Three years before that Christmas, I retired from Hargrove Financial Planning.
I had worked in wealth management for forty-one years. The last eighteen of those years as a senior analyst at Hargrove.
I started as a secretary in 1980. Typing up other people’s investment reports on an IBM Selectric. I took night classes. I studied for my licenses at the kitchen table after Todd and his sister Rebecca were asleep. I got promoted, and promoted again, and promoted again.
By the end, I could read a portfolio the way some people read a novel.
Instinctively. Seeing patterns other people missed. Understanding where something was heading long before it got there.
The young analysts used to come to my office with their spreadsheets.
“Theodora, can you look at this? Something feels off, and I can’t figure out what.”
I’d look at it for about three minutes. Then I’d put my finger on one line.
“There. That’s your problem.”
They called me the Oracle behind my back. I pretended not to know.
When I retired, at sixty, the firm threw me a little party in the conference room. Sheet cake and sparkling cider. My boss gave a speech. Everybody clapped.
Todd didn’t come. He had a meeting. Stacy sent a card.
But here’s the thing nobody knew.
When I retired, I wasn’t ready to stop working.
I was just ready to stop doing it for somebody else.
So I spent the next two years working. Quietly. Very quietly. At my own kitchen table, on my own laptop, with my own money.
I told almost no one.
Todd asked me once, early on, at one of those dinners where I was seated by the kitchen door. “So what are you keeping busy with these days, Mom?”
“Investment research,” I said.
Which was true, as far as it went.
He nodded the way people nod when they’ve already stopped listening. Then he turned to ask Stacy’s father about his golf game.
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