Chapter 16: Sins of the Father

The following evening Victor decided to invite his long-lost son to dinner at a restaurant located in the Downtown area. Gable Tower could be seen in the background through a window, so Victor hadn't gone too far from his office. At this restaurant, only the richest could afford to eat off the menu. The ambience of the restaurant was quite relaxing and friendly with soothing music and the pleasant smell of scrumptious meals freshly prepared.

His son was strikingly handsome with curly blond hair and a pair of captivating blue eyes. A tiny brown mole was just above his lips which were a soft pink. It is important to recognise just how similar he was in description to the mysterious blond guy seen in Essen's futuristic vision of the end of the world. He could very well be him, one of the two persons (with Jade seemingly being the other) destined to join Essen, David and Ezra in their fight to prevent said vision from coming to past.

They sat awkwardly quiet around the dining table with Victor eating and Terry staring up in the ceiling at the chandeliers.

"You haven't touched your lobsters," Victor noticed. "If you don't like I can order something else off the menu?"

"No, they're fine," Terry replied. "It's just that I haven't been to anywhere as fancy as this before."

Victor stopped eating when he heard this. He couldn't believe his ears. His son had never been to anywhere 'fancy' before. "Haven't you've been getting the cheques I sent you," he then enquired.

"Mom never got around to cash any of them. She was too proud."

"So that's why you're here. You need money."

Terry sighed before asking, "Is that why you think I'm here because I need your money?"

"You tell me, Terrence. Why are you here?"

"Last week was mom's funeral. Yeah, I bet you didn't know that. I've been sending you emails on top of emails for over a year now regarding her deteriorating health, even up to her last day on this earth. Did you even bother to read any of them?"

"I did as a matter of fact. I'm sorry to hear she has passed away now, but come on, Terrence, how would it look if I had shown up after all these years?"

"I don't know. But I'm sure she would have wanted you there," he frowned.

"I do not know if she told you this, but your mother and I---"

"Had an agreement? Oh, yeah. I've heard about that 'agreement'. She was to keep the illegitimate son she had with the millionaire heir a secret. She was to be given monthly cheques for her commitment to the agreement and the bastard she bore was to be given a new surname, because he was unfit...no...unworthy of the Gable last name."

"It's not my fault. Your mother told me she had an abortion. I only found out you existed years later. By then your mother and I had grown apart. "

"You know for years I thought you were ashamed of me. That maybe I was ugly or undesirable. Now that we've met I can see that you are a coward."

"Your mother made her decision."

"It's because of her decisions that I'm alive today!" Terry affirmed making a fist with his hand.

Victor saw it and resultantly decided to take a softer approach with him.

"Terrence, I know you're angry with me. You have all the right to be. The truth is I'm angry with myself too. Time and time again I've proven myself to be a bad judge of character. I've made a lot of bad decisions throughout my life, the biggest was when I turned my back on your mother. Now you're like what, twenty-one?"

"I turned thirty last month," Terry corrected with a frowned look.

"My point is, I'm not your ideal father-figure. I know that. I haven't played any part in your life whilst you were growing up. I want that to change. I want to be a part of your life. Let me make things right between us and end this foolish agreement my parents started."

"So are you expecting me to just welcome you into my life with arms wide open, after thirty years of acting like I didn't exist?"

"No. That is not what I'm asking of you. I know it will take time. I know it will take a lot of trials and errors. But I'm willing to try if you are. I've been on this throne for far too long by myself. It's high time, Terrence, you took your rightful place by my side as a Gable...as my son. What do you say to that? Will you try with me to make this work? Please?"

Terry's eyes glistened after hearing these words coming out of Victor's mouth. He saw that his father meant it as it was marked by the tears in his eyes. He was still angry with him, but in his heart, all he truly longed for was for a reconciliation with his father and now the opportunity was right before him. "I would love that," he agreed, trying not to sound too excited.

"Excellent," Victor then replied with an unexpected cough. "Forgive me. My throat feels a little dry."

So he drank some water. Suddenly, he coughed again; and again; and again. The tables across from them then began to give them scornful glances.

"Do you need some more water?" Terry offered, getting ready to pour him some from a silver-coloured water pitcher that was already placed on the dining table for them.

"I'm fine," Victor reassured him just before he coughed one last time. This time he coughed up a little blood which he didn't know had stained the cream-coloured tablecloth in front of him red, until later. Terry had seen it long before he did, but Victor when he saw it, acted like it was nothing and quickly used his napkin to cover it. "It's time to go," Victor alerted, grabbing his walking cane and proceeding to leave the table. Terry followed him.

Reaching outside, they entered the gold limousine that was already waiting on them. The car subsequently drove off some minutes later. Inside Victor swallowed two pills while Terry looked at him with question marks all over his face.

"I know you're hoping for some answers for what you saw inside there, but the short version of it is that I'm dying."

"What?" His son asked. "Are you kidding me?"

"No. No. To say I'm dead serious would be eliciting a pun and I'm not joking. My doctor...former doctor that is, told me this morning that I have cancer; the worst kind he said. The kind you don't come back from."

"Predictable," Terry remarked, shaking his head.

"What is?"

"I've only just met you in a couple of minutes and now you're telling me you're dying. I'm like cursed or some shit. People just keep dying around me."

"This is not your fault. If it's anyone's fault, it's God's. He allows innocent people to die every day. He allowed your mother to die. He gave me these faulty genes, condemning me to a life of pain and suffering. Millions of dollars wasted in healthcare over the years and for what? To have life show me the middle finger one last time. You know I missed out a lot too while growing up. I didn't go to proms; I didn't have any friends or get in trouble as most teenagers would at that age. No siree. I was too sick and weak. I was always so sick. Your mother, she was the best thing that had ever happened to me in my late twenties. She showed me a different side to life. The part worth living for."

"Then why did you abandoned her...abandoned us?"

"Gable wasn't always my family's name. We changed it from Dumas. In the early nineteen hundreds, the Dumas were avid masons and all the wealth they had amassed were done through consorting with witches and demons. Back then people were overly religious and word got out about my family's extra curriculum activities. It brought shame to the name Dumas. So we went into hiding and changed our name to Gable. Given time people simply forgot and moved on with their lives. My parents, however, kept the practice going. They disapproved of me falling in love with your mother who was a Jew. I hated them for that and when they finally passed away I was sure the practice would have died with them. But I was wrong. My sickness blinded me and I too fell in the same snare. I did unspeakable things to people. Things that are unforgivable, even in death. I lost who I was. Your mother was the light and I became the darkness. Our conflicting beliefs ultimately tore us apart."

"So that is why she left and it wasn't necessarily because your parents forced her to?"

"Yes," Victor then reached out and held onto his shoulder. "Terrence, what I did, I did to save my life; to preserve my legacy which will now be yours in short order. You are our family's only future. Make a better world than we did."

Suddenly, the driver stopped the car abruptly in the middle of a deserted intersection and for no apparent reason got out and ran.

Terry looking out through the tinted glass with his mouth wide open, saw the driver as he made his way across another street. "Did your driver just bailed out on us?"

"What are you talking about?" Victor replied, watching Terry as he tried to open the door to his right, but it was locked. He then slid across the white leather seat to try the other one on his left, but it didn't open either.

"Is this some kind of sick joke?"

"Terrence, what is the matter?"

"That asshead locked us in here," Terry said, hitting and getting frustrated at the doors because they wouldn't open.

Victor at first still didn't understand what was going on. Then quickly he called back to memory the altercation he had with the other elders of The Family this morning; how he threatened them that he was leaving and Carlos following up with the remark, telling him that he couldn't leave The Family. That no one could. It didn't take too long for Victor to put two and two together and realize that his life and his son's were in danger. "We need to get out of here, now!" He fretted, but it was too late. In a fraction of a second after he had said this, a trailer truck out of nowhere, rammed right into the side of the limousine with great speed and force, sending it rolling across the wide-open intersection several times before it slammed to a standstill into a metal traffic light pole which then toppled over on the car. At this point the car had flipped over on its roof, the doors had fallen off and both Victor and Terry could be seen lying unresponsive with blood, broken glass and debris all over them.