Takeover (8 page)

He smiles and walks over to the table. As he’s bringing me the beans, he smiles again and says, “So, you didn’t have a prison wife? I thought that was common courtesy.”

“There were an odd number of us at the time,” I say, taking a spoonful from the dish and placing its contents on my plate. “Maybe if I’d been in there longer, but those are the breaks.” I’ve found the most effective way of getting Luke to stop teasing is to play along.

“Ah,” he says, scrambling for a comeback, but not finding one. He walks the beans back to the table and resumes his spot close enough to the chicken to make sure he’s the first to get seconds should the situation turn hostile.

“You know,” Jordan, Matthew’s wife, says, “I heard that almost fifty percent of inmates are wrongfully accused. Is that true?”

I guess she’s asking me. “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “Again, maybe if I’d been in there a while longer, they would have gone over it at orientation.”

Jordan’s a lot of things: she’s a great mother, she’s an extremely over-protective mother and she’s an overbearing know-it-all when it comes to matters of children, motherhood, parenthood and other child-related matters. She’s also extremely gullible when it comes to just about everything else. “I didn’t know they had orientation in jail,” she says. “Do they have like a video and everything?”

Half of the people in the room are chuckling under their breath, but I simply respond with, “I had court this morning, so I had to miss it.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m always this snarky; I’ve just learned how to get through a family occasion without wanting to shoot myself. Or them. The order on that changes depending on my mood. I’ve heard that’s a common sentiment.

The rest of dinner is a lot of the usual: everyone talks over each other while Simon and Beth sit in one corner, watching everyone else, wondering if anyone can pick up on the fact that they’re stoned. Spoiler alert: we can, we just don’t care.

By the time that dinner is over, Matthew and Jordan make their quick exit; their usual excuse that having three kids entitles them to leave any function as soon as possible. As they’re leaving, Luke, Molly, John and Alice also pack up their kids and hit the road, leaving me with only a full room to deal with as opposed to the clown car that my family events usually end up being.

“So,” Mark says, “just out of curiosity, did you actually kill the guy or not?”

Let me tell you a little bit about Mark. Well, I guess there are only two things that you really need to know about him, other than the fact that he’s married to a woman named Sarah who had gone to high school with Jordan. He’s a venture capitalist who can always be found checking the stock market via the ticker app on his phone, and he’s kind of an asshole.

I don’t generally like to use such brash terms, but there doesn’t seem to be another that quite fits him. He’s the kind of guy who’s been taught by years of bad reactions to keep his mouth shut most of the time. The problem is that the small percentage of the time that he does open his mouth, you can generally expect something rather blunt and unsavory to come out.

“Mark!” my mother scolds. I love the woman, but sharply intoning the name of one of her errant children hasn’t really been very effective since we were kids.

“I’m sorry,” he says, very much the child being forced to apologize to someone after a rude question. “What I meant to say was, I’ll love you no matter what the answer to the following question is.” He looks at my mom, then at me. Simon and Beth are having a very difficult time keeping their hushed giggles to themselves. “Did you kill the guy?”

I stand and move from the steps to the chair across from where he’s sitting with Sarah. Don’t worry; there won’t be a test on this later. “Mark, how can you ask me that?” I respond.

“Well, someone’s suspected for murder, it’s the first question that naturally comes to mind,” he answers as his wife just glares at me. Ah, Sarah. If you think Mark is bad, you’ll find Sarah to be more than a little frightening.

“No,” I say, “I would never hurt anyone. Mr. McDaniel may not have been the nicest boss on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted him dead.”

My mother does a quick headcount to make sure that all of my siblings with children have gone, and then she focuses her attention on me, obviously interested in the answer herself.

“So, why’d they arrest you?” Sarah asks.

“I’d like a beer, would anyone else like a beer?” James asks. It’s so funny, back in high school, he seemed invincible. Now, he gets so uncomfortable around my family. Well, not my family in general, I guess. It’s mostly just Mark and Sarah that drive my future husband to the bottle.

“One of my coworkers told the detective that she saw me go into his office after he let me off for the day, and that the only other person to so much as approach it was the woman who found him,” I answer.

Nobody’s taken James up on his offer, but that’s not going to stop him from drinking. A wicked little smile comes over Sarah’s face, a rarity, and usually not a good sign. “So you were the last one to see him alive?” she asks.

“I would imagine that the person who jabbed an icepick into his neck was the last person to see him alive, Sarah, but thank you for the implication.” The best way to deal with Sarah is to... Well, the best way to deal with Sarah is to not have to deal with Sarah. She’s a tattoo artist, and I’m not entirely convinced that she didn’t go into that particular field so she could get paid to gouge people with needles.

“Now kids,” my dad, Ian, starts. “I don’t really think that this is appropriate conversation. The fact of the matter is that our Rose is home now, and I don’t think we need to go any further than that with this conversation. Why can’t we all just sit back and enjoy each other’s company?”

My dad is a child of the sixties. It’s not that he was involved in any sort of activism or anything like that; he was born in the sixties. He’s always seemed to be a little perturbed at the fact that he didn’t get to drop acid with Hendrix. Mix that with a love of contact sports and that’s my dad.

Sarah laughs. It’s a hideous sound that I can only equate to nails being run over a chalkboard. Of course, the nails going over the chalkboard wouldn’t belong to her; they’d be from a hand that she’s recently severed.

“What do you think about all of this, Simon?” Mark asks, not so much in hopes of an answer, more for the joy of watching his youngest brother squirm at having to say something in front of his family while he’s so clearly baked.

“I don’t,” he starts then looks at Beth. “Well, you can’t think that Rose would ever hurt anybody. She just doesn’t have it in her.”

“What,” Sarah says, largely out of context, “and you do?”

“Not like you,” Simon says. His eyes quickly go wide as he realizes that he’s let something slip. Now he’s going to spend the next five to ten minutes tripping out about whether or not we heard him. He shrivels into himself as Beth comforts him in a tone so quiet it doesn’t really look like she’s talking. I know why my dad is okay with Simon smoking pot, but my mom? I don’t know, maybe she really is that naïve.

Sarah just laughs. Her objective has been achieved.

James comes back with a half-empty beer in his hand. “So, how are we all doing out here? Does anyone want dessert?”

Mark shoots him a quick look, and before his eyes are back on me, James is already heading back into the kitchen in search of something stronger. I chuckle to myself. My poor baby.

“You think it’s funny?” Mark asks. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get you an interview with Rory McDaniel? Sure, the guy was an asshole, but he was one of the biggest guys in the business.”

“I’m sorry to have put you out by working for a man who got murdered,” I respond, hoping that James gets my telepathic message that I want him to bring me a beer on his way back; if he ever does come back.

“Well,” Mark says, “the next job’s all on you, sis. I’m not sticking my neck out like that again. Do you have any idea what it was like going to the office today with everyone thinking that my little sister killed Rory McDaniel?”

“It must have been so hard for you,” I respond with a double helping of patronization. “It must have been like being in jail where every one of your moves was scrutinized, feeling so imprisoned, but exposed. Oh wait! That was me,” I say, looking longingly toward the kitchen door. I’m not great at sending messages telepathically; although I’m sure Sarah could give me a few pointers in regard to the dark arts. I just keep thinking,
“James. Bring me a beer with no less than two shots of something hard in it.”
I’m not quite sure why I’m making the voice in my head sound spooky, but there it is.

“Yeah,” Mark says, “sorry about that.”

“Not your fault,” I respond as James finally comes back through the kitchen door, holding two beers. At first I’m shocked, and to be honest a little impressed with my psychic abilities, but it quickly becomes apparent that he’s just finishing his first beer and moving on to his second.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s happening out there in B.W. right now.” B.W. is his ridiculous way of saying, “The Business World.”

“Yeah?” I ask, only partially interested as I’ve moved from telepathy to body language, but James isn’t getting it.

“Yeah,” Mark responds. “One of the companies that me and the guys invested in is preparing a hostile takeover. They’ve had their eyes on Opulence for years, but McDaniel always found a way to dodge the noose,” he says, a smile crawling up one side of his face like an insect that you just know will swiftly fly away, “or the icepick as it were.”

“Would anyone like cake?” my mom asks. When quick scolding doesn’t work, my mother always goes for the cake.

“Sure,” I say.

Beth and Simon take a moment away from their quiet reassurances to each other that “it’s okay, nobody knows,” to quickly nod their assent. Mark and Sarah just sit there, staring at me. My family isn’t usually like this, I promise. I mean, their behavior is as predictable as the tides, but usually there are more of them to offset the borderline psychosis of Mark and Sarah.

“How did it happen?” Sarah asks. “Did he bleed out, or did he aspirate into his lungs?”

“Where did Andrew and Jillian go?” My mother asks. She
must
be that naïve. Andrew and Jillian are very different from one another. Andrew’s the quiet type. By quiet, I mean, the man is a librarian. Not a metaphor, his job is working at the public library, checking out books to people and shushing them. Jillian is more—well, you’ve met Jillian.

The thing that they have most in common, and what makes my mother naïve, is that it’s not only possible, but probable that the two are off somewhere either inside or outside having sex. I like to tell people that they met in a group for sex addicts, but the real truth is that Jillian went to the library where Andrew works one day and was so impressed by the fact that he shushed her and held his ground that it turned her on. It turned her on so much that the two of them got it on in the women’s bathroom. According to Andrew, it was a slow day otherwise.

“Maybe that’s what it was,” Sarah says, finally removing her glare from me and setting it on her husband.

“What do you mean?” he asks, somewhat nervous at being on the wrong end of those eyes. Yeah, that’s the kind of woman my asshole brother is married to: she even scares him.

“I mean, what if it was a business thing,” she says impatiently, “you know, like someone wanted him out of the way so that the acquisition could go through.”

“Not going to happen,” Mark says, still looking at me. “Waite’s already taken over the company, and he’s just as stubborn if not more so than McDaniel was.”

“Huh,” she says. “Just a theory.”

The back door opens, answering the question regarding the location of Andrew and Jillian. “So,” Andrew says, trying to fix his hair back in place with his fingers, “have we brought out the cake yet?”

Opulence

––––––––

P
art of me had thought that last night would be
the
night for James and I, but by the time my family left, I was too tired and James was far too drunk to be very amorous. I’m hoping that my body is returning to a normal schedule, as it’s now seven o’clock in the morning, and I’m wide awake. I haven’t been fired, but I think it’s safe to say that I’m not going to have to worry about going into work today.

James is snoring in bed next to me as I slither from under the covers and put my feet on the soft, inviting carpet. The sun is just coming over the horizon and this is, without a doubt, my favorite time of day. Most of the world isn’t awake yet; at least in this time zone. Everything is so quiet, peaceful. For the next hour or so, I will be the sole-creator of my morning.

Growing up in a house with six brothers has made me appreciate the little things: A few moments of silence in the morning, getting up before there’s any other motion in the world and, most of all, the luxury that comes with being completely ready for the day before anyone else can interfere.

Now it’s just me and James; James and I. It’s nothing against him, but I’m still going to enjoy the serenity of being alone with the morning, even here. I head downstairs and put some coffee on. I don’t usually drink more than a cup, but James lives off of the stuff.

With all of the commotion last night, I haven’t really had time to process what Jillian said about James’s financial situation. Don’t get me wrong, it was never the money that I was interested in, I would just really like to know why he felt the need to lie to me about it. It’s not like he really has to worry too much about me leaving him; I’m happy with him. I love him.

I get in the shower. I start to breathe in the steam, but my phone rings before my long, brown hair has had a chance to soak up very much water. About the last thing in the world that I want to do right now is leave the comforts of hot, running water, but I cannot abide a ringing phone.

I get out and don’t bother with a towel for anything but my hands as I pick up the phone from the side of the sink.