About books: Love of My Life

 

Many of us like to engage in “what if.” What if someone who was killed in a car crash had decided to wait to leave? What if the alarm hadn’t gone off? What if you’d decided to stop in to a particular restaurant, and the person you needed to make your career a success was there?

What if someone else told the story of your life as they knew it?

Tom Morton is a successful businessman. He has an attractive, successful wife and a teenage daughter who has never given her parents any trouble.

What a change from his formative years!

Tom was the third of three sons. The eldest was trouble from the moment he was born, and the family mainly feels the less said about him, the better. The second son was mentally challenged, and although he ended up doing well enough given his disadvantages, he was not what his parents expected.

So, when Tom came along, was intelligent, and didn’t give anyone a hard time, he was the shining star of the family. Everything seemed to come easily to him, and his parents didn’t look too hard to see if he was exactly what they thought. His mother certainly wouldn’t have listened to anything against her “good” son.

Everything seemed to be going right for him, and it looked like he was headed for a big advance in his career. His boss even brought him along for a meeting with another company they were going to merge with.

The meeting was in the World Trade Center. The date was September 11, 2001.

The story is told by four different women: his teenage daughter, whose last words to him the night before were, “I hate you!” because he refused to let her date someone he and her mother thought was too old for her; his wife, who felt so blessed to be married to such a wonderful man; his mother, whose world revolved around him; and Marty, a friend of his since childhood, who had reconnected with him just before he married, and had stayed in touch, even though they had long ago realized they would not be a good match.

Many people were saved on 9/11 because of “what ifs.” One man was saved because his daughter was ill, and he decided to work from home. A woman’s lived because she couldn’t decide what to wear, and missed her usual train. Another went to work early that day, and left the building a few minutes before the planes hit to go get coffee at a local shop.

The what ifs of this story come because he was never able to contact anyone to let them know whether or not he was all right. His boss managed a call to his wife just before the cell towers came down. He lost the call just as he was about to give her a message about Tom. Tom had left his phone home that day.

What if his boss was about to say Tom wasn’t with him for some reason? What if he’d gone for coffee and was about to return as the jets hit? What if he was on his way up in the elevator and it had just reached the point of the crash, killing him immediately?

The first three women had no way of knowing what became of Tom. All they knew was that he was presumed dead. His wallet was all that was recovered, with the remains of a few burnt bills.

Marty was the  only one who might have known, but whatever she knew, she never told the others.

I’ve always been fascinated by what if ideas. This is a story of what if, and how it affects the lives of four women. It’s a story Tom couldn’t tell because of the events of 9/11.