I got down on my knees to be down on Brady’s eye level. He eyed me earnestly. “Which one?” he asked.
Scanning the floor, I took a red train in my hand and put it on the track. Brady hit the switch on the control center at the track’s control house and the train zoomed around. He laughed approvingly.
“Which one for you?” I asked him.
In response, he got up and ran over to a shelf where a child-sized blue conductor cap was hanging on a hook. He picked it up and threw it sloppily on his head before tottering back over. He plopped down next to me and picked a black train to put on the track.
Brady wanted to play with me, but once he started he was in his own little world, watching the trains. After a minute of watching him I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“I got him that cap,” Vincent said. He took a seat next to me and watched Brady maneuver his train in silence. A warm smile was on his face the entire time.
Brady played with his train for a while longer before he noticed Vincent had taken a seat at the play area. When he saw Vincent at last, his brown eyes lit up anew.
“Uncle Vincent! Which one?”
Vincent picked out a yellow train to add to the track. Whether it was the train track itself or playing with Brady, he was enjoying this moment in a playful way that I hadn’t seen before.
“Hey buddy,” Vincent said after a moment, “why don’t we build a tunnel for our trains?”
“Yeah!” Brady yelled.
I watched as Vincent got a chair from another room and returned with a blanket. He put the chair at one end of the figure eight, and Brady helped him with the blanket as well as he could. Soon they were racing the trains under their makeshift tunnel.
Brady’s enthusiasm for the whole activity was infectious. I could tell Vincent was getting into it, and soon enough so was I, watching the trains fly by faster and faster. Vincent was in the middle of talking to Brady about changing the track to take better advantage of the chair when Giselle came into the room.
“Looks like you guys are having a blast,” she said.
Brady was very excited. “Trains!” he yelled.
“I see that. Kristen, do you want to help me finish frosting the C-A-K-E? I think the boys are occupied for a while and Rob just went out to grab some last minute party supplies before Brady’s friends come over.”
I looked up and sensed a hint of seriousness beneath her innocent veneer. “Of course,” I said. “You two will be okay without me, right?”
Vincent looked up from instigating a train crash. “I think so.” Brady was too engrossed to notice us.
“Okay,” I said. “Be back soon.” With that, I got up and followed Giselle into the kitchen.
Giselle’s kitchen was a total disaster, which was to be expected when you were throwing a birthday party for a three-year old. Various kitchen implements were strewn across the granite countertop, and a metallic mixing bowl was sitting next to a fresh and delicious smelling round yellow cake. She walked over to the bowl and began stirring the contents inside.
“Have you ever baked a cake before?” she asked over her shoulder.
I wasn’t very good in the kitchen. It was one of my failings: I had always been too busy with school and then work to learn how to cook well. I was mostly good with a microwave and doing basic things on a stove top, like warming up soup. Baking a cake from scratch was beyond me.
“Not on my own, no,” I said. “The most I’ve done is bake a cake out of a box with my mother, but that was years ago.”
She flashed a quick smile over her shoulder as she whisked the frosting. “Neither had I, until I had to bake a cake for Brady’s first birthday. It was hilariously lop-sided, but thankfully one-year olds don’t notice that kind of thing.”
“It looks like you’ve gotten pretty good,” I said.
“I’m trying, anyway.” She waved me over. “Well, even if you haven’t done this before, I’m sure you can give it a go. Just try and coat this evenly with frosting. I’m going to work on the blue frosting for writing happy birthday.”
I took the plastic frosting spreader from its place on the counter and went to work. It wasn’t very different from spreading peanut butter and jelly on a sandwich, which I was a pro at. I quickly got into a rhythm of taking a gob of frosting and smoothing it out on the cake.
Giselle watched me work for a moment and then set to work on the colored frosting. “So you’ve been seeing Vincent for a little while now?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“How did you two meet?”
I laughed nervously. Apparently Vincent hadn’t told her much. I decided to be truthful since the cat was out of the bag anyway. “To be honest, it’s a bit scandalous.”
She stopped whisking. “You weren’t married or something, were you?”
“No!” I cried. “Why? Do you think Vincent would do something like that?”
“I don’t, but people have a way of surprising you sometimes.”
I knew all about that, but I had forgotten what Vincent told me about her history. I wondered if he had told her about the situation with Marty. That was a private thing: the only people who knew about it were Vincent and Riley. Well, and Kurt and Bernie. It still upset me that he had done that. That had surprised me. As sweet as he had been all week, I still wasn’t over it.
“I guess that’s true,” I said. “Anyway, we actually met through work. I work for a personal wealth management firm and head up his account.”
She turned and looked at me. “Good for you! I hope you’re reining him in somewhat. Every time he travels I worry he’s going to have some horrible accident with all the risky sports he’s doing.”
“Oh, you too?”
She let out a short laugh and shook her head. “He seems to like you. I haven’t met a girlfriend of his before.”
Here was another surprise. The fact that Vincent had never introduced a girlfriend to his sister, who he was obviously close to, made me feel special. My mind shot to Ariel Diamond. If his sister had never met her, maybe things weren’t as serious between them as I had thought, even if the tattoo was strange.
“Not even Ariel?” I asked, before I knew the words were out of my mouth.
Giselle stopped whisking the frosting for a moment, but continued. “No, not Ariel. That was a different period in Vincent’s life. And mine, really. We didn’t talk much while he was dating her.”
“I see.”
“He’s much more family oriented now than he was then.”
“Oh?”
“Ever since our parents died. He grew up after that.”
I stopped in place. Vincent’s parents were dead? He had never talked about them, but then I rarely talked about my parents and they were still alive and kicking back in Texas. How had it never come up that his parents had already passed away? Did he just not care?
I began spreading the frosting again. “I didn’t know your parents had passed,” I said quietly.
It was her turn to put her whisk down. “Oh, sorry. I guess it’s been so long. They passed away nine years ago.”
So Vincent must have been very young. Younger than I was as I stood in that kitchen. Even though I didn’t talk to my parents much and didn’t rely on them financially at all, I couldn’t imagine them being gone.
“Wow, you two were young then.”
“I like to think thirty is still young!” she said, laughing.
My cheeks flushed. “That’s not what I meant!”
“I know, I know. It was way too young to lose our parents. Vincent took it very hard. It actually turned out to be the beginning of his success.”
“What do you mean?”
“After they passed away, he finally got his act together. He developed the camera a few months after the funeral. It was like he was possessed. We were both staying at our parents’ house for awhile after the accident and living on the small inheritance we got. He would be working twenty hours a day for weeks on end, out in the garage and on the computer and on the phone. It was a transformation. He went from being a slacker with potential to someone who was totally obsessed.”
The tone in her voice had changed. Her words took on a strange sharpness, like she was trying to cut them into me and make sure they sunk in. She obviously admired Vincent very deeply. This wasn’t a connection that was for the sake of appearances: Vincent meant the world to her. Listening to her talk about him, I could see why.
She continued. “Any time he wasn’t working he was saying he was going to take care of me and of us. To a twenty year old it’s pretty weird to have your surfer brother tell you that he’s going to take care of the family. It sounds like wishful thinking from a guy who’s just grieving for his parents, but Vincent really changed. He became this very intense person who found success everywhere he looked because he wouldn’t accept failure. He was selling that camera in three months and had it with retailers soon after, and he just built and built. Everyone underestimates him because of his appearance and his hobbies, but he just keeps plowing forward.”
I had researched the story of Vincent’s company from a financial perspective, but I hadn’t given thought to what it meant on a personal level to grind out so much success. Giselle had seen it first hand. In a way, I was almost jealous.
“It sounds like you admire him,” I said, simply because I hadn’t spoken in a while. We had both stopped with our frosting duties.
She nodded. “Then he changed again when Brady was born. Before that, he was on a path where it was nothing but business and intensity, but you can’t be intense with a newborn. Vincent makes sure my son has the best of everything. Vincent set up Brady’s college fund the day after Brady was born, and has done so much research on camps and things to send him to.”
She shrugged, laughing. “I’ll get these emails at two a.m. saying ‘it’s your kid but I just want to tell you I’m happy to pay to send him to this camp when he’s old enough’ or ‘do you think Brady would like this? I can get it delivered this weekend.’ Never mind my son, it’s a full-time job keeping up with Vincent!”