Chapter 3 - My Unfortunate Life
Alex
I can say that there have been many times in my life when I have felt unfortunate.
First, I never met my mother. My father told me that she had left us when she went to meet a rich guy. That was the first time I promised myself that I would become a rich man so that I would never be abandoned. After that, my father married a different woman. She scolded me when he wasn't home and called me a liar, when I decided telling him.
Then my father signed up to fight in a war.
His words, “Alex, this will secure my retirement”, still echo in my head. I wanted to cry when he left, but he complained, “Hey, men don't cry.”
When my father came back as a veteran of the war, he was not the same man that I had known. He was never the nicest person, but before the war I felt his human warmth and how much he cared for me and my stepmother. But now he was a man who had never healed from the horrific scenes he had seen. He came back from the war violent, drunk, addicted to medical drugs mixed with vodka and cigarettes. His wife left him. He died young, leaving a young, orphaned son with nothing but a house and meager savings.
When he dies, I started feeling miserable. I was young and was studying at a college for business administration. I had to work very hard to get where I am. I had to clean the floors of hotels, I had to work part time at the college to get a scholarship. Until the day I started working as a janitor at a casino in town.
One evening, while I was cleaning up the office of my boss - an office that he rarely visited - I found a folder on the floor. My curiosity got the best of me, and I ended up opening the folder. It held accounting documents for the casino. At that moment, I forgot that I was just a janitor, and I sat down at the boss's desk and started to recalculate the numbers. It was a small miscalculation that could lead to a substantial loss of income.
"Mr. Montreal," I got his attention in the morning of the next day.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Alex, I'm just a janitor."
"I have no raise to give you, now get the hell out of here!"
"It's not about that. It's about those documents you're holding."
He glanced at me sideways.
"What do you know about them? They're confidential!"
I explained to him how things had gone that previous day.
"I should fire you for this! But..." he analyzed the situation, "I have a feeling that there is some kind of embezzlement in these calculations! If you can prove it, I can forgive your audacity. If you can't, you will not only be fired. You will face even harsher consequences!"
"I can prove it and even name the person if you give me the documents from the past few months!" It was at that moment that I had to be confident.
And fortunately, I was right. I risked a great deal but ended up being very well rewarded.
So, I started helping Mr. Montreal in running his businesses, which consisted of much more than just a casino. He owned casinos, clubs, hotels, resorts, and restaurants. It was a lot of work, but I excelled at what I was doing, making connections with other entrepreneurs, strengthening bonds, and taking advantage of every business opportunity that came my way. I was earning more and more of that old man's trust, and I was being promoted to higher and higher positions, surpassing people who had been working with him for years.
The happiest moment in my life was when I fell in love for the first time. I had reached a high position in the business and had a considerable bank account when Vick came into my life. She was Mr. Montreal's daughter and had been living with her mother in Europe until that point. However, she wanted to take over the management of her father's business and moved back to the United States. It was love at first sight.
She was an incredibly intelligent woman and a kind woman in equal measure. She was also beautiful and ambitious. But her ambition wasn't to be more than anyone else, or to humiliate anyone, or to take advantage of anyone. She wanted to expand her father's empire, all within the law, without taking advantage of anyone. Her ambitions and mine were quite similar. So much so that she fell in love with me. We got married, and she asked me to take her family name as my own, which was a break from the social norms in which it is customary for women to take the surname of their husbands. I did it without hesitation. Being her husband was the highest accomplishment I could achieve in life.
Our passion for each other was intense, and we lived all that it had to offer. We traveled; we made plans. We threw a big wedding party and had an amazing honeymoon. Vick even made me go and meet my father's family. He had never even introduced me to them! And seemingly just overnight, I not only had a wife and a father-in-law, but I also had a grandmother, uncles, and cousins.
But then I lost her to a serious illness, three years after her father died of the same disease. Vick was pregnant with Laurie when she found out that she was suffering from leukemia.
She told me: "I'm not going to have the treatment," with such determination in her eyes. It was clear to me that I would have no influence on her decision. “Promise me that you're going to love Laurie more than anything else, Alex!”
“Of course, I will. She's going to be my piece of you in the world.”
I couldn’t be truly happy when my daughter was born, because a few days later, her mother left us. Although I loved Laurie with all my heart, I felt miserable because I couldn't have everything at the same time. Life taught me that early on.