“Hello?” The older man picked up on the first ring. In almost a year Johnny hadn’t called, outside of regularly scheduled check-ins.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, John. What’s wrong, son?”
Everyone at home called him John now that he was a man. He still liked Johnny.
“Nothing,” he quickly assured his father.
“You wouldn’t be calling if nothing was wrong. Now don’t make me worry. It’s not good for my health.”
Alex Brubaker’s health was just fine. At sixty, he had a body equivalent to a forty-year-old’s according to the doctor’s report after his last physical.
“Have you ever failed at something?” Johnny asked.
Silence on the other end of the line had him re-thinking the decision to call. What the hell was he doing? Flying off in the jet. Calling his daddy. Kissing his life-quest partner. You’d think he was losing his mind.
At the moment it felt like he could be.
“So, the truck’s not panning out the way you expected?” Alex said after a few long seconds, and Johnny wondered if he’d called his mother over to listen in. It wasn’t like he really cared. Either his mom heard it all firsthand, or his dad would tell her later. Th
e elder Brubakers were a team, pure and simple. He and Angel had done their best to emulate them.
“Don’t take it to heart, son. This was Angel’s dream, not yours. You did the right thing in giving it flight. That’s what matters. It’s not like you need the money. Or like she does, either.”
No, what Angel had always needed was independence. Life apart from their small circle, their parents, the kids they’d grown up with. Although Johnny had been happy right where they were, she’d needed what she’d called real life.
Not that he’d tell their parents that.
“Actually, I was thinking about franchising the truck,” he said now. “It’s making far more than I projected and the lines are so long I could easily support a second truck at the same venue. But what I had in mind was selling to individuals who want to get into the business. There’d be corporate oversight, but we’d give the owners autonomy, too, within boundaries that would protect the brand. And to be true to Angel’s goals, a percentage of the profits would have to go to local charities.”
“You don’t need my input to do any of that.”
No, he didn’t. The legalities of creating and expanding a business were all in a day’s work for him. His father’s holdings currently numbered more than two hundred ventures, with Alex as major investor of all of them. Johnny had another twelve, in his name alone. Angel’s Food Bowls, even as a national venture, would be the smallest among them.
“I’ve never failed at anything,” Johnny said, looking out into the night. Seeing ships in the harbor. Thinking about the stories his father had told of being a young naval officer aboard a ship in San Diego.
“You work hard. You give a hundred percent to whatever you do.”
“And you’re blessed with intelligence and talent, Johnny,” his mother’s voice piped in. He couldn’t help smiling at that one.
He loved his folks to death, but they were so predictable. In a totally comforting way.
“Have you ever failed at anything, Dad?”
“I’ve had ventures that didn’t pan out as well as I liked. Think of the Critchner deal.”
A fleet of container ships his father had purchased had made millions instead of the billions he’d first projected. He’d sold them off for twice as much as he’d paid for them. Johnny had handled the deal.
“I’m talking failure, Dad. As in not succeeding?”
“What’s this all about, Johnny?” his mother asked. Anne was a worrier. “What’s this talk about failure? What’s going on?”
“Sometimes you reach a point when you realize the venture isn’t serving you as well as you’d hoped, so you realize you don’t want it anymore, and you cut your losses,” his father said right after her.
Johnny wasn’t concerned about not wanting something. Exactly the opposite.
“What about wanting it and failing to make it work?”