This Bright River

by Patrick Somerville

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From a writer and producer of HBO's acclaimed apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers, comes a compelling story of young love and old secrets.

Ben Hanson's aimless life has bottomed out after a series of bad decisions, but an unexpected offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin's mysterious death a decade earlier.

Lauren Sheehan abandoned her career in medicine after a series of violent events abroad. Now she's back in the safest place she knows -- the same small Wisconsin town where she and Ben grew up -- hiding from a world that has only brought her heartache.

As Lauren cautiously expands her horizons and Ben tries to unravel his family's dark secrets, their paths intersect. Could each be exactly what the other needs?

A compelling family drama and a surprising love story, This Bright River is the work of a natural storyteller, one whose dark humor and piercing intelligence provide constant, lasting delights.

Release date: June 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 464

Sample

“Part love story, part murder mystery, part meditation on violence, part exploration of what home can and should mean, this novel roams wide and far, in terms of its story and even its geography…. What glues it all together is Ben Hanson, and the writer behind him, Patrick Somerville, who filters the randomness of this world with an exquisitely wry and thought-provoking lens, tossing off one-line life-changers that keep you looking for your own revelations along with the characters.”

—Leigh Newman, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Literary novels are often accused of being either boring or irrelevant, but Patrick Somerville’s new novel, This Bright River, is neither. A sharp and timely commentary on the nature (and future) of narrative, it’s also a pleasure to read…. The book seesaws through time and space and, like any good video game, has enough side stories and dead-end leads to feel immersive…. Somerville is a novelist of talent who embraces the broader world, equally at home writing about video games, the effects of violence on intimate relationships, and perhaps most of all, the second acts of American lives.”

—S. J. Culver, San Francisco Chronicle

“The chapters don’t roll forward so much as fit together like puzzle pieces. But Mr. Somerville—who has something of the roadside-diner raconteur about him—makes the approach work on the strength of his writing voice. It possesses a sneaky ease and charm that mask the story’s building menace. This fine book’s richest explorations are less into the secrets lurking in ordinary-seeming towns than into those harbored by ordinary-seeming families.”

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A remarkable achievement—a stellar, bruising book about how place forms character and our capacity to transform ourselves. Somerville works in a host of styles throughout This Bright River…. At times his prose acquires the sawed-off simplicity of a thriller, particularly in the closing chapters…. The dialogue is marked by too-smart-by-half patter that recalls David Foster Wallace. Chapter titles have the symbolic gravitas fit for a New Yorker short story…. What truly unifies the novel, though, is Somerville’s respect and esteem for his characters—something that’s not a given among literary novelists…. Somerville argues that our lives have more fluidity than we tend to believe—or credit ourselves for…. This Bright River affirms our capacity for change, but stresses how hard-won our transformations need to be.”

—Mark Athitakis, Chicago Tribune

“Stories nest subtly within other stories until, near the end, there’s a revelation about one precise, profound moment in time. Somerville is after something grand here, using nonlinear storytelling and shifting points of view to investigate elusive truths and to explore the nature of both delusion and evil…. The author largely succeeds. This Bright River is propulsive and thought-provoking, from its unorthodox family dynamics to the sometimes paradoxical messages it imparts.”

—Tobias Carroll, Time Out New York

“Employing twin narration and exploring eternal themes of love, death, family, and duplicity, the 450-pager appears to carry the ambition uptick one expects from an acclaimed author’s sophomore novel.”

—Flavorpill Chicago

“Why it’s a must: It’s the best kind of prose—like a friend who is telling you the wildest story over a beer. Time flies.”

—Marie Claire

“Somerville takes a quantum leap in his torrential second novel…. Somerville has a gift for spurring dialogue, and the meandering narrative tributaries he explores stoke our curiosity and build suspense as he crosses the wilderness of madness and bloodshed, lies and loyalty, courage and love, in this by turns rolling and raging river of a novel.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Ben’s jilted slacker past and his unwelcome reception are so much fun to read. The oddballs who populated the road quest in Somerville’s tightly wound, slender first novel, The Cradle, are outdone by the secondary characters of St. Helens. Somerville relies less on eccentricities and more on directness, especially with Ben’s sardonic sister and righteous if not well-intentioned parents. We get their motives and duplicities—their human complexities—through witty dialogue and sharply crafted group scenes…. The novel soon transcends a coming-home story or a love story. At 450 pages, it’s indeed a bigger book, as Somerville intended, that peers into the love and evil mankind carries in the same strand of DNA.”

—Robert Duffer, Time Out Chicago

“Ambitious, stylish.”

—Publishers Weekly

“How do we react to overhearing a conversation while trapped on public transportation? Do we want to interrupt, to knock in some sense or offer advice, or do we listen, by turns angered and fascinated by tragedies only halfheartedly avoided? A provoking book: the reader will not escape untouched.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Some Frozen Night

Madison, Wisconsin

He’s been drinking with this guy for a long time.

It’s good.

It was a rough day and this just sort of happened. The guy sat down and ordered a bourbon, neat, and after ten minutes of silence, the two of them saying nothing and drinking their drinks, looking up at the TV, they started to chat. First about the basketball game, then about campus, then about classes, then about the cold. Then women.

“There are amazing women in this town,” he says. “You know? It’s crazy.”

“College towns.”

“That could be it.”

He’s completely drunk now, and he can’t see very well, but he’s been talking a lot, he’s sort of opened up to this guy, and the guy has continued to listen. He likes him. He’s a listener. He likes anyone who will listen to him when he gets going on a rant, but he likes this guy specifically because he’s tuned in. Listening in that good way. Bars are funny and it’s tough for two strangers to start talking because everybody’s got a thousand friends and everything is a party and everyone’s always on the way somewhere, and somehow he doesn’t have any friends anymore. But apparently this guy came here to do the same thing: sit down alone and drink out the gremlins.

“We make a good pair,” he says. “You know? We’re like Pancho and Lefty.”

The guy nods. “Yes. Totally.”

Gremlins is the word he uses when he thinks about everything bad within himself.

“I’m completely feeling it right now.”

The guy says he is too.

They’re both quiet for a bit.

The guy asks him if he wants to go get high.

He considers.

Then: “Yes,” he says, nodding at his drink, furrowing his brow, very serious about it, because sometimes he has panic attacks and he doesn’t want that to happen this time. “I think I do. Let’s keep it going.”

“Okay,” says the guy. “Let’s go.”

They both put on their jackets, get up, and walk out of the smoky bar.

Outside it’s freezing, but it’s a nice relief from all the cigarette smoke.

The guy says, “I’m parked down here. Around the corner.”

“This’ll be interesting,” he says, raising his eyebrows, following the guy.

He doesn’t really know what he means, he thinks, looking down at his feet, watching them walk him. Everyone in Madison’s a pothead, though. It’s a real thing.

They turn off State Street, cross Johnson, and walk down Henry.

He’s sort of sick of it. He’s sick of a lot of things. It’s dark here. Pretty much everyone is a pothead.

“That’s an awesome jacket,” says the guy.

“Yeah?” he says, looking down at his own sleeve. “I never thought about it.” In truth he has not.

“It’s just so cold. That looks warm.”

“It is.”

“I have this thing, but it’s never as warm as it seems like it should be, you know? I mean, for the money I paid. It eats it.”

“I actually like it.”

“What?”

“I like yours. You like mine. We should switch.”

“But people never actually do things like that, you know.”

“That’s accurate.”

“Did you say you lived here? Or you’re visiting?”

“I live here.”

“Me too.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

“Okay, right here,” the guy says, nodding at a car. They both stop by the door.

“Cool.”

“Here we are.”

“Cool.”

“Cool,” the guy says back.

The guy unlocks the door, leans in, reaches across to the glove compartment, and rustles around.

Now the guy’s got something in his hand.

“You wanna just smoke on the street?” he says, squinting at the thing in his hand. “Or what? Maybe we should just sit in your car? It is cold. I knew it was cold, but I didn’t know it was this cold.” And it’s an amazing thing, he thinks, how cold it gets, and how nevertheless we usually do okay. He has something of a moment while pondering this.

Take hypothermia. Take, for instance, the stories of the lost men who wander away from their trapped vehicles in search of roads, in search of cars, in search of help. Even as a child, he was terrified by these stories. Usually there is a family left behind. Maybe a mother and an infant. There’s no more gas and they’ve been there for days and they’ve finally run out of crackers. The father decides he has to go for help. He’s tried to be reasonable up to this point, but it’s now or never. He leaves the car and goes out in a blizzard. He walks around in circles and almost always dies frozen, alone, and excruciatingly close to his starting point.

As a child, he would hear these stories and think to himself: How could this be possible? How could something so terrible and cruel even be possible? But this is what nature does to people.

“No,” says the guy. “I don’t want to smoke on the street.”

The tone of the guy’s voice awakens him from his brief, mediocre reverie. “Where, then?” he says.

“It’s not that,” says the guy. “I’m sorry about this. I really am, dude. I’m actually going to kill you now.”

He looks.

“What did you say?”

“It’s the principle,” the guy says.

Then the guy hits him over the head with whatever he’s got in his hand.



When he comes to, he’s confused, and what he worries about first, for some reason, is the smell. It smells like wet towels. Musty. Moldy. It’s terrifying to smell it. Then he worries because he doesn’t know how much time has passed, then he worries because he starts to remember.

It’s pitch-black now, not just dark, and he can hear the sounds of the road.

It’s cold.

It takes him a few minutes of careful thinking to remember the bar in detail, to remember the guy, to remember that they left the bar, and to make sense of the pain in his skull. He hit him. The guy hit him in the head.

Eventually, the pieces all tumble together.

He’s contorted in here.

He scrapes around in the dark, remembering what the guy said at the end.

He said it was the principle.

He scrapes around some more, tries to push.

He starts to pound.

At some point he starts to scream.

Sleep on the plane.

Dream of the ancient ocean I am leaving and a farewell glance at the tops of mountains I have not climbed.

O’Hare, then, changed in an unsayable way, but changed alongside the grays and whites and moving walkways, people drifting with their rolling bags, the smell of the Cinnabon, and the wedge-shaped line at the corner McDonald’s.

A disembodied voice compels the sea of walkers to part from behind; we watch as his beeping white cart crawls through the gap we’ve created, and he nods his chill thanks, chewing his gum and wearing his three-piece United Airlines suit like a tuxedo. An elderly couple is aboard his vessel, seated on the back puff seats, facing stern, facing us, eyes sleepy as heads rock left, right, absorbing buffets. They get to ride because they are so old.

Bubblers.

Children run the wrong way on the moving walkway and therefore have no motion.

A girl asleep with her back against a white pillar in an empty gate, and she’s in her pajamas, as though she knew that it would come to this.

Planes like toys I used to fly with arm-power, drifting down to land, parking on the tarmac. I see them through the windows.

Shoeshine guys have a station against the wall.

And then the Quiznos, and I know that I am closer.



We’d heard about the vandalism from the cops, but even so, neither of my parents had been able to drive up to see the fallout for themselves. Since Denny was the last of our relatives to be living in Wisconsin, no one else had been up to see either, and all we knew about the Fourth of July party came down to a phone call, a county sheriff’s PDF, and the phrase significant damage scribbled in a few pieces of mail. You never knew what a cop might label as significant, though; it could be understatement or overstatement. Most cops I’d known saw the world through the wrong end of a broken telescope.

On the way into St. Helens proper I considered stopping at Golden’s to pick up cleaning supplies, but I hesitated at the turnoff, then drifted by the entrance to the store, foot up over the brake. Too soon for any of that, I decided. I figured I’d survey the damage first and see what needed to be done. I was tired and not used to driving, and I wanted to take a shower. At this point I was also three steps past disgusting.

I went by, kept straight, and a few minutes later I was halfway up the hill, and a few minutes after that, I was there. The turn into Denny’s driveway came back to me like I’d done it the week before.

Looking at the garage door, I killed the engine and rolled my neck in a stretch, marveled (as far as I could marvel) at how far a person could go in one day, especially if he put his mind to it and was wired enough dollars from his parents.

I’d flown from Seattle to Chicago on an early flight and taken a cab out to Peregrine Park, where I’d had to stop to pick up the car—which, according to my father, was now my car, registered in my name. It was a Nissan Maxima with a sewing machine for an engine. I had ignored my parents’ request that I spend a night at their place and instead headed directly to Denny’s, fearing that an evening in their home would begin with an unrelenting assault on my decision-making skills and conclude with the usual half-drunk sales pitch about permanently moving back to the Midwest. I did not want to hear it.

I played with the moon roof. I looked at the clouds. I looked back at the house.

I was thirty-two now, absurdly, and as far as I could remember, the last time I had been here was twelve years ago, when I was halfway through college and drove out from Madison for a weekend visit. It was a two-story cottage-style home made of what I thought might be limestone; I’d never really noticed how nice—how strong? sturdy?—it was when I was a kid. Now it struck me as a small keep, really. Not in perfect shape by any means, but a keep nonetheless.

I glanced over my shoulder at Jeremy’s computer, still snug down behind the passenger seat. I needed a monitor to do anything with it. I probably needed to talk to Jeremy too, as I had stolen it on my way out of Washington.

I started the engine again, turned up the air conditioner, and called my sister.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’ve made it to Constantinople.”

“Welcome home,” she said. “I’m there.” Which meant Boston. “Does St. Helens look the same?” she asked. “I always wonder. Are there Moors?”

“Wonder when?”

“When I think about St. Helens.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Yes? I didn’t actually go into town. I did just go past Golden’s, though. Totally weird.”

She had worked at the grocery store too, but she and I intersected as employees for only a couple of months. She was the object of desire for many of the other bagboys, who never did much to hide their attraction to her when I was around. One kid, with whom I often faced the shelves at night, once turned to me to whisper, with grave seriousness, that he would give me upwards of fifty dollars if I brought him a pair of my sister’s panties. This kid was named Will Normal. One hundred if they were used, he said, which to me, at that age—and still, actually—made no erotic sense.

Back then there was a rumor circulating—these were the last months Haley lived in town, before she left to go to Choate—that she’d gotten involved with one of the managers, a man named Rick Hagan, who was married and in his early forties. People gave me shit about Haley and her looks all the time. I hated it. Will Normal, who I think ended up a semitruck driver in Canada, was the worst of them. His teeth had been like almonds.

When I confronted her about the Rick rumor a few nights before she left town, Haley laughed and said, “Um, no.”

“So it’s not true,” I said, watching her pack, because I wanted to know, and a part of me felt as though my sister was capable of it. I had already slashed Will Normal’s tires, but that hadn’t been about revenge so much as it was just to feel better.

“You’re asking me if I’m banging Rick, the four-hundred-year-old night manager at Golden’s, the grocery store where we work? Because some bagboy said so?”

“Yes.”

“No, Ben. I’m not having sex with Rick.” She dropped an INXS T-shirt into the suitcase. “And this is why I am leaving,” she said. “Exactly this.”

“What?”

“This,” she said, making two circles with her hands, Miyagi-like, I suppose to indicate the whole world around us and everything that was wrong with it.

Remembering this, thirty-two-year-old me leaned back into the seat and laid a hand on the wheel. “I’m sure the town is the same,” I said. “Time stands still here, like it does in a postcard. Or something. Right?”

“Or in hell.”

I guessed Haley would add some withering condemnation of the people here next, something along the lines of St. Helens being populated by the modern cultural equivalent of fourteenth-century peasantry, her usual attitude about Wisconsin, but she said nothing. I looked at a cloud of bugs floating in front of Denny’s garage, and then to the right, at the frame of an unfinished fence. It occurred to me that Denny had been the one who’d been working on it. And I knew my uncle. I knew how annoyed he would have been, had he still existed, that he’d left something partially finished.

We lingered in the silence.

“So?” I said eventually. “Anything new?”

“With John?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s back in Winchester at his parents’ house, living in the room where he grew up, masturbating into his socks.”

“That’s nice.”

“The maid’s doing his laundry and he’s golfing with his father in the afternoons. He’s finally figured out how to crawl back into his own adolescence. It turned out to be easy.”

“John masturbates into his socks?” I asked. I frowned at the garage door. It seemed so uncomfortable.

“That’s his way.”

The situation regarding John Carraway, my sister’s husband, was simple on the surface, but the whole thing became a little more complicated if you’d spent any time with him and knew him, as I did, as a pretty decent fellow. Beyond the adultery. He was a soft-spoken, sensitive, balding Episcopalian from Connecticut who enjoyed birding and had studied classics at Yale, where he and Haley first met. (He liked watching squirrels too, although it’s possible this was just a deeply weird joke Haley liked to tell that I’d never understood.) He was an industrial-machinery executive—sinecure—who traveled a great deal, and a few months before, on some Tuesday night in St. Louis, idling in his rental car on a street corner in the Landing, he had managed to get himself arrested by a police officer who was posing as a hooker.

This had happened on a bleak night in March, and for weeks afterward John tried to conceal his arrest from my sister and from his employers. I found there to be great disharmony to it all. I didn’t know what to think and I was doing my best to stay out of it. Maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe not. It was very hard to tell. For all I knew John had been doing this for years and years, possibly even running around with his penis out while chasing unsuspecting female bird enthusiasts through the woods of New England. The point is that it’s hard to know a person.

In the end it was just a piece of mail about his trial date that came while he was out of town that got him caught. Haley opened it; that’s it. She found his mug shot online and e-mailed me the link a few days after she kicked him out of the house, but his company still didn’t know, and so far my sister had stopped herself from telling John’s bosses, who were all a part of their social circle. She’d admitted to me that she’d been tempted more than once. Our parents didn’t know. They just knew about the separation.

John and Haley had three kids, two girls and a boy, and that made things, according to Haley, complicated.

I was trying to have no opinion.

“Things will be better when school starts again and it’s just me and the baby,” Haley said. “I’ll have more time to kill myself.”

“I think you should come up here for a visit.”

I did want to see her. How had she aged; how did it seem in the flesh? What had the middle of her thirties done to her? What might Haley look like walking through the downtown streets of St. Helens, where she hadn’t been in almost twenty years? Where she had once been a kind of queen? Time-related questions abounded. I had not seen her in almost five years. There were different explanations for this, but most of it was my fault.

“We’ll see.”

Denny had a couple of flower beds dappled across the front yard, and I couldn’t remember whether they’d been there before. They were just the kinds of things Denny would have insisted on putting in himself, and I imagined him at work, hauling rocks in a wheelbarrow on a Sunday morning.

From the look of the woods at the end of the yard and Denny’s brown lawn, it had been a dry summer here. I would need to put sprinklers out for the grass. Nothing alive in the flower beds anymore—instead of color, just patches of vertical twigs.

“So how are you?” said my sister.

Which meant: Now let’s talk about your fucked-up life instead.

“Good,” I said. “I made it. I guess that’s it.”

“Is it feeling like the right decision?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Which was totally true, I wasn’t just avoiding. There was more to the story than my sister needed to know, though; a lot of it had to do with Jeremy and Allie, and the game, and not feeling comfortable in my own skin out west since my release, where I had been walking the streets of Southeast like a zombie, doing very little. How do I say it without putting people off? We’ve only just met. For some time I’d been feeling as though my whole self were coated in Novocain.

In the silence, I could hear her trying to figure out what could have gone so wrong for me in Portland, post-Chestik, that I would actually agree to my father’s recent proposal. Then I heard the clinks of her pouring wine.

Haley and John lived in some part of Boston the name of which I could never recall—something that sounded like an English fiefdom—and from what I could gather, the place was large, expensive, and sterile. John’s family was already rich, and Haley still had her trust fund, and between the two of them and all that wealth, they’d made themselves even wealthier. Unlike me, my sister inherited our father’s gift for understanding the flow of money in the river of the American economy, and I suspected she and he engaged in late-night chats, both of them drinking sixteen-year Glenlivet, discussing aspects of the day’s stock exchange action that made little sense to anyone but the 1 percent. The 1 percent of the 1 percent.

On top of this intuitive savvy, Haley worked too—she did IT consulting, usually from home, under the aegis of a company she’d created. Her clients were multinational corporations I had never heard of. Sinetco, based in Singapore. Lorent. One-word corporations, the kind with no function in the eyes of a regular person, the kind that did not pay taxes, the kind that spent money bulldozing the bodies of indigenous peoples into tremendous holes in order to make room for resource exploitation. (Or so I cynically imagined. In truth, I just knew nothing. At this moment in my life, my only real areas of expertise concerned ultra-obscure strains of genetically enhanced marijuana and backgammon strategy; it made me defensive to think that my sister knew so much more than I did about the world.) What I did know: her hourly consulting rate was more than I had ever legitimately earned in a week.

“Have you found a meeting yet?” she asked.

“I got here ten minutes ago,” I said.

“And?”

“And leave me alone.”

“Why?”

“Do you think Denny has internet?”

“I think so,” she said. “We used to e-mail. Has anyone been paying his bills?”

“Mom has.”

“You have it then.”

“You and Denny used to e-mail?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“I didn’t know he even had an e-mail address.”

“Of course he did,” she said. “It’s not 1996, Benjy.”

“I thought he only used Pony Express.”

“I think we’ve moved into a time in history when all people have e-mail addresses.”

“You actually think that?”

“The Luddite thing is not as compelling as you think it is.”

“As though most of the world isn’t poor and without plumbing, let alone internet?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “I mean among people who matter.”

“Do you know how much you sometimes sound like our father?”

“Often.”

“It’s gross.”

“It’s totally on purpose.”

“You should not be proud of that.”

“Denny had a Facebook account too,” she said, ignoring this. “Didn’t you know that? When he died I put something up on his wall, just a little RIP note. It turned into a memorial. People all posted things, remembrances. You know. E-funeral. That’s what happens now. We may as well not even have bodies. We are the cloud.”

“I’ve never understood Facebook,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to e-mail them about Denny’s account. And tell them that he’s, you know… not alive.”

“What a bizarre thing to have to do.”

“But yesterday I was thinking—don’t you think it would make sense for them to give us his password and just let us into his account?”

“How come?”

“I think it would be nice to set up a kind of permanent memorial. Or so we can take the page down, eventually. Otherwise he’s going to be up there forever. It creeps me out.”

“I have no idea what that even means,” I said.

“Of course you don’t.”

“You can handle all of that. I’ll handle his house.”

I looked at his fence.

“I’ll finish the fence.”



The good news was that it turned out significant damage was not that significant. The house was not trashed—not according to my understanding of trashed, anyway, which was essentially unlimited. Yes, there were small signs. There was a coffee can full of cigarettes sitting on the kitchen table (I found that to be thoughtful, actually), a couple of broken glasses in the sink, lots of bottles, and the smell of stagnant alcohol about the place. However, but for a half-empty bottle of Colt 45 on the coffee table, on a coaster, Denny’s living room had been untouched. It really wasn’t so bad. The kids who’d had the party had kept themselves confined to the kitchen and the back porch, and I spent a few moments imagining the scene, imagining all of them around the table, laughing and drinking, not in the least bit disturbed by their surroundings, a dead man’s home, just glad to have found a place where they were safe—or so they thought. An insomniac jogger had been the one to do them in; at 3:00 a.m., he’d seen the cars in the driveway. And that’s all it ever takes, isn’t it? An intercepted e-mail, an unexpected jogger. A lost number. A rock in the wrong place. A man who can’t sleep who happens to be somewhere he usually isn’t.

I found that the sheets were a little messed up in Denny’s bedroom, but who knew whether that had been the work of the kids or just the remnants of Denny’s last morning on Earth. There could very well have been teenager sex here, I thought, surveying. Some lines I would not cross. I couldn’t decide, though, thinking about my uncle, whether he was the type to make the bed right away.

In the end I stripped it and took the heap of sheets downstairs and stuffed everything into the washing machine.

Upstairs, in the living room, I sat on the couch for a few minutes, sniffing at the air, trying to judge whether I was going to have to steam-clean the carpet, then just trying not to nod off. If I did now, there would be no chance of sleep tonight. So, lids heavy, I spied Denny’s record player in the built-in bookshelf across the room and got up to browse.

I found the CSNY right away.

I got some water, sat back down.

Stared at the wall.

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”



A little background as the song plays:

My sinecure was to guard the house. It was my job to clean it up, fix it up, and do whatever needed to be done in order to usher it onto the market and get it sold. For my services as flipper and resident, per insane agreement with my father, I was to receive 25 percent on the sale, which was a stupid percentage for the work I would be doing, but my father was aware that my whole trust was shot, and he had to have suspicions about th