The Ultimate Gift Read online

  the ultimate gift

  exclusive movie edition

  Rene Gutteridge

  Based on the original novel by Jim Stovall

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  Copyright © 2007 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. and Jim Stovall

  Based on the screenplay by Cheryl McKay.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Gutteridge, Rene.

  The ultimate gift / Rene Gutteridge and Jim Stovall.

  p. cm.

  Based on the novel: The ultimate gift / by Jim Stovall.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59554-340-0 (trade pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-59554-340-6 (trade pbk.)

  1. Great-uncles—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Travelers—

  Fiction. I. Stovall, Jim. II. Stovall, Jim. Ultimate gift. III. Title.

  PS3557.U887U46 2007

  813'.6--dc22

  2007000437

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Foreword By Jim Stovall

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Reading Group Guide

  Note from Rene Gutteridge

  The 12 Gifts

  foreword by Jim Stovall

  thank you for joining me on this truly incredible journey. In each person’s life, there are a handful of amazing days. These are days that—from the vantage of an historical perspective—we can look back at over the years and realize that a single, solitary day inevitably changed our life forever. One of these amazing days for me occurred in late 1999.

  Through a series of unintentional coincidences, I had become a motivational speaker for arena events around the world, and as a consequence of that, I became an author. I had written several how-to and biographical books drawing on my experience as a blind person and athlete, as well as founder and president of the Narrative Television Network. I had written a book about movie stars, athletes, and all manner of celebrities I had interviewed on television or worked with onstage. To make a long story a bit shorter, I had written everything I knew and a few things I only merely suspected.

  When my publishers and readers continued to clamor for another book, I realized it was time for me to enter the realm of fiction. I had never written fiction before, but as with most other things in life, traveling uncharted waters didn’t seem to bother me. I reasoned that if I had already written and published everything I knew, it was time to start making up things. Hence, on what I otherwise presumed was a normal day, I sat down to dictate what I assumed would be just another in a line of books.

  My process in writing is different from any other author I have ever met. As a blind person myself, writing for me consists of dictating to a very competent lady in my office named Dorothy Thompson. I merely dictate the words as I wish them to appear in the book, and Dorothy takes responsibility for sentences, paragraphs, spelling, punctuation, and all related things that are a mystery to me.

  I write very quickly, and I don’t do edits or rewrites. People assume that my publishers have someone else to do the edits or rewrites, but in reality, with rare exceptions, the way I dictate my books to Dorothy is the way people around the world read them, word for word.

  On that fateful day in 1999, I had nothing in my mind other than the first line of a story and the title, The Ultimate Gift. Over the next five days, a completed novel emerged, and I sent it off to my publisher, much as I had done with the previous five books. However, due to a corporate restructuring and eventual takeover at that publishing house, it was communicated to me that, although my publishers really liked The Ultimate Gift, they didn’t want to release a novel. They were getting away from fiction. But since contracts had already been signed, I was informed that my publisher would put the book out into the marketplace . . . with no support. They simply were not willing to advertise or promote it.

  Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, my little novel entitled The Ultimate Gift sat on bookshelves all across the country and simply died from lack of attention.

  Then something happened that is still hard for me to believe; if I wrote it into one of my novels, no one else would believe it either. The Ultimate Gift started selling. But not in a normal way. I started getting calls from book distributors who were inquiring what I was doing to create these one hundred-, five hundred, and even one thousand-book orders, as they had never before seen anything like that. Well, I simply didn’t have a clue what I was doing to drive those orders, but I told the booksellers and distributors if they found out what was causing this to please let me know so we could continue doing it.

  From that day to this, through a string of international publishers and without any major advertising or promotion at all, The Ultimate Gift has sold more than 3.5 million copies. Somehow, financial planners, brokers, insurance professionals, school teachers, university professors, clergy, and many others have been reading The Ultimate Gift and buying dozens and even hundreds of books to pass along to friends, clients, parishioners, and students. This is truly unprecedented.

  As a blind person for the last two decades, one of my true joys in life has been discovering the National Library Service for the Blind. This agency makes special recorded books available to blind and visually impaired people across the country. Thanks to a high-speed tape player, I am able to consistently read a book each day. I am embarrassed to say when I had my eyesight and could read a book just as you are reading this one now, I don’t know that I ever read an entire book cover to cover. But now, through my blindness, I have become not only a consistent and avid reader, but indeed a voracious reader.

  Through all of those books throughout all of those years, occasionally there has been a title that impacted me so much I would recommend it to as many as four or five friends or colleagues. But when I learned that my very first effort at fiction, my little novel The Ultimate Gift, was being read and then passed along by all manner of individuals by the case lot and even the truckload, I was overwhelmed.

  I had the added blessing, as I had included my phone number in The Ultimate Gift, of speaking literally to thousands of these avid readers and now disciples of the message. As the
se people have come to know, any time you have something to celebrate as part of your own Ultimate Gift journey or if you’re in one of those periods when The Ultimate Gift magic and message doesn’t seem to apply to your current dilemma, I am as close as the nearest telephone at 918-627-1000. To this day, people continue to call for more books and speeches and information about the movie and sequel books, including The Ultimate Life. I sit here each and every day thankful that providence put me in the right place at the right time on that amazing day in 1999.

  As The Ultimate Gift continued to skyrocket as a cultural icon, I was contacted by several major movie studios regarding making The Ultimate Gift into a movie. As owner and CEO of a television network, I have worked in and around the movie and entertainment industry for a number of years and know at least one of the pitfalls; therefore, each time a studio presented me with a contract to make The Ultimate Gift into a movie, I inserted a clause into the contract that stated I would have to approve the movie script. After several frustrating experiences, I had resigned myself to the probability that The Ultimate Gift would never be a movie because no one was committed to keeping the magic and the message intact.

  Then came the day when Rick Eldridge called me, and from that initial conversation and Rick’s commitment to the message, The Ultimate Gift movie was born. Rick became my partner and my friend, and a creative force in propelling The Ultimate Gift movie and movement ahead. As producer of The Ultimate Gift movie, Rick Eldridge not only allowed me but encouraged me to maintain script approval and to provide input into casting, music, and every element of the film. He even allowed me to play a brief part in the movie. When you’re watching The Ultimate Gift on the big screen, near the end of the film there is a brief scene involving a limo driver delivering a few lines. That would be me. I find it ironic and a bit comical that somehow the blind guy got to be the limo driver—or at least I can say I play one in the movies.

  The Ultimate Gift movie and this novelization of it repackage and share a vital piece of the message, fully presented in the original The Ultimate Gift novel. I believe that books can change people’s minds and ideas and, therefore, their lives, as continues to happen with The Ultimate Gift novel. But movies can change a culture. Therefore, together we can Share the Gift and Change the World.

  Jim Stovall

  2007

  [email protected]

  chapter 1

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  Present Day

  sir . . . he’s gone.”

  Theophilus Hamilton stood near the large glass window that framed a world he hardly understood anymore. He didn’t turn around but instead let his gaze fall to the busy city below. A deep sadness tangled his words, so he took a moment to compose himself. The inevitable had finally come, but it didn’t make it any easier.

  He stayed at the window as he addressed Miss Hastings. “Contact family members, the various corporate boards and business interests . . .” He sighed. There was a lot to take care of. Now wasn’t the time to mourn. And Hamilton knew that perhaps he mourned more for what Red had endured in life. Red was at peace now, but there would be nothing resembling peace in the wake of his death. “And let’s call a meeting.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miss Hastings said. She turned to leave the room, then stopped and turned back to Hamilton. “Sir, I am so sorry for your loss.” She pulled the heavy oak doors of his office closed.

  Clutching his cane, he gazed out the dark window and wondered how well he would be able to tolerate the wolves that had been waiting and circling for days now. Oh, yes, they would put on their sad faces. Some of them. Others would adopt a false solicitousness. No matter. Everything was set into motion now; no man could change it. And he doubted it would change any man, either.

  But for a man whose life had gone terribly wrong in so many different ways, he’d had hope all the way to the end.

  Hamilton closed his eyes. The older he got, the less he held out much optimism for anything. But maybe, just maybe, he had a little, too.

  His mind wandered back to the first time he’d ever heard Red’s voice. It had been a phone call, placed to Hamilton right after he’d graduated from law school.

  “Am I speaking with Theophilus Hamilton?”

  “Sir, yes—Yes, sir. This is he.”

  “Name’s Howard Stevens. You can call me Red. I need a lawyer for a few business ideas I have, a few still in the dream stage.”

  Hamilton smiled now. Red Stevens and his dreams. He was at peace. But Theophilus understood peace would not be a part of his own immediate future.

  The day couldn’t have been grayer. Hamilton stood near the pastor, surveying the five-hundred-plus mourners who clustered around the shiny mahogany casket of Red Stevens. Flowers, bright and white, were the only color among a graveyard filled with stately, aboveground tombs and important people all dressed in suitable dark clothing, every single one carrying a black umbrella. Their faces reflected more aversion to the rain they were forced to stand in than to the death of the man they were here to lament.

  Behind the mourners and down the hill a little, Hamilton spotted one pink umbrella, which was doing a poor job of protecting its keeper from the rain, since the young girl wasn’t putting it over her head. Instead, she seemed to be the only one embracing the moment, with her face tilted upward to the sky as it bathed her in wetness.

  Hamilton sighed. Oh, how he wished there could be more of that kind of goodness and innocence in the world.

  The pastor, hunched under his own black umbrella, cupping his little black book, was doing his best to uphold the sanctity of the moment. “Though the skies may weep,” he said, “the Bible assures us that ‘precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.’”

  No one—near Hamilton, anyway—looked as though they cared at all what the Bible said. Red’s two sons, Bill and Jack, stood just three feet away, oblivious to the idea they were supposed to appear sorrowful.

  “I wonder who the old man negotiated with for the rain,” Jack said with a cynical smile to Bill, Red’s oldest.

  “Well, it’s a sure bet he’s laughing, watching us get soaked.”

  “Yeah, well, now it’s his turn,” Jack said.

  “There’s not a person here,” the pastor continued, “whose life in some way has not been touched by Howard ‘Red’ Stevens.”

  Hamilton watched Jack and Bill glance at each other and roll their eyes. Jack, the playboy of the family, pulled up the sleeve of his coat and looked at his watch. Bill glanced down at some sort of organizing device or cell phone in his hand, then quietly put it back in his pocket. It was all Hamilton could do not to say something, but that wasn’t his way. And it hadn’t been Red’s either. He’d let his children become what they’d become. He’d tried a time or two to step in and talk some sense into any of them who would listen, but they never listened unless he was talking in the language of dollar signs.

  Hamilton’s gaze found its way back to the little girl, who seemed intent on getting wet. He wondered why such a young girl felt the need to wear such dark lipstick. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old, but her lips were stained the color of wine grapes. What was the world coming to? But he smiled as the mother suddenly noticed the umbrella to her side and rushed to put it back in its place, much to the young girl’s disappointment.

  “Red often quoted Malcolm Muggeridge,” the pastor said to a crowd growing more agitated with every wet minute that went by, “saying that ‘every happening, great or small, is a parable by which God speaks to us; and the art of life is to get the message.’ May the message of Red Stevens continue in the hearts of those he leaves behind.”

  The pastor seemed to sense he was losing their interest. He turned to Bill. “Bill?” He gestured toward the casket.

  “Uh . . . yes,” Bill said, stepping forward. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out a small canister. “Even though Dad moved his corporate offices from Texas many years ago, for tax reasons, he always said he wanted to b
e buried under Texas soil.” He opened the canister and shook some dirt onto the casket, then stepped back.

  Somebody touched Hamilton’s elbow. He didn’t have to turn around. He knew it was Miss Hastings, assuring him he was right for keeping silent and avoiding a scene.

  Suddenly the loud rumblings of a car caused the entire crowd to turn as a vintage 1971 Dodge Charger R/T slowed on the small cemetery road below. What little dirt was left on the casket fell off as the ground shook from the revving engine. Hamilton could hardly stop himself from throwing up his hands in disgust. But then again, neither could the other mourners, whose mouths hung open at the sight of the yellow-and-black muscle car roaring to a stop in front of them.

  The young man getting out of the car was apparently the only one who hadn’t gotten the family memo about what kind of etiquette was expected. He flung the car door open, nursing a cigarette and likely a bad hangover, judging by the state of his clothes and hair. Some hideous rock-and-roll song thumped against the backdrop of the rainstorm, until he turned it off and rose out of the car. He wore black sunglasses and an expression that might’ve been worse if they could see his eyes. Beside him an expressionless young woman appeared in a taut black dress that spoke to the idea she might be at the wrong social event.

  “Is that him?” Miss Hastings whispered.

  “That’s him.” Hamilton sighed. He watched Jason Stevens walk up the small hill, dismissing his cigarette as he tossed it aside into a puddle. He also dismissed his girlfriend and two others who had crawled unsteadily from the backseat of the car, walking ahead of all of them and heading straight for his mother, Sarah.

  “Mom,” he said.

  Even with all the Botox she’d managed over the years, his mother was able to lift her eyebrows high in a frightful expression of embarrassment and shock. “You’re late!” she said in a sharp tone.

  Jason Stevens propped his sunglasses on top of his head, glancing around at his family members with the kind of attitude that got you cut out of the will.