What Grandmother Left
\nLet me tell you what actually happened, because the version that gets remembered in a family is never quite the same as the version that occurred, and I have learned, in the months since Miami, to care about the accurate version.<\/p>\n
My name is Emily Parker and I am thirty two years old and I have spent most of those years being the wrong daughter in a family that did not always acknowledge it had two.<\/p>\n
My grandmother\u2019s name was Ruth Eleanor Parker, and she was eighty one when she died, and she had built the Vesta Hospitality Group from a single bed-and-breakfast in Savannah, Georgia in 1972 with my grandfather Thomas, and the company now held eleven full-service hotels along the Eastern Seaboard and in South Florida and Hawaii. She had done this through the kind of sustained intelligence and absolute refusal to be underestimated that I have spent my whole life trying to understand and replicate in some smaller form.<\/p>\n
My father, Richard, had worked in the business for thirty years and had, over that time, through a combination of legal maneuvering and the specific advantage that accrues to men who are comfortable with paperwork when the women around them are not, acquired the operating management of the company while my grandmother retained her majority shareholding. This arrangement had never entirely satisfied either of them and had been the source of a friction between them that my father described as normal business disagreement and that my grandmother described, in her private moments with me, as a forty year argument about whose company it actually was.<\/p>\n
She knew whose company it was.<\/p>\n
She had never stopped knowing.<\/p>\n
She had also spent the last five years of her life making sure that when she was gone, the company went to the right person.<\/p>\n
I had been her right person.<\/p>\n
I want to be clear about why, not because I need to justify it to you but because I have spent months being asked to justify it to everyone else and I am tired of the version where it is a mystery. I am the right person because I paid attention. For twenty years, every time my parents brought me to family events at Vesta properties and everyone in my family treated the hotels as a backdrop for the social performance of being wealthy, I was the person walking the service corridors and asking the kitchen staff about their workflow and sitting with my grandmother in her office watching her review occupancy projections. She taught me because I asked. She gave me the shares because I understood what they meant, not in the financial sense, though the financial sense is also real, but in the sense of what my grandfather had built and what she had spent fifty years growing.<\/p>\n
My father understood the company as a vehicle.<\/p>\n
I understood it as a thing.<\/p>\n
She gave it to the person who understood it as a thing.<\/p>\n
The legal transfer finalized on the morning of the Miami trip, which was not a coincidence. My grandmother\u2019s estate attorney, a meticulous woman named Claudia Reyes, had structured the timeline specifically so that the shares transferred on a date I could confirm before a trip that my grandmother had known about and that she had, I believe, anticipated correctly.<\/p>\n
She knew my family.<\/p>\n
She knew what my family would do.<\/p>\n
She had a gift for anticipating exactly which people would underestimate exactly which other people, and she had built the entire structure of her estate around that gift.<\/p>\n
In the lobby of the Vesta Grand Hotel in Miami, I stood with my carry-on and my canceled reservation and my mother\u2019s smirk and I thought about my grandmother, who had stood in this same lobby decades earlier and had known every room rate and every occupancy number and had greeted every manager by name.<\/p>\n
I took out my phone.<\/p>\n
I called Margaret.<\/p>\n
Margaret Kim is the Vesta Hospitality Group\u2019s regional director for South Florida and has been with the company for seventeen years. She had worked directly for my grandmother for the first twelve of those years and understood, better than most people in the organization, what the transfer of shares meant in practice.<\/p>\n
I had called her from the airport, before we landed, to let her know the transfer had finalized. She had said, in her particular tone of quiet competence, that she understood and that she would await instructions.<\/p>\n
\u201cMargaret,\u201d I said, \u201cthis is Emily Parker. Please cancel all executive family privileges attached to Richard Parker\u2019s account. Effective immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n
My mother laughed.<\/p>\n
The laugh was the specific one she used when she considered something beneath the level of serious response. It was a small, dismissive sound that she had been deploying since I was approximately seven years old.<\/p>\n
She stopped laughing when Margaret said, loudly enough that the hotel lobby acoustic carried it: \u201cOf course, Ms. Parker. Confirmed. Shall I also notify the other Vesta properties?\u201d<\/p>\n
I had not asked her to notify the other properties. Margaret had offered this because Margaret understood the full scope of what we were doing and was, in her professional capacity, being thorough.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said. \u201cAll properties.\u201d<\/p>\n
I put the phone in my pocket.<\/p>\n
I turned to the front desk clerk, a young woman named Sonia whose name tag I had registered when I arrived and who had the expression of someone who has been watching a situation develop and is waiting to understand what her role in it is going to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cSonia,\u201d I said, \u201ccould you check what rooms are available for a single occupancy booking tonight? My original reservation was canceled.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sonia\u2019s fingers moved to her keyboard.<\/p>\n
Behind me, I heard my father say something to my mother in the low tone he used when he was computing a situation rather than reacting to it. My father was a financial man. He was good at calculations. He was beginning to do one now.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have several options available,\u201d Sonia said. \u201cWe have a standard room on the fourteenth floor, a junior suite on the seventeenth, or\u2014\u201d She paused. \u201cThe presidential suite on the twenty-first floor is now available as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
My mother, behind me, made a sound.<\/p>\n
I turned.<\/p>\n
She was looking at her phone.<\/p>\n
Brandon was looking at his phone.<\/p>\n
Madison had the expression of someone who has received unexpected information and is not yet sure what to do with it.<\/p>\n
I turned back to Sonia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take the junior suite,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
This is the detail that I think matters, and that the version people tell each other tends to get wrong: I did not take the presidential suite to make a point. I took the junior suite because it was what I needed for one person and because I had been raised by a woman who believed that conspicuous consumption was its own kind of vulgarity, and who had never, in all the years I had known her, used more hotel room than she actually needed.<\/p>\n
The presidential suite was canceled because it was attached to my father\u2019s executive family account and the executive family privileges no longer applied. That was an administrative fact. What I did with my own room was my own choice, and I chose the junior suite because it would have a good bed and a view and would be sufficient.<\/p>\n
Sonia ran my card.<\/p>\n
She handed me my key.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs there anything else I can help you with, Ms. Parker?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said. \u201cCould you let the housekeeping manager know I\u2019d appreciate connecting with her tomorrow morning? I\u2019d like a brief orientation to the property.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sonia\u2019s expression completed its adjustment.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I picked up my carry-on.<\/p>\n
I turned to face my family.<\/p>\n
My mother had gone through several expressions since Margaret\u2019s response and had arrived at the one she deployed when she was calculating how to position a situation. It was the expression she used in board meetings, which I knew because I had attended some of them and had sat in the chair near the back that she did not register as occupied.<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s face was still.<\/p>\n
Madison was looking at her phone.<\/p>\n
Brandon, who I had met twice before this weekend and who struck me as someone who had entered this family with enthusiasm and was now beginning to understand what he had entered, was looking at Madison.<\/p>\n
\u201cRichard,\u201d my father said.<\/p>\n
He was talking to himself. Checking something.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe access is suspended,\u201d Madison said. She showed him the screen. \u201cIt says account access suspended for review.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe review is the transfer,\u201d I said. \u201cThe shares transferred this morning. The executive family account was linked to the company\u2019s operating management, which was my grandmother\u2019s to assign. She assigned it differently.\u201d<\/p>\n
My father looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you do?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI received the shares,\u201d I said. \u201cThis morning. The legal transfer finalized at nine forty two Eastern time. Claudia Reyes can confirm the details if you\u2019d like to call her.\u201d<\/p>\n
A pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe controlling shares,\u201d my father said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom your grandmother\u2019s estate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe transferred the controlling shares to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
My mother said, \u201cThat\u2019s not possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe transfer documents are filed with the appropriate state and federal entities,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m happy to email you the confirmation. I expected you\u2019d have received something from Claudia\u2019s office, but perhaps the communication was delayed.\u201d<\/p>\n
It had not been delayed. Claudia had sent the notification to my father\u2019s email at nine forty five. He had not checked it because we had been on the plane.<\/p>\n
He checked it now.<\/p>\n
My mother looked at his screen.<\/p>\n
Something happened in her face. It was not the expression I had been expecting. I had been expecting the confrontation, the reassertion, the various escalations she deployed when challenged. What I got instead was something simpler and, in its way, more honest: the expression of a person who has understood something and is not yet ready to respond to it but cannot pretend they haven\u2019t understood it.<\/p>\n
She had smirked an hour ago because she thought she had won something.<\/p>\n
She understood now that the game had been much larger than she thought, and that she had not been winning it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe suite,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe presidential suite was attached to the executive family privileges,\u201d I said. \u201cThose privileges were extended by my grandmother to the family as a courtesy. The courtesy does not transfer with the shares. It would have lapsed eventually regardless. The timing was what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was true.<\/p>\n
I had not planned the timing of the suite cancellation to coincide with the lobby moment. The lobby moment had created the context in which the phone call made sense. But the cancellation of the executive family account was going to happen on this day regardless, because the shares had transferred on this day, and the administrative consequence of that transfer was the review of all accounts associated with the previous controlling holder\u2019s family access.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could reinstate it,\u201d Madison said.<\/p>\n
She said this to me directly, which was the first time she had addressed me directly since we landed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you going to?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I thought about the conversation in the lobby. About the canceled reservation and the suggestion of the airport and my mother\u2019s voice saying figure it out and my father not looking at me while he adjusted his watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of today,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday is part of it,\u201d I said. \u201cBut this isn\u2019t primarily about today. This is about what my grandmother wanted for the company and what the company needs to be able to do clearly and without confusion about whose decisions matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re punishing us,\u201d my mother said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m administering an estate,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
I picked up my carry-on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll see you at dinner,\u201d I said. \u201cIf you\u2019re staying for the weekend. There\u2019s a good restaurant on the fourteenth floor. I\u2019ve heard the fish is excellent.\u201d<\/p>\n
I went to the elevator.<\/p>\n
I did not look back.<\/p>\n
My room was on the seventeenth floor and the view was exactly what I had hoped: the bay, the late afternoon light on the water, the specific quality of Miami from above that I had seen once before on a visit with my grandmother when I was nineteen and that I had been carrying since as a shorthand for what it felt like to be somewhere good.<\/p>\n
I sat on the edge of the bed.<\/p>\n
I called Claudia.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did it go?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout how she expected it to go,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhich \u2018she\u2019?\u201d Claudia said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandmother,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was a very precise woman,\u201d Claudia said. \u201cShe thought about the Miami timing for some time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs there anything you need from me immediately?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot immediately,\u201d I said. \u201cI want to connect with Margaret tomorrow and do a proper walkthrough of the property. And I\u2019d like to schedule a board call for early next week to introduce myself in the operational context.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll arrange both,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I hung up.<\/p>\n
I sat for a while looking at the water.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had a phrase she used when she was talking about what it meant to run a hospitality company. She said that a hotel was the only business where every transaction began with a question: what do you need, and how can we help you get it? She said that the answer to that question, done correctly, was the whole of the work.<\/p>\n
I had been thinking about that phrase all day.<\/p>\n
I ordered room service. I did not order extravagantly: a salad, a piece of fish, a glass of wine. I ate at the table by the window with the bay going dark outside and the lights coming on across the water and I thought about what came next.<\/p>\n
What came next was complicated and I was not going to understand all of it tonight.<\/p>\n
But I had time.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had spent fifty years building this.<\/p>\n
I was thirty two.<\/p>\n
I had time.<\/p>\n
My father knocked on my door at seven.<\/p>\n
I had expected this. My father was not a person who absorbed a large piece of information and let it sit overnight without responding. He was a man of action, or what he considered action: the managed confrontation, the negotiated repositioning, the conversation where he established the new frame before the other person had finished processing the old one.<\/p>\n
I had watched him do this my whole life.<\/p>\n
I opened the door.<\/p>\n
He was alone. This was unusual. My father generally preferred an audience for difficult conversations. The absence of my mother and Madison told me something about his read of the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cMay I come in?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He came in. He looked at the room with the quick professional assessment of a man who has spent decades in hotels and knows what the room rate corresponds to. He was calculating.<\/p>\n
He sat in the chair by the table.<\/p>\n
I sat on the edge of the bed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to understand,\u201d he said, \u201cexactly what the legal situation is.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was my father\u2019s version of conversation: the immediate establishment of terms.<\/p>\n
\u201cClaudia\u2019s office sent the documentation,\u201d I said. \u201cI can forward it if you didn\u2019t receive it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI received it,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to understand what your intentions are.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy intentions are to run the company according to what my grandmother wanted,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour grandmother was not entirely rational in her final years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
I had been expecting this.<\/p>\n
\u201cClaudia will confirm that the transfer documents meet all legal standards for competency and free execution,\u201d I said. \u201cMy grandmother was assessed by two independent physicians in the year before her death. Both found her fully competent. This was arranged specifically because your objection was anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n
His jaw tightened.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe anticipated it?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had been watching you work for thirty years,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
A pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe never told me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me,\u201d I said. \u201cShe didn\u2019t tell you because the relevant conversation was between her and me.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the truest thing I had said to my father in years, and the fact that it was also the hardest thing told me something about the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to discuss your intentions for my role in the company,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour contract runs through the end of next year,\u201d I said. \u201cIt will be honored. After that, I\u2019ll be conducting a review of the executive structure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not\u2014\u201d He stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe board will be involved in the review,\u201d I said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t personal. This is how the company transitions when controlling interest changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re going to remove me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to conduct a review,\u201d I said. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the outcome of that review will be. I haven\u2019t run this company before. I\u2019m thirty two years old and I have a great deal to learn and I am going to take the time to learn it before I make permanent decisions about the executive structure.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou mean that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not just moving me out immediately,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know yet what the right structure is,\u201d I said. \u201cI know what the company needs to be able to do. I know what my grandmother wanted for it. I\u2019m going to spend time understanding the current operations before I make structural decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was quiet.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe should have prepared you,\u201d he said. \u201cMore formally. If this was her plan, she should have brought you in earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe brought me in when she brought me in,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019ve been paying attention since I was a teenager.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI should have,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
This was not an apology. My father did not apologize. But it was the closest approximation he produced, and I received it as what it was.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe weekend,\u201d I said. \u201cThe executive privileges are suspended because the transfer required it. That\u2019s going to be true for the review period, which will be approximately ninety days. After the review, we can discuss what, if any, family account structure makes sense going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
He stood.<\/p>\n
He looked out the window at the bay.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe loved this city,\u201d he said. About my grandmother.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe always said the Miami property was her favorite.\u201d He paused. \u201cI thought it was because of the light.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me it was because it was the first one she built after Grandfather died,\u201d I said. \u201cShe said it was the first decision that was entirely hers.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was quiet for a moment.<\/p>\n
Then he went to the door.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll review the documentation tonight,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s reasonable,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He left.<\/p>\n
I sat for a long time after he left, not thinking about the company but about my grandmother in a hotel lobby in Miami thirty years ago, building the first thing that was entirely hers.<\/p>\n
She had done it.<\/p>\n
I was going to try.<\/p>\n
The weekend continued.<\/p>\n
I had expected, after the lobby and my father\u2019s visit, that the family would remove themselves from the hotel or at minimum from my vicinity. What happened instead was more complicated and, in retrospect, more like my grandmother\u2019s prediction of human behavior.<\/p>\n
My mother came to breakfast the next morning.<\/p>\n
Not to apologize. My mother\u2019s relationship to apology was similar to my father\u2019s: she did not produce them directly. She produced things that existed in the general category of conciliation, which was her own version of acknowledging that something had happened.<\/p>\n
She sat across from me at the restaurant table and ordered coffee and said, without preamble, \u201cTell me about the company.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat specifically?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat Mother\u2014\u201d She stopped. She had called my grandmother Mother for forty years. \u201cWhat Ruth wanted for it. She never talked to me about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe talked to me about it,\u201d I said. \u201cA great deal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d my mother said. \u201cI noticed. I thought it was her way of indulging you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was her way of teaching me,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
My mother looked at her coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe didn\u2019t like me,\u201d she said. \u201cRuth. She tolerated me. I always knew it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was true. My grandmother had been cordial to my mother for forty years with the specific cordiality of a woman who is maintaining a professional relationship with someone she does not trust.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe thought you were good at managing appearances,\u201d I said. \u201cShe considered that a skill. She just thought you applied it at the expense of other things.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the expense of you,\u201d my mother said.<\/p>\n
I did not say anything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to tell you I was wrong about everything,\u201d she said. \u201cI made choices about how to run this family and I made them with what I had. I don\u2019t think I was wrong about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cNot about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut yesterday,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYesterday was wrong,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She drank her coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you going to do?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRun the company,\u201d I said. \u201cLearn it properly. Do what my grandmother wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd us?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know yet,\u201d I said. \u201cI haven\u2019t figured out what I want the family to look like. I know what I don\u2019t want it to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe airport comment,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe airport comment,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd the years before it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought I was preparing you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I looked at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor difficulty,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought Madison needed protection and you were strong enough to manage without it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was not an excuse. She said it in the tone of someone describing their reasoning, not defending it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not what it felt like,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cI can see that now.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sat in the restaurant with the morning light coming in off the water and the breakfast service moving around us and I thought about how many mornings in how many Vesta properties my grandmother had sat in this same arrangement, watching the people she loved manage themselves in the aftermath of their choices.<\/p>\n
She had been patient.<\/p>\n
I was trying to be.<\/p>\n
Madison found me by the pool in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
She sat in the chair beside mine without asking, which was very Madison. She had her sunglasses on and her hair was perfect and she was wearing the specific expression of someone who has decided to say something and is not yet sure how to begin.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to tell you something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know,\u201d she said. \u201cAbout the shares. About any of it. I thought you just called Margaret to complain.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know you didn\u2019t know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI canceled your room,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was\u2014\u201d She stopped. \u201cI thought it was a funny thing. Making room for Brandon\u2019s cousins. I knew you\u2019d find somewhere. I didn\u2019t think about what it was actually doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe aunts weren\u2019t coming,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
A pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did you know?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I called the hotel before we left,\u201d I said. \u201cTo check the reservation. There was no additional booking under Brandon\u2019s family name. I knew then that the room had been canceled specifically.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was quiet.<\/p>\n
\u201cMom told me to cancel it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI should have said no,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said no to very few things Mom has told me to do,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s a pattern I\u2019m aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrandon and I have been talking,\u201d she said. \u201cAbout things. About the family, about what we want the next part to look like. He has thoughts about your father\u2019s way of doing things.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes he?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s been watching for two years,\u201d she said. \u201cHe came in thinking he was joining a family and he\u2019s been noticing the patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat has he noticed?\u201d<\/p>\n
She was quiet for a moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe says Dad treats the company like it\u2019s a prop,\u201d she said. \u201cSomething to display rather than something to run. And that Mom treats the family the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s right,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve known for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen why\u2014\u201d I started.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I didn\u2019t know what else to do,\u201d she said. \u201cThe family I have is the one I have. You don\u2019t just change that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
She took off her sunglasses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWill you let me try?\u201d she said. \u201cI know I can\u2019t undo the room. I can\u2019t undo a lot of things. But I\u2019d like to try to be something different to you than what I\u2019ve been.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at my sister.<\/p>\n
She was thirty six years old and she was asking me something she had never asked before, which was: can we be something real to each other, and can we start now?<\/p>\n
I thought about my grandmother.<\/p>\n
She had not made things easy. She had built her whole estate structure around the expectation that my family would be exactly as they were, and she had protected me within that structure rather than trying to change it. She was, in her way, a realist.<\/p>\n
But she was also a woman who had spent fifty years in the hospitality business, which is the business of believing that you can make people feel better than they expected to feel, and she had never entirely abandoned that.<\/p>\n
\u201cTry,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you,\u201d Madison said.<\/p>\n
She put her sunglasses back on.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrandon wants to know,\u201d she said, \u201cif there\u2019s any chance of a property tour tomorrow. He\u2019s apparently been reading about the company since you said what you said in the lobby and he has many questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrandon has been reading about the company,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince four thirty yesterday,\u201d she said. \u201cHe took notes.\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought about this.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell him to bring the notes,\u201d I said. \u201cThe walkthrough is at nine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The walkthrough the following morning included Margaret, the housekeeping manager, the food and beverage director, and three members of the maintenance team who Margaret had assembled because they had been with the property the longest and because I had asked to meet the people who knew the building best.<\/p>\n
I brought Brandon because he had taken notes and showed up with questions that were specific and informed and that Margaret answered with the visible respect of a professional encountering someone who had done their homework.<\/p>\n
I did not bring my parents.<\/p>\n
They were invited.<\/p>\n
They did not come.<\/p>\n
My father had reviewed the documentation and had retained his own attorney, which was appropriate and which I had expected. The relationship would be managed through the proper channels in the appropriate period. That was the professional context.<\/p>\n
The family context was harder and I was not trying to resolve it in a weekend.<\/p>\n
At the end of the walkthrough, standing in the lower lobby near the service entrance where the morning deliveries were still coming in, Margaret said to me: \u201cYour grandmother stood here every morning at six when she was working from this property. She checked the deliveries herself. She said if you know what\u2019s coming in, you know what\u2019s going out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said. \u201cShe told me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Margaret looked at me with the expression she had been wearing since I arrived, which was an expression I was learning to read: attentive, professional, but underneath it something that was not quite professional, a quality of accumulated investment in something she had watched being built.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat she built,\u201d Margaret said. \u201cIt\u2019s worth protecting.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know,\u201d Margaret said, \u201cbut you haven\u2019t run it yet. That\u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe knowing will become real and then it will become difficult and then it will become yours,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s how it went for her.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at the lobby.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took her about two years,\u201d she said. \u201cAfter Thomas died. She said the first year she was running it for him. The second year she started running it for herself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the third year?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the third year,\u201d Margaret said, \u201cshe stopped counting which year it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
I flew home on Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
On the flight, I reviewed the operational summary Margaret had put together, occupancy numbers and maintenance schedules and staffing levels and the capital project that had been deferred for three years and that the previous management had been reluctant to approve and that my grandmother had flagged in her last communication with the board as overdue.<\/p>\n
The capital project was a renovation of the service infrastructure on the south wing. Not the rooms that guests saw. The corridors and the mechanical systems and the staff facilities. The part that didn\u2019t show up in photographs.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had always said that you could tell everything about how a hotel was run by the quality of the staff areas. That a company that treated its visible face as the priority and let the unseen parts deteriorate was a company that had decided appearances were more important than reality.<\/p>\n
She had spent fifty years building something where the unseen parts were as well-maintained as the things on display.<\/p>\n
I approved the capital project on the flight home.<\/p>\n
Then I started the draft of the board introduction.<\/p>\n
Then I looked out the window at the clouds.<\/p>\n
My grandmother used to say that the thing she had loved most about the business was that it required you to believe, every day, that you could give people something worth coming back for. That the transaction was not really about the room or the food or the view. It was about whether someone left feeling that the world had been a little bit better than they expected it to be, and whether they would trust you to try that again.<\/p>\n
She had believed that.<\/p>\n
She had built something that tried, every day, to be worth coming back to.<\/p>\n
I was thirty two years old and I had just inherited the instrument of that belief, and I did not know yet how to run it, and I was going to spend a long time learning, and somewhere in the middle of that long time I was going to stop counting which year it was.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had told me this.<\/p>\n
I had listened.<\/p>\n
I was still listening.<\/p>\n
The plane went through the clouds.<\/p>\n
On the other side, the city lights were coming on below.<\/p>\n
That was enough, for tonight.<\/p>\n
That was the start of the real thing.<\/p>\n
The rest was work.<\/p>\n
I was ready to do the work.<\/p>\n
I had been watching how to do it for twenty years.<\/p>\n
It was time.<\/p>\n
I want to tell you about the months after Miami, because they were not the triumphant continuation that the lobby moment might suggest, and because the honest account includes the parts that were difficult.<\/p>\n
The first month was disorienting in a way I had not anticipated.<\/p>\n
I knew what I had inherited in the abstract: shares, a controlling position, the legal authority to make decisions about a company that employed approximately two thousand people across eleven properties. I had understood this intellectually. The intellectual understanding turned out to be quite different from the experience of sitting in a board meeting at thirty two and being the person that everyone in the room was watching for the signal of what came next.<\/p>\n
The board had known about the transfer in advance. My grandmother had been transparent with them about her intentions in the year before her death, which was one of the many ways she had managed the transition with a foresight I was still discovering the dimensions of. Several board members had worked directly with my grandmother for decades. One of them, a man named Howard Briggs who had been on the board since the late nineties, had said at the first meeting, looking directly at me across the table: \u201cRuth spoke of you often. She described you as the person who asked the questions that mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n
I had not expected that.<\/p>\n
I had prepared for skepticism. I had prepared a very thorough presentation on my understanding of the company and my initial priorities. I had not prepared for the specific quality of being recognized by people who had known me only through my grandmother\u2019s description of me.<\/p>\n
The executive structure was, as I had promised my father, subject to a ninety-day review.<\/p>\n
I want to be precise about what that review actually involved: it involved working with a firm that specialized in organizational assessment to evaluate the current structure against the company\u2019s operational needs and long-term goals. It was not personal. It was methodical. It produced a report that made specific recommendations.<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s role in the recommendations was complicated.<\/p>\n
He had built significant operational relationships in the industry over thirty years. His network was real and had value. His management style, however, had accumulated a pattern of decisions that the assessment described as prioritizing short-term appearance over long-term infrastructure, which was exactly the thing my grandmother had flagged repeatedly in her communications to me.<\/p>\n
The south wing renovation was the clearest example: three years of deferral because the cost would affect the quarterly margins that my father reported to his financial contacts. The renovation was not visible to guests. It affected the staff areas and the mechanical systems. It was the kind of investment that made the company better and made the numbers worse for two years before making the numbers better again.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had understood this.<\/p>\n
My father had understood the numbers.<\/p>\n
After the review, I had a conversation with my father that lasted two hours and that I will not reproduce in full. The outcome was this: he remained in an advisory role through the end of his contract, with a reduced scope focused on the industry relationships where his network was genuinely valuable. The operational management structure was reorganized under Margaret\u2019s regional leadership with a new national operations director whom I recruited with Margaret\u2019s recommendation.<\/p>\n
My father accepted this.<\/p>\n
Not happily. But he accepted it, and the acceptance was more than I had expected, which told me something about what the sixty-day period had done to his understanding of the situation.<\/p>\n
He called me on a Tuesday in the third month.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been reviewing the south wing renovation proposal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRuth had been trying to get this approved since 2021,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kept finding reasons to defer it,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought I was being fiscally responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was protecting the numbers at the expense of the building,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
This was my father, in his language, saying that he understood something he had not understood before.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe renovation starts in April,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d he said. \u201cMargaret sent me the schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n
A pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a good building,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Miami property. Your grandmother was right about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was right about most things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He was quiet for a moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe knew I would fight the transfer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe prepared for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe prepared for everything,\u201d I said. \u201cThat was who she was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cWere you angry?\u201d he said. \u201cFor a long time. Before Miami.\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought about this.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t see it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cYou weren\u2019t looking.\u201d<\/p>\n
He received this.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
I sat with those two words.<\/p>\n
My father had said them.<\/p>\n
Not performed them, not deployed them strategically. Said them in the plain voice of someone who has arrived, late, at a true thing and is saying it plainly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that enough?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor now,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s a start.\u201d<\/p>\n
My mother and I had a different kind of conversation, or a series of them, over the following months.<\/p>\n
She did not call me. I called her, twice in the first month, because I had decided that the family situation was not going to improve if I waited for my family to initiate and that I was going to have to do some of the initiating myself, which was something I had always done and which was not unfair but was something I was choosing rather than accepting.<\/p>\n
She was surprised the first time I called.<\/p>\n
We talked about small things. The weather. What she had been doing. A book she had read. I have never fully understood my mother, and the phone calls in the months after Miami did not produce full understanding, but they produced something: a regular conversation between two people who have decided to try, which is not the same as two people who have figured out how to be comfortable with each other but which is the necessary precondition for it.<\/p>\n
In December, she asked if I would come for the holidays.<\/p>\n
I said I would think about it.<\/p>\n
I thought about it.<\/p>\n
I went.<\/p>\n
It was a family holiday in the way of family holidays when the family is in the middle of changing its shape: slightly awkward, occasionally too effortful, with moments that were genuinely good and moments that were genuinely hard and an absence of the performed smoothness that had characterized family gatherings in my childhood, which I found, on balance, preferable.<\/p>\n
Madison and Brandon were there.<\/p>\n
Brandon had taken the walkthrough notes and turned them into a hobby. He had been reading about the hospitality industry with the focused enthusiasm of a person who has found a subject that catches him, and over dinner he asked me specific questions about operational trends and how the regional structure worked and whether I had considered the possibility of extending the Vesta brand into a different market segment.<\/p>\n
I had considered it.<\/p>\n
We talked for an hour after dinner while the others watched a movie in the living room and my father poured himself a scotch in the kitchen and listened, not participating but present, which was his version of engagement.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you thinking about bringing him in?\u201d Madison said, quietly, while Brandon was refilling his glass.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d have to demonstrate competence in a formal capacity first,\u201d I said. \u201cEnthusiasm isn\u2019t enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe knows that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell him to call Margaret,\u201d I said. \u201cShe\u2019s building the training program for the regional management structure. If he\u2019s serious, that\u2019s where to start.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not doing this as a favor to me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cIf he goes through the program and he\u2019s good, it\u2019ll be because he\u2019s good. Not because of the family connection.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou understand that means it might not work out,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d she said. \u201cHe knows too. He said he wanted to earn it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen tell him to call Margaret,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
In January, I flew back to Miami.<\/p>\n
I did the morning check of the deliveries at six o\u2019clock, alone, the way Margaret had told me my grandmother had done it.<\/p>\n
The dock was the back of the house. The service entrance. The loading area where the produce and the linens and the cleaning supplies arrived. A world that guests never saw.<\/p>\n
A man named Oscar checked in each delivery against the manifest with the focused attention of someone who had been doing this for twenty years and who took it seriously in the way of people who understand that the unseen work is the foundation of the visible thing.<\/p>\n
He did not know who I was.<\/p>\n
He was checking a delivery.<\/p>\n
I watched him work.<\/p>\n
After a while, he noticed me.<\/p>\n
\u201cHelp you?\u201d he said, not rudely, but with the assessing attention of someone who wants to know why a person in regular clothes is standing in the loading area.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m Emily Parker,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m the new controlling shareholder.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just wanted to see how the delivery process works,\u201d I said. \u201cMy grandmother used to do this every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
He thought about this.<\/p>\n
\u201cRuth Parker?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew her,\u201d he said. \u201cShe came back here every visit. Asked about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat sounds right,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe learned my daughter\u2019s name the second visit,\u201d he said. \u201cRemembered it every time after. Asked how she was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought about my grandmother, standing in this dock at six in the morning, asking Oscar about his daughter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is she doing?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
Something in his face did the thing that faces do when they receive something they weren\u2019t expecting.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s in college,\u201d he said. \u201cPre-med.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s wonderful,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He told me her name.<\/p>\n
I wrote it down.<\/p>\n
I would ask about her next visit.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had known that the whole of the work, done correctly, was made of moments like this: a name remembered, a question asked, the belief that the person in front of you was worth paying attention to even when no one was watching.<\/p>\n
She had done it for fifty years.<\/p>\n
I was starting.<\/p>\n
The dock smelled of cardboard and fresh produce and the specific industrial cleanliness of a working service area.<\/p>\n
The delivery came in.<\/p>\n
Oscar checked it against the manifest.<\/p>\n
I watched.<\/p>\n
This was the real thing.<\/p>\n
This was what I had inherited.<\/p>\n
Not the lobby, not the presidential suite, not the executive family account.<\/p>\n
This.<\/p>\n
The unseen work.<\/p>\n
The foundation.<\/p>\n
I was going to learn to do it right.<\/p>\n
Every morning.<\/p>\n
Starting here.<\/p>\n
One more thing.<\/p>\n
In February, I found a letter.<\/p>\n
My grandmother had a habit of writing letters and filing them in specific places where the recipient would eventually find them. She had done this throughout her life and her attorney Claudia had a catalog of them, some of which had already been delivered and some of which were meant to be found rather than delivered, placed in locations where the right person would encounter them at the right time.<\/p>\n
Claudia had told me about this habit.<\/p>\n
She had not told me about this letter specifically.<\/p>\n
I found it in the back of the operational files for the Miami property, in a folder labeled Orientation Notes, 2019, in a section I had been reviewing as part of understanding the property\u2019s recent history.<\/p>\n
The letter was addressed to me, in her handwriting, on the company stationery.<\/p>\n
It said:<\/p>\n
Emily,<\/p>\n
If you are reading this in the files, you have done what I hoped. You came back to the property and you started looking at the parts that aren\u2019t obvious. That is how you learn a building.<\/p>\n
I want to tell you something I haven\u2019t told you directly, which is that everything I built was meant to come to you from the beginning. Not because you are the most accomplished person in our family, though you may be. Because you are the one who understood that the point was to build something worth coming back to.<\/p>\n
Your father is a capable man who never quite understood this. He thought the point was to own something impressive. I spent thirty years trying to explain that the hotel is not the point. The people in the hotel are the point. The point is Oscar and his daughter and the cook named Teresa who has been with us since 1995 and the couple who came for their honeymoon in 2003 and came back for their twentieth anniversary in 2023 because we remembered their names.<\/p>\n
The point is that people need to feel that the world can be a little better than they expected it to be, and that someone believed enough to try to make it so.<\/p>\n
I believe you understand this.<\/p>\n
I believe this because I have watched you for thirty years and you are the only person in our family who has ever asked why instead of how much.<\/p>\n
Run it well. Learn what you don\u2019t know. Trust Margaret. Let the board help you.<\/p>\n
And every time it gets hard, go back to the dock in the morning and watch Oscar check the deliveries. He has been doing it correctly for twenty years. He will remind you what correctly looks like.<\/p>\n
All my love, Grandmother<\/p>\n
P.S. I left a note for Oscar too. He knows you\u2019re coming.<\/p>\n
I sat on the floor of the file room in the basement of the Miami Vesta with the letter in my hands.<\/p>\n
I sat there for a long time.<\/p>\n
Then I put the letter back in the folder.<\/p>\n
Then I went upstairs.<\/p>\n
Oscar was finishing the last of the morning delivery check.<\/p>\n
He looked up when I came to the dock door.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe left me a note,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d I said. \u201cI just found mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
He nodded.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said you\u2019d figure it out,\u201d he said. \u201cShe said to give you time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m figuring it out,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re here at six in the morning looking at the deliveries,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a good sign.\u201d<\/p>\n
I almost laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019s your daughter?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He said her name.<\/p>\n
He told me how she was doing.<\/p>\n
I listened.<\/p>\n
The dock smelled of cardboard and produce and the specific industrial clean of a working building.<\/p>\n
Outside, the Miami morning was beginning.<\/p>\n
Inside, the work was already underway.<\/p>\n
It had been underway since 1972.<\/p>\n
I was here now.<\/p>\n
That was enough.<\/p>\n
That was the whole of it.<\/p>\n
That was what my grandmother left.<\/p>\n
Not the shares.<\/p>\n
Not the company.<\/p>\n
The understanding of what the company was for.<\/p>\n
I had it.<\/p>\n
I was going to try to be worthy of it.<\/p>\n
Every morning.<\/p>\n
Starting now.<\/p>\n
I want to say one last thing about the lobby.<\/p>\n
The part people want to know is what happened when my mother\u2019s smile fell, when the executive access was suspended and the presidential suite was suddenly unavailable and my father started reading the email from Claudia\u2019s office standing in the marble lobby of the Miami Vesta Grand.<\/p>\n
I have told you what happened.<\/p>\n
What I want to say is this: the lobby moment was not the point.<\/p>\n
My grandmother did not structure her estate to produce a lobby moment. She structured it to produce the right custodian for something she had spent fifty years building. The lobby was a consequence. The consequence happened to be visible and immediate and somewhat dramatic and it produced in my mother an expression that I will carry for some time.<\/p>\n
But the lobby was not why.<\/p>\n
The why is Oscar and his daughter.<\/p>\n
The why is Teresa who has been with the company since 1995.<\/p>\n
The why is the couple from the honeymoon who came back for the twentieth anniversary.<\/p>\n
The why is the south wing renovation.<\/p>\n
The why is six in the morning at the loading dock.<\/p>\n
The why is what my grandmother built and what she believed it was for.<\/p>\n
I am here because she believed I understood that.<\/p>\n
I am going to try to prove her right.<\/p>\n
Every morning.<\/p>\n
Starting at the dock.<\/p>\n
Watching Oscar check the deliveries.<\/p>\n
Learning what correctly looks like.<\/p>\n
That is the whole of it.<\/p>\n
That is everything.<\/p>\n
My grandmother knew that.<\/p>\n
Now I do too.<\/p>\n
She trusted me with it.<\/p>\n
I am going to earn the trust.<\/p>\n
That is enough.<\/p>\n
That has always been enough.<\/p>\n
Every morning.<\/p>\n
The dock.<\/p>\n
The delivery.<\/p>\n
Oscar\u2019s daughter\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
My grandmother\u2019s letter.<\/p>\n
The south wing renovation.<\/p>\n
The company that was built to be worth coming back to.<\/p>\n
I am here.<\/p>\n
I am learning.<\/p>\n
That is the whole of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What Grandmother Left Let me tell you what actually happened, because the version that gets remembered in a family is never quite the same as the version that occurred, and … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36812,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family","category-inspiration","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55420,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55419\/revisions\/55420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}