“You should come to St. Bart's this winter,” Adam urged Gray. He always flew there to meet Charlie on the boat for a week or two over New Year's. Gray always said that a month on the boat in the summer was enough for him, and they all knew why he hated the Caribbean. It had too many bad memories for him.
“Maybe sometime I will,” Gray said vaguely. Charlie said he hoped he would.
The last night was always nostalgic, they hated to leave each other and go back to real life. Adam was meeting Amanda and Jacob for a week in London, and taking them to Paris for a weekend, and staying at the Ritz. It would be a gentle transition for him after the luxuries of the
The morning they left, Gray and Adam drove to the airport together in a limo the purser had rented for them. Charlie stood on the aft deck and waved, and was sad when they were gone. They were his closest friends, and both good men. For all their vagaries and hang-ups, Adam's comments about women, and weakness for very young ones, Charlie knew they were decent people and cared a great deal about him, as he did about them. He would have done anything for them, and he knew they would for him too. They were the Three Musketeers, through thick and thin.
Adam called Charlie from London, to thank him for a fantastic trip, and the next day Gray sent him an e-mail saying the same thing. The best ever, they all agreed. It was hard to imagine, but their trips got better every year. They met terrific people, went to wonderful places, and enjoyed each other more with each passing year. It made Charlie feel sometimes that life wouldn't be so bad if he never met the right woman. If that happened, at least he had two remarkable men as friends. Life could be worse.
He spent his last two weeks on the boat doing business by computer, setting up meetings for his return, and making a list of things he wanted the captain to attend to to maintain the boat. In November, they'd be making the crossing to the Caribbean, and Charlie would have loved to be on it. He found it relaxing and peaceful to do so, but he had too much going on this year. The foundation had given nearly a million dollars to a new children's shelter, and he wanted to be around to see how it was being spent. When he finally left the boat in the third week of September, he was ready. He wanted to see friends, and get to his office. He had been gone for nearly three months. It was time to go home, whatever that meant. To him, it meant an empty apartment, an office where he upheld his family's traditions, sitting on the boards and committees he served on, and spending time with friends, going to dinner parties or cultural events. It never meant a person he could come home to, someone waiting for him, or to share his life with. It was beginning to seem less and less likely that he would ever find that person, but even if he didn't, he still had to go home. There was nowhere else to go. He couldn't hide from reality forever, sitting on his boat. And there were always Gray and Adam in New York. He was going to call them as soon as he got home, and see if they wanted to go out for dinner somewhere. They were in fact someone to go home to, and the brothers he had come to love. He was grateful he had them.
The flight to New York was uneventful, and unlike Adam, Charlie flew commercial. It had never seemed worthwhile to him to buy a plane. But Adam traveled more than he did, and it made sense to him. Charlie knew, from an itinerary Adam's secretary had sent him, that he was flying back to New York that night too. He had been in Las Vegas for an entire week, after his travels in Europe with his kids. He'd had an e-mail from Adam himself too, asking Charlie if he wanted to go to a concert with him the following week. It was one of those megaevents that Charlie loved and Gray said he hated, and it sounded like fun to him, so he had e-mailed back that he would join him. Adam wrote back that he was pleased.
