Girl Meets Billionaire

by Aubrey, Brenna

  “She wanted to see Smuckers,” I explain. “I was just…trying to help.”

  When he looks up at me a second later, the boy is gone. Maybe the whole thing was an illusion. “Help,” he bites out with emphasis, “is a funny name for trying to make a dying woman believe you’re communicating with her dog. Giving her bizarre messages from her dog.” He pulls out his phone. “Maybe you can explain your help to the police.”

  My heart pounds. Communicating with her dog, bizarre messages from her dog—that is what I was doing.

  “She just wanted to see him.”

  He gives me a disgusted look. “And you’re happy to accommodate. If there’s something in it for you.”

  I raise myself up straight as possible because I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  “She likes to interact with Smuckers.” I swallow. “She doesn’t want to be alone.”

  “Harry,” he says, strolling out into the hall and speaking in soft tones. Is Harry the police?

  “Bernadette.” I touch her hand. “I have to go, Bernadette.”

  She stirs. Did she even hear?

  The son returns a moment later. “They’re coming.” His steely glare twists through my belly like a corkscrew.

  I won’t let him cow me. Years ago I swore I’d never let a rich asshole scare me or bully me ever again—not ever again.

  So I glare right back.

  It comes to me at this point that there’s something oddly familiar about him. He’s got that classic Hollywood-leading-man look—at least, if your Hollywood movie was about a darkly mesmerizing titan of industry. If your movie was about a friendly cowpoke this guy probably wouldn’t work out, unless you wanted him to turn dangerous at the end and take over the whole town.

  “Good,” I say. “Let them come.” I don’t mean it. The last thing I need is the cops.

  He scowls. “Mom,” he says, looking down at her.

  There’s this awkward silence where she doesn’t reply, and I think I should go, but I don’t want to rip Smuckers away.

  “You’re telling me she seemed…conscious before?” He asks it remotely and without looking up.

  “She was talking,” I say. “Petting Smuckers.”

  Just then, a beefy bald-headed guy in a security uniform comes in, followed by two nurses. “You’re going to have to take the animal out. Now,” the security guard growls.

  Bernadette’s hand is over Smuckers’s fuzzy little back.

  “Leave him,” I plead. “She’ll be so upset.”

  Nobody’s listening to me; their attention riveted on the son who has chosen this moment to turn the harsh light of his wrath onto the guard and the nurses flanking him.

  I take a deep breath. I feel like I haven’t breathed since he entered the room.

  Calmly, the son cocks his head. He and the security guard are about the same size—the security guard might even be a bit beefier, but if it came to a fight, my money would be on the son. He has an aura of power and confidence. He crackles with it.

  The security guard is no wimp, though. He stares right back, all testosterone. It’s like watching Animal Kingdom, Midtown Manhattan Edition.

  “If my mother wants the dog by her side,” he says calmly, “my mother gets the dog by her side.”

  “Rule’s a rule,” the security guy growls. “You’ll remove the animal or I’ll remove it and hand it over to animal control.”

  Animal control? It?

  The son’s blue eyes sparkle with humor, as if the security guard’s threats are mere clownish whispers in a world constructed for him and him alone.

  He addresses the assembled staff as a group. “Do you all understand who this is?”

  It’s Smuckers, biotches! I think.

  The complaining nurse folds her arms. “I don’t care. This is a pet-free facility.”

  I rivet my attention to the son. I didn’t like him when he was turning his hard-ass Blue Magnum gaze on me, but now his asshole power is on my side, or at least Smuckers’s side.

  “This is Bernadette Locke, head of the Locke Foundation, the entity that funded this wing, the medical teaching and research facility on the other side of that skyway, and probably your paychecks.”

  I straighten. What?

  More people come into the room, among them, a woman who seems to be some kind of administrator. “Henry Locke,” she says, grasping his hand. She apologizes for the mix-up, uttering words of empathy, admiration, gratitude. If he had a ring, she’d kiss it. She’d make out with it.

  “…and of course Mrs. Locke can have her dog stay with her as long as she pleases,” she continues. “With our sincerest apologies—we had no idea that the swing shift was not informed…” She mumbles on, all excuses.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It means a lot.”

  They all look at me, like you’re still here?

  The son points at me. “You. Out.”

  “Wait. I promised Bernadette—I promised her I’d care for Smuckers. She asked me specifically to care for him, you know, when…”

  He huffs out an exasperated breath and holds out his hand. “Card.”

  I grab my wallet, and hand over my Etsy business card, quickly drawing away from the brush of his hand, the sizzle of his orbit.

  The card has a photo of a tough-looking German shepherd wearing a pink-sequined bow tie.

  He scowls down at it for a long time. Really scowls.

  I’m imagining that he’s thinking of all the things he’d do if somebody tried to put a bow tie dog collar on him. And I’m guessing none of his scenarios end with the bow tie dog collar being in any way recognizable as a bow tie dog collar.

  “She wants to know Smuckers has a home and—”

  “I comprehend the meaning of care for Smuckers,” he says. “We’ll send Smuckers in a car.”

  A car. That’s how Mrs. Locke would always say it. Send a car. I thought she meant an Uber or a cab all this time.

  But it comes to me, standing there, that Bernadette Locke belongs in an entirely different world than I belong to, and that in her world a car is a limo.

  Chapter Two

  Vicky

  Two Weeks Later

  I almost don’t answer the buzzer. I’m not expecting anyone. And who just shows up and buzzes? A drunk or a freak, that’s who.

  My sister, Carly, is busy fulfilling her duty as a sixteen-year-old girl to make us late due to hair styling operations that are more complex than a Space-X mission.

  The buzzer sounds again and again. Smuckers barks.

  I pick him up. “Shhh!” We’re not technically supposed to have dogs in the building.

  Carly answers it. “For you,” she says.

  I go and push the intercom button. “This is Vicky.”

  “Certified letter for Smuckers care of Vicky Nelson.”

  “A letter for Smuckers?”

  “Yes. Care of Vicky Nelson.”

  A Venn diagram forms in my mind.

  The circle that contains people I know who would think of such a moronic joke does not touch the circle that contains friends who would be up this early. “No, thanks,” I say.

  Buzzzzz.

  “Reading the envelope,” comes the voice. “Smuckers care of Vicky Nelson. From the law offices of Malcomb, Malcomb, and Miller.”

  It occurs to me then that maybe Bernadette remembered her promise to help pay for Smuckers’s upkeep, after all.

  She’d mentioned it when she was asking me to care for him, once the diagnosis was in. Take care of my baby. I’ll see you’re compensated, she’d said.

  I never thought she’d actually follow through. Bernadette made a lot of promises and vows in her life. She liked making them way more than fulfilling them.

  I didn’t offer to care for Smuckers to earn any kind of allowance. The little dog had grown on Carly and me over the years. I couldn’t bear to let him go to a home that wouldn’t love his fuzzy little face.

  But what if?
/>   “Coming down,” I say.

  I spin and eye Carly. She’s not ready yet. “I’ll take Smuck down and we’ll handle this and wait. Five minutes.” I look over at the corner where Buddy the parrot eyes me. “And feed Buddy!”

  I carry Smuckers down all six flights. Smuckers is for shit on stairs.

  I never saw Bernadette after that day in the hospital with Henry Locke. She died soon after and Henry’s assistant called me with an alert that Smuckers was being sent over, and it was indeed in a limo. Carly and I just laughed, seeing his furry little snout in the backseat window of the sleek, black, mad-money ride.

  Instagram!

  I didn’t go to Bernadette’s funeral. Nobody invited me—not that I expected it after meeting jerky hard-ass Henry Locke.

  Carly’s been telling me all along to track down Henry and make him follow through on Bernadette’s promise to defray Smuckers’s upkeep. I told Carly I’d take a job as a gloryhole attendant at the Glory Daze massage parlor before I’d approach Henry for money. The Glory Daze is an actual place in the shitty Bronx neighborhood where we used to live before we got our very sweet long-term apartment-and-parrot sitting gig. And it’s what you think.

  I will never ask Henry for anything.

  Henry is exactly the kind of rich, entitled asshole I’ve constructed my life around avoiding.

  I find a courier waiting outside the doorway. He hands over a large envelope and gets my signature.

  I thank him and put Smuckers on the green leash that goes with today’s green bow tie.

  I open the envelope while he poops next to his favorite light pole with its graffiti-covered base. My heart sinks when I see there are only some letters inside. No check.

  Oh well. I walk Smuckers up to the block to throw the poop bag in the trash. He smells the small fence around the scrubby little tree, investigates a sticky dark puddle with yellow bits in it that I’m hoping is a smashed ice cream cone, and noses a crumpled coffee cup.

  That done, we sit on the top step of the stoop, just outside of the stream of people rushing back and forth, and I get to reading.

  It takes a good minute for me to get that it’s not just any letter; it’s a summons to a reading of the last will and testament of Bernadette Locke.

  “Because that would’ve been too easy,” I say to Smuckers, who is straining toward the suspicious possible ice cream cone.

  A young woman with wild magenta hair that has a streak of yellow down one side comes by, and Smuckers forgets about his quest for food in favor of stranger petting, which he gets.

  Carly arrives and smiles at the woman. “I love your hair! I want your hair.” The woman smiles and walks off, and Carly discreetly snaps a photo. “Did you see that?” Carly says. “That’s the exact hair I want.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I say.

  “There’s this cute place on Eighty-fourth that does it. Bess is doing purple there this weekend, and I’m thinking about maybe a change.” She twirls a red curl. “Of the purple and yellow kind…”

  “You know the rule,” I say.

  “But I want to go with Bess. She’s not going to want to delay.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Twenty-one-day cooling-off period. All major financial and appearance decisions.”

  “Colorful hair is not really major.”

  “That’s what you’re going with? Hair in two different Skittles colors is not major?”

  She pouts.

  I grab her backpack. “Come on. That’s our pact.”

  “It’s not fair. You never make money or appearance decisions. You have everything the same all the time.”

  “It’s our pact. End of story.”

  We head down the crowded sidewalk, expertly sidestepping people on their phones and navigating around wandering tourists with the precision of fighter jets in formation.

  “I’m going to tell Bess to delay twenty-one days and then I’ll do it with her,” she says when we come back together.

  I give her a look.

  “What?”

  “That’s a commitment. When you’re good for your word, like we are, committing is the same as doing. Telling Bess to delay because you’ll do it with her?” We’ve been over this before. “We keep our word, us two.”

  She snorts and huffs. But it’s our thing, and she knows it.

  We two sisters keep our word. It’s a thing.

  Also, our pact has kept her from quite a few misguided tattoos.

  “What was the courier? Was it the Smuckers allowance?”

  “Who knows?” I say. “Maybe she put the dog food allowance in her will. I have to take an afternoon off work and trek halfway across town to find out. Rich people have no concept of life.”

  Carly zeroes in on another fashionable woman with wild-colored hair and then gives me the side-eye.

  “Bird,” I say, which is our sisters version of fuck you, from flipping the finger, the bird.

  But really, that’s what I want for her—to only have to worry about things like hair and pop music and selfie lighting techniques. I’ll fight to see she gets that. She’s decided to be an actress but she has to wait until she’s a senior in high school before she can be in nonschool productions.

  I know I keep her too close. She doesn’t get to kick around town at night like other girls her age. The helicopter sister. But better that than our shipwrecked mom back home in Deerville.

  “Tell you what,” I say. “If I get Saks, we’ll go get ourselves two-hundred-dollar blowouts.”

  “Hold you to it.”

  The preliminary buyers liked my collection of jewelry for humans. Sedate elegance, they called it, which is about right. It’s not the big, wild, exuberantly colorful stuff that I used to be attracted to, but I’m good with that. My life these days is geared for staying under the radar. Coloring inside the lines.

  I’d do anything to distance myself from when I was Vonda O’Neil, the most hated teen in America for one very long summer some seven years ago. The girl who cried wolf. Except there really was a wolf.

  Nobody believed me.

  Carly hates the clothes I wear even more than Bernadette ever did. You’re not on trial anymore, she always says. You can stop living like a monk now. You don’t have to wear those boring-ass outfits.

  But the pencil skirts and dark sweater sets my lawyer recommended grew on me. For the record, they’re not boring-ass. They project an image of trustworthiness, and that’s important to me.

  Anyway, there’s just one more hurdle for my jewelry line—the VP of merchandising. A huge order from Saks would make such a difference. Carly doesn’t know how hand-to-mouth we actually live; we’re still in the hole from two years of braces, but I’ll never let her know. I don’t just want to protect her from Mom; I want to protect her from everything.

  “Can a person even do that? Leave an allowance to a dog in a will?”

  “Rich people can do anything they want to,” I say, and then I swallow my bitterness, because Carly doesn’t need it. She doesn’t need to hate rich, entitled people, and specifically rich, entitled men, the way I do.

  It still shocks me that Bernadette was fabulously wealthy. She was pretty successful in hiding it; she seemed post-rich, if anything. I sometimes wonder if she concealed it because she picked up my disdain for the wealthy.

  After the shelter fundraiser fair, Bernadette suddenly started showing up on this bench that Carly and I couldn’t avoid passing in getting to Carly’s school, and she’d call us over and ask for a reading—just a few impressions, she’d sometimes say. And I’d politely decline.

  Carly thought she was stalking us, because she kept on showing up. I don’t know about that, but she definitely got madder and madder that I wouldn’t read Smuckers for her. She clearly thought it was a personal thing I had against her. The woman had a paranoid and highly suspicious nature.

  Then there was the day she was in distress, out in the heat. We were on the way to school, as usual, and she was half slumped on that bench, so pale and
frail, with Smuckers panting at the end of his leash. We stopped to make sure she was okay. She told us she felt faint; she asked us to help her home.

  Her home turned out to be a gorgeous prewar building several blocks down. We got her up and settled in and hydrated. As soon as she bounced back to her regular self, she offered me money for a special Smuckers reading from the whisperer.

  It was then I saw Smuckers’s bone-dry water bowl.

  “Okay, one quick free read,” I said.

  Carly widened her eyes as I unhooked Smuckers’s leash and picked him up. I put my hand on his head, kind of a Vulcan mind-meld thing, and closed my eyes. So thirsty. I need a lot of water. So very thirsty, Bernadette.

  Bernadette seemed pretty upset when she looked down at Smuckers’s water bowl. I made Carly fill it and we got out of there as quickly as possible after that.

  That was the first step down the slippery slope of being a pet whisperer.

  Bernadette’s next move was a masterful one. From a different bench, she spotted Carly playing Frisbee in the park with some girlfriends. She asked her if she’d walk Smuckers for thirty bucks—just around the park.

  Carly jumped at it and treated her friends to frozen yogurt afterward. Days later came the big ask—Bernadette wanted Carly to be her permanent dog walker, once a day, an easy thirty bucks. No doubt she suspected how badly Carly would want it, and probably figured I wasn’t going to let Carly walk the streets of Manhattan alone with that dog.

  I said no to Carly at first, but eventually I relented, after making Carly agree that twenty-five out of every thirty bucks would go to a college fund. And, really, dog walking is a legit service, unlike pet whisperer. Especially for Bernadette.

  From then on, we’d stop off at Bernadette’s apartment on the way home from Carly’s school. We’d grab Smuckers and do an errand or two. Sometimes we’d take him to watch the neighborhood mimes. We feel sorry for them, because they are really not at all talented, but they always brighten up in a gleeful mime way when Smuckers comes around.

  Little by little, Smuckers began delivering safety-conscious or morale-boosting messages to Bernadette. She was so alone, and Smuckers was the only one she seemed inclined to listen to. It felt like a public service.