned, wasn’t laughing. She’d curled up her legs beneath her body and was gripping herself tightly by the elbows. From what he could see of her expression in the flickering firelight, it looked pained.

  He jerked his gaze to the moon. And the mountain silhouetted in the glass.

  She’ll never see you again after this, he thought. She’
s like every girl growing up who held his crimes against you.

  But Amanda wanted his taped confession—had cooked for it and fought for it and cried for it—so he would give it to her. He would talk until he got it all out of his system and there was nothing left for her to ask him.

  And then she could leave him, or he would leave her. Either way, there would be no future for them. He didn’t see how they’d make it out of this interview without her recoiling when she looked at him. In preparation, he’d already packed his bags and put them in the RV. He’d walk to the village from here. He’d…

  “Brody,” Amanda said gently. “I’m listening.”

  He tore back his hair. Say it. Screw the voice recorder. Don’t think.

  “After my mother died it was just me and him, moving from town to town until I got to sixth grade and won a scholarship to a boarding school in New Hampshire,” he said, all in a rush. “A skiing scholarship, all expenses paid.”

  This was the good part of his childhood and he smiled, remembering it. “During that year, I saw a whole new world.” He stretched out his legs, feeling his shoulders relax. She didn’t speak, just nodded her encouragement, so he took that as a sign to go on. Maybe he did want to tell her this part.

  “There were counselors at that school—men mostly, because it was an all-boys academy—and they were intent on teaching character and integrity.” Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how much they’d affected him. How their influence had come full circle with his career.

  “I guess you could say that what they taught stuck with me. After the first year it was like a thirst. I wanted to get away from my past, from the embarrassment of having a father who couldn’t tell the truth, who always had an angle to run.”

  He pulled again at his hair. He wouldn’t look at Amanda through this part. Just say it. Say it and get it over with and let her leave if she had to. “Yeah, I had to go home to him during summers and holidays until I graduated and went to high school.” He shook his head at the wonder of his escape. “That place cost almost forty thousand dollars a year, even back then, and it had all these rich kids. Boys from upper-class families—industrialists, bankers, foreign ambassadors’ kids…”

  Was she listening? She hadn’t said a word. Maybe that was a reporter’s trick.

  He sucked back another swig of wine. Tasted the sweet mellowness of the eleven-year-old wine. This vintage was fantastic, the best of the Barolos, but it was wasted on this story. For this, he’d be better off with a bottle of rotgut.

  “Our graduation ceremony was a big deal.” He tilted the bottle, let the wine slosh back and forth like a melody. “I must have been feeling heady, because I made the mistake of inviting him for the weekend.” The memory still burned, and he took a breath to shake it off. “At that point, I hadn’t seen him in a while. But I was getting a President’s Award for character and citizenship—” he let out a snort “—and I was so pumped up about it, I didn’t stop to consider. I just wanted somebody there to see, you know? Somebody to support me, to be proud of how far I’d come.”

  He glanced at her, sitting in the shadows cast by the glow of the fire, the smell of clean smoke permeating the room. How could he expect her to understand anything he was talking about? She’d had a relatively normal childhood, MacArthur notwithstanding, and an intact family. She’d had her mother and her sister to balance difficulties with her father.

  But this exercise wasn’t about her, it was about him. And he would never have said a word about it if she hadn’t demanded it of him. And since she’d asked, since she wasn’t saying anything to stop him, he would push away the shame and keep talking. He was only going to relive this once. Never again.

  He gazed back at the moon. “I already told you my mother died before I could remember her. She was killed in a car accident.” He closed his eyes. “I never knew anyone from her family, and my father was estranged from his, so he was all I had. Everybody around me, my buddies, my roommate—they were filling out address cards for the school to send invitations to their relatives. I was so excited about my award—so stupid—I didn’t think it through. I invited him on impulse.”

  He was tensing again, his words coming faster because he was getting to the crappy part—just one day in a string of crappy days he never revisited in his memories, except if he was having a nightmare. But who could help nightmares?

  “He showed up, of course,” he said dully. “Dressed all wrong, but I’m not big on exteriors, so I put that out of my head. He sat beside my roommate’s parents. They were Korean, very proper. They owned a tire company.” He plunked the bottle on a side table and forced himself to look back at the moon. “At the reception before the ceremony, I noticed my father pitching them an investment idea. A total lie, but he didn’t care, he always talked his way out of things if he got caught. And because he chose his marks well, he was fearless about it. Not a conscience on him.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, the shame stabbing through his own conscience. “Once, he even stole from a church treasury. Here I am, eleven years old, going to church for the first time in my life and my father steals ten thousand dollars from the damn missionary fund.”

  “Brody, I’m—”

  “Don’t, Amanda. Let me finish.” He stood and paced. Pacing helped get rid of the bad energy the confession stirred up. “Did he need the money? No. He had a job, with decent people, better than he deserved. When I confronted him about it, he got self-righteous that those funds were for poor people, and we were poor because he couldn’t afford fancy coaching for me or a pair of racing boots that fit.”

  Right. He tossed a pillow at the couch. “But that was all bull. Even when I was eleven I knew he had a sickness, a compulsion that nobody ever called him on. They—the religious people, the kind people—they were all so forgiving of him. It just grew and grew, because that was how he picked his marks.”

  Amanda made a small noise but he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn. She’s going to leave me. She’s going to leave, but I have to tell her anyway.

  “So I washed my hands of him.” He wiped his palms, sweaty and hot, on his corduroys. “After my graduation when he embarrassed me for the last time, I told him to go away. That I was done with him. That he’d dumped on me and the life I was trying to build for the last time. In my heart I cut him off, but not in the dramatic way your father did. I just turned around and focused harder on my own life. Created my new family, so to speak. I earned a spot on the national ski team. Achieved what I could.” He rubbed at his roiling stomach. He felt like throwing up.

  “Brody, I’m sorry,” Amanda whispered.

  “I said don’t. You’re interviewing me, remember? Keep it professional. Ask your questions. I’m only doing this once.”

  There was a silence, and then he heard her soft intake of breath. “Why did you start your charity?”

  “It was…an accident.” He whirled on her. “And don’t connect the two, because it has nothing to do with my father,” he said vehemently. “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “When I train at home, I have all these teen boys who come up to me in lodges and after races, wanting to talk about skiing. That’s the thing about this sport, Amanda, it isn’t like other pro sports where you’re separated from the amateurs who play it. Pro baseball and football players have their own facilities, but who could corral a mountain for us? So we’ll get teens hanging around while we train. Kids like I used to be, boys hungry for role models.”

  “What do you do for them, Brody?”

  He’d promised her honesty, so he would answer every foolish and painful thing she asked. He sat on the edge of the couch, staring at the backs of his hands. There wasn’t a sound in the room but the crackling of the logs in the woodstove. “My foundation grants ski academy scholarships,” he said finally, “and coaching and mentoring grants. I keep it anonymous and local to New England because that’s all I can handle right now.”

  He stared over at her, but he m
ight as well have been talking to a shadow, for all he could see of her face. “I want to keep this low-key, okay, so don’t write too much about it.” He stared at his hands again. “Because if I’m honest, the whole thing helps me more than it helps anybody else.”

  She made a small noise in her throat. “What about funding?”

  He shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  “Where does the money come from?”

  “Me, of course.” Where else? “Back when I earned more in sponsorships, I used to twist my sponsors’ arms, and quietly ask for donations from private individuals, people who knew me, whenever I could. But that’s all changed.”

  “Brody, what did you mean when you said the foundation helps you more than it helps the kids?”

  He laughed. “I sleep at night. I figure I’m doing something. I’ve been given influence, money—God willing—and even if I don’t have time to administer it as well as I’d like, I can still spread the good around. Maybe one guy will…” He stopped. He’d actually forgotten the voice recorder was rolling.

  “Did you have your own male role model?” she asked.

  Was this for her, or for her article? “Yeah, sure, guys on the tour. Older guys who took an interest in me.” He smacked the cushion beside him. “Hans, like I told you. He’s showing me now how I’d like to live once I’m retired from competing.”

  There was a silence. And then: “Y-you mentioned a family you created. Are they the guys on your team? The guys who travel with your RVs?”

  She was perceptive. No one had ever asked him that. “I went to high school with Jean-Claude, my trainer. Steve was a teen my foundation gave a scholarship to.” He chuckled. “He’s a real ski bum. I wanted to find something for him to do around the tour, so I made him my ski tuner. Hermann and Franz are pros who worked on the team with your father, but quit because they weren’t happy with his direction. They were friends of mine, and they came with me when I regrouped.”