Chapter 5: The Son
The man in the navy overcoat stopped three feet from Table 14. He didn't look at Victoria, who had stepped back into Arthur Pendelton’s shadow, her smile frozen on her face like grease on a cold plate. He didn't look at the manager, or the security guards, or the thirty rich people who were now holding their breath.
He looked down at Rose.
"Ma," he said.
The voice was low, deep, with the distinct, heavy South Side accent that no amount of Ivy League education or corporate boardrooms could completely scrub from the tongue. It was the voice of a boy who had grown up in a brick bungalow on 79th Street, listening to the foghorns off the lake while his mother fried potatoes on a two-burner stove.
Rose blinked up through her spectacles, her thin mouth opening in a small, soft "O" of surprise. "Oh... David," she whispered. Her fingers detached themselves from Emma’s hand and reached up toward his sleeve, her touch light and hesitant, as if she were afraid he might disappear if she pressed too hard. "You're early, dear. You told me you wouldn't be off the train from New York until ten o'clock."
"The meeting ended early, Ma," David Vance said. He unbuttoned his navy overcoat, revealing a plain gray wool suit underneath—a suit that had no designer labels on the cuff but was cut so perfectly to his frame that it made Richard Vance's four-thousand-dollar ensemble look like something off a discount rack at Macy's. He knelt down on the polished wood floor beside her chair, ignoring the fact that his cashmere trousers were pressing into the wet salt tracks left by the servers' shoes. "Did you have the steak? I told you to order the one with the bone in it."
"I had the rib, David," Rose said, a faint pink color finally coming back into her cheeks, her shoulders straightening by two inches. "The nice girl here... Emma... she brought it to me herself. She told me I was the queen of the wing."
David Vance looked up then. He looked at Emma.
His eyes were very clear up close, a cool, intelligent green that looked at her for three long seconds without speaking. He saw the missing nametag on her vest. He saw the pink notice from ComEd that had slipped halfway out of her apron pocket during the confrontation. He saw the slight, steady tremble in her chin that she had been fighting since seven o'clock.
"Thank you, Emma," he said.
"She’s fired!" Victoria screamed, her voice cracking like an old plate as she stepped forward from the pantry door, her fingers pointing at Emma’s face. She hadn't understood the alignment of the stars yet; she only knew that her father was standing by the server station with his head bowed and that this strange man was kneeling on the floor like a servant. "Daddy, tell him! This girl insulted me in front of the entire room. She refused to move this... this person when I asked her to. Arthur, why are they still sitting there? Get them both out!"
Thomas Greer took two fast steps forward, his hand coming down on his daughter’s wrist with a grip that made her tennis bracelet clink sharply. "Victoria," he whispered, his voice sounding like dry gravel being turned over with a shovel. "Shut up."
"Daddy?" she blinked, her blue eyes turning wide and round with a sudden, unscripted confusion. "What are you—"
"I said shut your mouth," Thomas Greer hissed, his face turning a dark, dangerous plum color. He turned toward David Vance, his shoulders caving inward until he looked twenty pounds lighter than he had when he walked through the door. "Mr. Vance... I... I apologize. My daughter... she didn't know. She hasn't been involved in the operational transition. If I had known Mrs. Vance was dining with us tonight, I would have had the regional director open the private suite upstairs."
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David Vance didn't get up from the floor. He remained kneeling beside his mother’s chair, his large hand resting on her gray wool sleeve. He looked at Thomas Greer over his shoulder, his green eyes turning into two small, flat discs of jade.
"She didn't know?" David asked, his voice remaining perfectly level, without a single ripple of anger to mark the surface. "Which part didn't she know, Tom? Did she not know that my mother worked thirty-two years at the phone company to pay for the mortgage on the building your hospitality group rents on 35th Street? Or did she just not know that the fund I manage bought fifty-one percent of your corporate debt three weeks ago?"
