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 I have learned, in the months since Miami, to care about the accurate version.
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.
My grandmother’s 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.
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.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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