The Golden Boy

by Patricia Finn

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

An unexpected letter sends a man and his wife into their pasts – and offers them both a shot at redemption
 
After an involuntary retirement from his high-flying Hollywood career, Stafford Hopkins has retreated to a luxury estate on Maui, along with his wife Agnes, both grimly resigned to life in a paradise where neither feels fully at home. Stafford is ready to retreat into himself, too, when a letter arrives with shocking news.

Stafford has been named guardian of four children he didn’t know existed: the grandchildren of his late childhood friend, Bobby Shepherd, whose ghost Stafford can no longer ignore. Returning to both the hardscrabble farming town and the dark secret he’d tried to forget for decades, Stafford is forced to confront his past in order to rebuild his future – and to redirect the fates of his family and the four young people suddenly in his care.

Slyly funny and deeply moving, The Golden Boy is a captivating debut about love, mercy, and second chances.

Release date: March 10, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

For even a house is a sort of public monument.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

Maui

IN HIS LATE FIFTIES, Stafford Hopkins began to wake up crying. Agnes had only recently returned to his bed and he could not think of a tactful way to mention this without sending her back to the pool house. He knew she would assume that men who cry in their sleep are unhappy men, and the unhappiness of others was, to her, a personal issue. There would be blame, first determined and then assigned, and it would happen suddenly. Unassigned blame frightened his wife, and he had learned to live with that, accepting it as he did his need for her presence in his life. He did not know if he still loved her, but assumed it was no longer necessary for him to know, because he was a successful man, his happiness maintained by diet, exercise, and well-planned trips to fine places. They had many friends, he and his wife, and they were managed carefully like other things. It had been a long time since anything in their lives was left to chance, and they had always been in agreement that it did not pay to be careless.

When they built the retirement property on Maui then, and he told her abruptly and without warning that he wanted to sell their other houses, the prospect frightened her. They fought for months, house by house, until he finally gave in and came, she said, to his senses. They had lived in Los Angeles for thirty years, she said. LA was home. Yes, she knew he had left the network. She was dimly aware of that. But he was still in demand as a creative consultant and business adviser on large projects and important industry matters, was he not? So where exactly would they stay when they returned to LA for meetings and parties and award shows? Where would they go if they had no house of their own in the city? Or did he think she would stay alone in Hawaii and he would fly back and forth when it suited him, staying in hotel suites like an outsider, a junior executive? He was being selfish, which was normal, but he wasn’t thinking, which was not.

They had, after all, already downsized from the big house in Bel Air to the penthouse in Beverly Hills, and it was no trouble to maintain it at this point, none whatsoever. The little beach house in Malibu was well managed as a rental property and cost them virtually nothing to own. The apartment in New York was a financial asset whether they ever stayed there again or not. And as for their winter house, the house in Aspen that he always claimed to dislike so much? Well, that house, she said, that house had become too valuable to sell and it would not be fair to their daughter to sell it now, because it could not be replaced. Besides, she said, they both liked to see snow in the winter, did they not? Wasn’t that why they’d bought the Aspen house? Wasn’t that why they’d spent Christmas and New Year’s there for the past twelve bloody years? It had become a tradition, and traditions couldn’t just be tossed away like they were nothing—like they were magazines or old shoes.

This last argument had made him laugh, and she had surprised them both by not crying when he mocked her.

“When did this word tradition slip into your vocabulary?” he asked. “And are you sure it’s the word you’re looking for? Because I always thought a tradition was something deeper than a few winter holidays at an overpriced ski resort—self-indulgence on the grand scale, I admit—but not quite the same thing as the handing down of legends and customs from one generation to the next, which, last time I checked, was the real meaning of the word. But maybe there’s a new meaning? Something modern? American? It’s paradosis in Greek, isn’t it? Or maybe synetheia, depending on the context. I’d have to look it up.”

“I’m not stupid, Stafford,” she said.

“Who said you were stupid?” he replied.

“You did.”

“I did not say you were stupid.”

“You said it just the same as if you did,” she answered.

“Well, I’m sorry you think that.”

“No,” she said, “you’re not sorry. You’re never sorry about anything.”

“Really.”

“You’re not a sorry guy.”

“Well, I’m sorry you think that too,” he said.

“Because I’m not.”

“You’re not what?”

“Stupid. So you can shove that up your butt, Professor Hopkins, and elucidate your own asshole, which, I trust, you still know where to find.”

“I did not say you were stupid.”

But the truth was, Stafford did think Agnes was stupid, and that was because she was no longer discernible to him from the other women married to the other wealthy men of Los Angeles. She had learned to talk like them and dress like them and perhaps even think like them, and Stafford was ashamed of her now that she had finally mastered the art of dissembling. She had remained unaccountably stubborn, though, for a woman of their wealth and privilege, and he knew she would not give up easily, not when it came to her houses or any of the things that mattered to her.

Why, then, had she harangued him relentlessly in the months that followed. Why did he want to ruin everything now? Why couldn’t he just enjoy the life they had built for themselves? These were the fruits of their labors for God’s sake! They didn’t steal anything. They didn’t run people down in cars to get what they had. They worked very hard in a tough business and made some money and bought a few nice houses. Was that so terrible? Why couldn’t he just be happy? Why couldn’t he be like other men for once in his life? Like Brit’s husband or Annabel’s—or even Suzanne’s, now that he’d given up the little girlfriend. They didn’t torment their wives with this endless anguish about being rich in America. They gave a lot of money to charity and enjoyed the rest.

And so it went. Until finally, calmly, as they sat down to eat their breakfast one morning, she abandoned all arguments and instead, sawing the top of her egg off with the blunt edge of her knife, informed him without malice or sentiment that if he sold any of their houses, even so much as a garden shed, she would not go to Hawaii with him. Not for a month, a week, or a single day.

“You’ll have to go into exile alone, Stafford. And you won’t do well without me.”

He knew, of course, that she was right—and on both counts too—and he almost smiled, watching her scoop the inside of the egg out of its shell in measured little bites. He would not survive without her. She had held the winning card from the start, but he was impressed she had not played it sooner. Thus played, however, the agreement was struck quickly and the terms outlined as plainly as possible to avoid any cause for recrimination later.

They would live on the island of Maui from the fifteenth day of January until the first day of August. There would be a minimum of two trips back to the mainland during that time. They would return to Los Angeles for the month of August in preparation for their annual fall trips and for the industry parties leading up to the award shows, which she enjoyed attending. In mid-September, when the Emmys were over, they would travel to Europe or cruise or catch up on theater in London or perhaps a combination of several itineraries, and on the fifteenth day of November, they would fly to New York for two weeks. Following that, they would go to Aspen via Los Angeles and begin the preparations for Christmas and New Year’s, which, if done properly, would take more than a month but she didn’t like to be in Aspen before the first day of December because November could be dreary. And they would celebrate Christmas in the mountains, just as they had for the past twelve years. And if Callie came, they would try to forget old quarrels and concentrate instead on enjoying themselves. But even without Callie, even if she didn’t come and they were alone, there would be plenty to do because their other friends would be there, their Aspen friends. There would be cocktail parties and private dinners and the lavish brunches all beautifully done, and the time would fly by the way it always did at Christmas. And the snow would be there too, she said, great, frozen heaps of it. The snow that reminded him of Canada and her of a grandmother’s house in Big Falls, Wisconsin, a house she was glad to leave and happy to abandon.

“So you can drop your argument about houses, Stafford,” she said.

“And what argument is that?”

“That I have some kind of house fetish.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That I can’t part with a house.”

“I said you can’t part with a house you like. The houses you think you own.”

“What do you mean, ‘think’?”

“Ownership is a state of mind, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t start with me, Stafford.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyhow, I could have kept that little house in Wisconsin if I really wanted it. It was mine—not yours, not ours, mine. At least, I think it was.”

“That’s my point.”

“No, that’s my point. I only keep houses I like.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t like the Big Falls house.”

“Noted.”

“So I got rid of it. As soon as it was mine, that is. Which means I can, technically, give up a house.”

“I withdraw my argument. I was wrong.”

“Thank you, Stafford.”

The house in Big Falls, Wisconsin, the house she had disliked, was a three-bedroom bungalow with low ceilings, a single bathroom, and a tiny kitchen at the back of the house. There was a window in the living room set too high on the wall and a front door that opened backward, hinged on the wrong side. The house had been built in 1927 at a cost of twenty-four hundred dollars, and what it lacked in luxury, it made up for in the social misery of its future inhabitants. When it was sold, more than fifty years later, to a local businessman who leveled it to expand the parking for a popcorn shrimp franchise, it fetched just enough money to pay for the granite counters Agnes had ordered for the Aspen house. Stafford had pointed this out to his wife at the time, but she was unconcerned with the significance, financial or otherwise. What was the point of comparing these kinds of things, she asked him. The cost of granite in Aspen had nothing to do with anything in Big Falls. The money had come to her, in any event, as part of her grandmother’s estate, and if she wanted to blow it all on granite, she would—and did.

In truth, Stafford had no interest in the value of a house or anything else in Big Falls, Wisconsin. It was a place his wife had been sent to following the death of her mother, an event they had agreed, early in their marriage, not to dwell on. It was a Saturday morning in August and Agnes, a little girl of seven or perhaps eight, was standing on the sidewalk outside the apartment building in Madison where she lived with her unhappy mother, waiting, she told Stafford, for the ice-cream truck to come. She wanted a Creamsicle that day, and since they were expensive, she had taken the money from her mother’s change purse. Well, there was no point in asking, was there? A Creamsicle took a long time to eat if you didn’t gobble it up too quickly, and she was determined to have one. Absolutely determined.

But that was all she generally said about her mother’s death, and if it struck Stafford as odd that the story involved more details about ice cream on a stick than a drug-addled suicide found dead on the floor, he kept it to himself.

The Hopkinses’ Maui house was extraordinary even by the standards of the wealthy, which, at this point in their lives, were the only standards they lived by. There had been very little discussion about the design of the house once they had settled the more pivotal issue of oceanfront or ocean view. The money was not the significant factor in making this decision; neither, oddly enough, was the status. They both hated the ocean and were reluctant, even on the calmest of days, to swim in it. Agnes was a competent swimmer but easily panicked by the unexpected movement of natural things while he, a poor swimmer at best, knew there would come a day when the ocean would be ready for him, and on that day he would drown. He had been told this three times in his life, and under circumstances so bizarre and disturbing he had decided it was easier to accept it as prophecy than seek rational explanation and prolong the uncertainty. In the meantime, though, he enjoyed looking at the water from a safe distance, as if measuring its strength against his own.

It was sometime during their second year on Maui that the crying started. He had always been an early riser, never able to sleep more than a few hours at a time, but he had not cried for many years, not since he was a boy, lying awake in the upstairs room over the kitchen, listening to the arguments that raged nightly between his parents over something Emmett had done or not done or might do. Stafford used to cry then, but only because he was afraid his father’s heart would give out a second time from all the worries and troubles that everybody said would kill a man with a bad heart. It would be Emmett’s fault, of course, because Emmett was an unreliable boy who drank and misbehaved and sometimes stole things from other people, and Stafford knew he would have to choose between a brother and a mother in the end.

But Stafford had put those years away and did not know why he wept now, a man of fifty-eight who had built a life for himself that no other boy from Napanee could have dreamed of, let alone achieved.

After a while, the first bird would begin chirping, almost apologetically, but quickly joined by the garrulous enthusiasm of the others until the sound of birds, some singing and some squawking, consumed the silence.

Stafford loved the sound of these birds and sometimes he would say so out loud, whispering to them, “I love you guys.”

Agnes had learned to sleep through the early-morning racket, but Stafford would lie on his back, letting the sounds wash over him like the memories of another life, not his own. His darkest fantasies no longer extended to mysterious encounters with bewitching strangers but seemed instead to have settled on the notion that he too had been a bird once, with a bird life and a bird family and bird problems. He was not embarrassed by the childishness of his thoughts, because they belonged only to him and he knew that he would never share them.

But soon he would roll over onto his side, careful not to drag the pale, silky sheets with him. He would draw his legs up close to his stomach and wrap his hands around his knees, and then he would cry into his pillow until it was wet and stained with the salt of his tears. And as he wept, the sound of the birds would gradually subside with the arrival of another day, and Stafford would stop crying and slowly swing his legs around to the floor and sit up. His wife would stir and stretch a hand toward him, resting it on the small of his back. She had beautiful hands, he thought, because they were not like the rest of her, which had become beautiful in the same carefully curated way her friends were. Only her hands had remained unchanged, and in them he could see the last vestige of who she had been and why he had once loved her. The square palms and straight fingers with the round nails.

When they were very young, he had once taken her hands into his own and kissed them and told her that his mother said a woman’s hands should look good with a potato in them. She had laughed with him then, and he remembered spending that weekend making love to her in a bed too small for two, with a sheet that wrapped around them like a shroud.

“What time is it, Stafford?”

“It’s early. Go back to sleep.”

“Is it nice out?”

“It will be.”

“Tell Kelly to start in the kitchen.”

“Today? She comes today?”

“It’s Tuesday, Stafford.”

“I thought she came on Fridays.”

“And on Tuesdays.”

“Right.”

“What time is your golf game?”

“Jim canceled.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I’ll bring you coffee later.”

“Don’t let me sleep too late, Stafford.”

On Maui there is a light that comes over the hills of Kapalua at dawn and again at nightfall that gives the green slopes that tumble down to the sea the soft glow of velvet. Dark rows of Norfolk pines mark the ridges of these grassy hillsides, some of them edging the roads that weave their way up from the sea. From the top of the ridge, where Stafford’s house stood, the views west toward the islands of Molokai and Lanai were, he felt, more manageable in the early-morning light, the great shimmering mass of water that filled the horizon somehow easier on the eye. There were hidden and unseen swells that moved beneath the surface of the water, but from the top of Stafford’s hillside, when the light was soft, there was no sign of movement. It would change later, he knew. The light would change everything, and the wind would pick up by midmorning, after which there would be no holding back, no lingering reserve from the pale-blue sea that surrounded him.

There was an outside kitchen and an inside kitchen, both attached to the main house. There was another kitchen inside the pool house, and a fourth one on the far side of the swimming pool in the little pavilion that served as a bar shack for drinks. It was here that Stafford kept everything he needed for his predawn breakfasts. He liked tea in the morning, preferring it to the coffee his wife insisted on drinking later and throughout the day. It was the tea his father had drunk, a tea that once came with small china birds inside the box—robins and sparrows for the most part, but the occasional blue jay and, once, a red cardinal. It was an advertising gimmick popular at the time, an easy ploy designed to sell ordinary tea to ordinary people. It lasted a few years and then the magic faded and the birds stopped coming.

Still, Stafford was never able to open a box of his father’s tea without a fleeting hope he might yet find a little tea-bird inside, dusty and wayward from the long journey. He had collected them when he was a boy, lining them up on the windowsill in his room and naming them, gluing their broken beaks back on when they fell, and moving them to safety when the window was open and the wind blew in from the fields. But that was long ago, when he was still living on a Canadian farm, surrounded by the long winters and straight roads that led to other farms and other boys. The tea-birds of his boyhood were gone.

“Stafford, it’s me. It’s your mother. Stafford, wake up.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“It’s already afternoon. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Stafford.”

“Go away.”

“The Shepherds came by again. They want to see you.”

“Tell them I’m sick.”

“They’re worried about you, Stafford. Everyone’s worried. They came by last night and again this morning. They said they’d call again after supper.”

“I don’t want to see them. Keep them away from me.”

“Stafford, it’s no good going on like this. You’re not a little boy anymore. You have to pull yourself together.”

“I don’t want to see them!”

“Crying won’t bring him back, Stafford.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know?”

“All right, all right, don’t go all crazy again. I’ll tell them you’re sick. I’ll tell them you can’t see them just yet.”

Stafford Hopkins liked a cup of strong tea in the morning, and he steeped it in a tin cup that had to be held carefully because the handle was broken, and the cup grew hot quickly and burned his fingers if they brushed against it. He thickened the tea with condensed milk and then added three lumps of white sugar, stirring carefully until the sugar dissolved. And when he was satisfied with the color and thickness of his brew, he took the cup and walked to the far edge of his property where the outer stone wall dropped into the hillside below. And there he drank the tea, the sun rising over the house behind him, taking away the coolness of dawn and the mysteries of childhood like an inhaled breath of air.

“We are lost people, both of us lost,” he said to his wife at the start of their exile. “And the best place to be lost is paradise.”

“Oh, for Jesus’ sakes, Stafford,” she said. “Get a fricking hobby.”

In the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned, but those who compete.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

HOLLYWOOD LIKED STAFFORD’S WIFE. She was quick and fun and smarter than they gave her credit for, but that, of course, was the source of her charm. She didn’t need to be the star in the room. She was happy to let others shine and could adjust easily to the level of the other person, which was usually a notch or two below her own. But sometimes Stafford would watch Agnes as she took hold of the room and cast her charming spell over its inhabitants, and he would be suddenly anxious because he knew there was a ferocity within her that she could not always control. She was too easily wounded by uncertainty, and whenever happiness arrived or left, it did so like a great slam of a door, and he would see her face change from the girl he loved to a woman he feared.

None of this mattered when they were living in Canada, where they were generally shunned by the remnants of Stafford’s family, who disliked her for reasons of their own. But in Los Angeles, the deficiencies in her character ran the risk of derailing Stafford’s success in network television, without which they would not have been approved for membership at the prestigious private golf club they had waited six long years to join.

They were in their late thirties then, and her excitement was infectious. They were doing so well, the two of them. It was astonishing to think of who they were and where they had come from. But he was good at his job, wasn’t he, just wonderful at it, and they were both already certain he was being groomed for the top job. Their daughter was still small and the trouble there hadn’t started yet, and they had just bought the big house in Bel Air, and the money was pouring in, just pouring. She had learned to make martinis and host successful dinner parties, and their house had acquired the clean, sophisticated style that was expected of people in their social position. And now, a club. A private club. It was almost too much.

“Our first club!” she kept saying, like a dishwasher offered a seat in the dining room. “So when can we go? Will I need golf shoes?”

“‘Go’?”

“Play.”

“You’ll need lessons. A lot of them.”

“Oh, how hard can it be? I’d rather just go out and whack at the ball my own way. See how it feels. Nobody needs to see me, do they? Couldn’t we find a quiet day and play a few holes together, Stafford? You can show me what to do. It’ll be fun.”

“It’s not that simple,” he said, and he tried to explain to her that golf was an intricate, metaphysical game. That it was more than “whacking at the ball.” There were subtle social nuances, codes of conduct, and volumes of unspoken rules, all of which contributed, at different levels, to the complex etiquette of a wonderful game. Furthermore, he told his wife, playing golf at the level expected by the country club he had just paid six figures to join did not lend itself to her approach. You were expected to understand the game before you set foot on the links, and unless she was prepared to get serious and take some lessons and approach golf with the respect it deserved, he did not see any point in maintaining her membership as anything other than a social one. So no, they would not be going out and “whacking at the ball” together at the Bel-Air Country Club.

“Fine, then,” she said, and her voice was bright and cold, and he knew his wife was in trouble, and that meant they would fight, and it would be vicious from start to finish the way their fights always were. “Put me down for a social membership. Put me down for dining room hostess if that’s what you think I’d be good at, and I can fuck the kitchen staff on my breaks.”

And then, as was so often the case in those years, her shoulders tightened, and her hands went up, fingers splayed, the palms facing him like a child waiting for a hit but not ready to duck.

“Here we go,” Stafford said. “It was just too good a day, wasn’t it?”

“Shut up!”

“So you had to wreck it.”

“You put me down. You always put me down!”

“Oh, I put you down. What crap. You did this to yourself.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did this. You’re doing this.”

“I hate you, Stafford. I hate you!”

“You’re doing it to yourself. You’ve been looking for a fight since you got up this morning. I knew it was coming.”

“You shit-fucker.”

“Don’t hold back, honey. Let it all out.”

“Shut up! I hate you! You and your shit-fucking golf etiquette.”

“Why don’t you yell a little louder so Callie can hear every word? I would hate for her to miss any of this. I’ll open the windows so the neighbors can hear too.”

“Fine! Open them. Tell everybody. I don’t care. I just don’t give a fuck, Stafford. You care but I don’t. I really don’t!”

In those days, Agnes was crude when she was angry, and when she lost control of her temper, she was unreachable. He did not understand why she found it necessary to overreact to everything he said, and he did not believe that he was responsible for her outbursts. He only wanted her to understand that they had moved into a social and business world where everyone was watched. You could not lose . . .