Beautiful Lies Read Online Free Page A

autoworkers, my father and Max lived in the same suburb for eighteen years. While my father came from a solid home, my grandparents hardworking blue-collar people, Max’s father was an alcoholic and a physically abusive man. One night when Max was sixteen, his father’s violence turned deadly. Max’s father beat his mother into a coma from which she never awoke. Rather than let him become a ward of the state, my grandparents took Max in and somehow managed to help both him and my father through college.
    My father went on to medical school and later became the pediatrician that he is to this day. Max went into real estate and became one of the biggest developers on the East Coast. He never stopped trying to pay back my father and my grandparents. Because my grandparents flat out refused a cash payback, he lavished them and us with Caribbean cruises and outrageous birthday gifts, from bicycles to new cars. Naturally, we adored him. He never married and, without children, treated my brother, Ace, and me like we were his own.
    Everyone always thought of him as a happy man, rarely seen without a smile on his face, always ready with a belly laugh. But even as a child, I remember sensing a deep sadness in him. I remember looking into his blue eyes and seeing grief edging his lashes, pulling down at the corner of his mouth. I remember how he’d glaze over, lost in thought, when he thought no one was looking. And I remember the way he always looked at my mother, Grace, as if she were a glittering prize that had been awarded to someone else.
    Uncle Max was an alcoholic, but because he was a happy drunk, no one seemed to mind. The Christmas Eve before last, after leaving my parents’ house, where we’d all spent the evening together, he never returned to his home. He’d apparently stopped off at a bar after leaving us, then several hours later got into his black Mercedes sedan and proceeded to drive off a bridge and into the frigid water below. By accident or design, we’ll never know, though a lack of skid marks indicated that there was no last-second slamming of the brakes. It was icy that night. That might have been it, the rubber of the tires unable to find purchase on the slick road. Or perhaps he passed out at the wheel, never saw it coming. We prefer to think of it as an accident, since the alternative would haunt us all.
    As a family, we were bereft, but my father most of all; he’d lost the person with whom he’d shared most of his life. It still didn’t feel quite right to celebrate Christmas Eve, a night we’d always shared with Max and the night we lost him.
    In his will, he’d left most of his money to my parents, and to the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation. He’d created this foundation long before I was born, and it existed to fund myriad charities that offered assistance and shelter to battered women and abused children. But he also left a large sum of money to me and my brother, Ace. With the help of an accountant, my share of the money had been solidly invested. As a result, I had the freedom I so cherished. My brother, on the other hand, injected that money into his veins. Or so I assumed. But that’s something else.
    I wasn’t thinking about any of this that morning. I was just looking forward to a day that I owned, where I could do anything I wanted. I showered, blew-dry my hair, pulled on my four-year-old Levi’s, as faded and soft as memory, a bright red Tommy Hil-figer sweatshirt, Nikes, and a Yankees cap, and headed out the door. If I had known, I would have paused at the door to say good-bye to a perfectly lovely existence, an enviably simple, comfortable, happy life. Not perfect, of course. But pretty close, comparatively speaking.
    In the hallway I tried to be as quiet as possible. I strongly suspected Victoria, my elderly neighbor, of waiting by her door to hear when I entered and left my apartment. The knowledge of this caused me to come and go quietly. Not that I disliked her. It was only