It was the first thing of mine my brother took credit for.
It wouldn’t be the biggest.
I should tell you about my mother because she matters more than she’ll seem to at first.
My mother is not a cruel woman.
She’s the person who clears the table when Dad gets loud.
She’s the person who says don’t upset your father.
Instead of your father is wrong, she thinks peace is something you make by taking things off the table before they can be argued about.
In February of 2021, my father had a stent put in.
Minor, the cardiologist said.
Routine.
He was home in 2 days.
But something changed in the house after that.
My mother’s rule stopped being a preference and became a law.
Nothing that could stop Dad’s heart.
And my father, for his part, decided he was done looking at numbers.
I don’t look at the books anymore, he told the family that spring.
That’s what a son and a sister are for.
The sister is my aunt Lorraine.
She’s my father’s younger sister, four years behind him, and she’s kept the books for Night Landscape since 2006.
He pays her a little.
Not enough.
After her divorce in 2019, she moved into the casita behind my parents’ house, and the arrangement became something nobody talked about.
She lived on my father’s land and worked on my father’s money.
And she never once in all the years I knew her said a word against him.
She keeps a ledger.
A real one.
Clothbound.
Green with a spine that’s gone soft from being opened.
She enters everything by hand before it ever touches the computer.
Computers forget, she told me once.
Paper doesn’t.
I didn’t know it then, but my aunt had already started writing my name in that book.
Just my initials.
And the first time she wrote them, I was 20 years old and I had no idea it was happening.
Here’s the last thing you need before we get to 2016.
I was 17, a senior in high school, and I got into Arizona State for supply chain management.
I know what that sounds like.
It sounds like nothing.
Supply chain.
It’s the study of how things get from one place to another without falling apart.
I loved it the way some kids love music.
It was the spreadsheet but bigger.
I put the acceptance letter on the refrigerator.
My father looked at it for a second and said, “Good.”
Then he turned to Preston and asked how the Sanderson bid was going that night.
On his way to bed, he stopped in my doorway and patted the frame.
You’ll be fine, Emmy.
You always are.
He meant it as a compliment.
I took it as one for a long time.
My brother needed a push.
I never did.
That was the whole difference between us as far as my father was concerned.
One kid you had to worry about and one kid you didn’t.
He was right.
I was fine.
2 years later, he’d used that against me.
In the spring of 2015, my brother graduated from ASU finally, and my father gave him a business.
Not the landscaping company.
Not yet.
A side company.
Night Illumination.
Landscape lighting.
The kind of high-end path lights and uplighting that rich people in North Scottsdale pay a fortune for.
Dad put up the seed money, vouched for Preston with three lighting vendors on the strength of the Night name, and had that wooden sign made.
The gold letters cost $400.
Preston was 22.
He ran it for 9 months.
I’ll spare you the details because Preston would, and it’s his story.
It’s enough to say that by February of 2016, the company was gone and what was left was $58,000 in vendor invoices.
All of them with the Night name on them.
My father took that personally.
Not the failure.
The name.
The Night name doesn’t stiff a vendor, he said.
Not while I’m alive.
He said it at the kitchen table.
I was home for the weekend.
20 years old.
Halfway through my sophomore year.
Preston was sitting across from me, looking at his hands.
My mother was clearing dishes that were already clean.
$58,000.
My father had exactly one place he could find that fast.
It took him 3 weeks to ask me.
He called me back for dinner in March.
That should have told me something because my father doesn’t do dinners.
He does Sundays.
And he does birthdays.
And that’s it.
But he asked me to drive up on a Wednesday and my mother made pot roast and nobody looked at me for the first 20 minutes.
Then he set his fork down.
