by Julia Kent
“GO!” Liam shouted from the other room, so loud we walked back to the living room to find all the guys on their licking apps, only they were so high they seemed to be performing oral sex in slow motion, like slugs making their way through a molasses spill.
“Thanks for the offer to help,” I added, pointedly looking at the guys. “But I got it.”
“You don’t have to do everything for them,” she reiterated. “You don’t have to prove yourself. You did that a long time ago.”
“That’s why you think I –”
Bzzz. My phone interrupted.
“Sorry.” I gave her the kind of smile you give a friend who you know is right, but you’re done talking about the issue. “Work.”
And with that Charlotte retreated, as I talked to the overnight-air company shipping the band’s equipment, her words pinging around my brain like shrapnel that ricochets.
JOE
I was still buzzed and that is why Uber is one of the best inventions to come out of Silicon Valley in years. Taking an Uber to Mom and Dad’s house also gave me an out. Call for an Uber and the driver would show up and I could just leave.
Mom’s cryptic conversation took second place to Darla’s mindfuck, frankly, so whatever Mom and Dad had to tell me felt small. After Darla left me in the lurch it took two strokes to spray the bed like my dick was Kermit the Frog holding a firehose.
I needed revenge.
I needed her.
The last thing I needed was a verbal showdown with my mother, Dad sitting there calmly taking it all in and commenting at the end, supporting Mom. I was there because she wasn’t using her normal tactics with me. Some part of this felt just weird enough that it was in my best interests to show up.
Besides, Trevor ran out of pot, so no reason to stay at home.
“Joey,” Mom said quietly as I entered the house, some sort of drink in her hand. As I hugged her, the palm of her hand was a sheet of ice. She’d clearly been drinking for a while, clutching some sort of inebriant for a long enough time to fortify her.
For what?
“Son,” Dad said, giving me that big-man hug he’s bestowed on me since I grew into my puberty body. There was a fierceness to them both, a gravity that made me think someone had died.
“Is, um, Gene here?” I asked, looking around, suddenly worried.
“What? No. This is family business,” Dad said quietly, blinking hard.
“Gene is family,” I said through gritted teeth, tired of this conflict.
“That’s not what Herb means, Joe,” Mom said. “Gene is family. You’re right. But not for what we need to discuss with you. And he already knows about it anyhow. No need for him to be here now.”
“You’re both scaring me,” I said in a joking voice, grabbing an orange out of the ever-present fruit bowl on the counter in front of the kitchen. “What is this?”
“It’s nothing for you to be scared of,” Dad said with a slightly stunned look on his face. “Just… it’s hard for your mother and I to wrap our minds around this.”
“Don’t tell me I’m about to become a big brother,” I joked.
“That would be a miracle of biblical proportion, given that I went through menopause already,” Mom answered with more information than I ever wanted to know.
“And we’re off to a great start,” Dad murmured, heading toward his office, motioning for me to follow.
At that moment, some part of me froze inside.
Because if we were having this conversation in Dad’s office, it was big.
My father’s home office was like the Oval Office to me. Had been since I was little. Barred from entering it unless invited specifically, I’d always viewed the room with a strange sort of reverence I didn’t have for any other space. Dad had talked to me about sex in here. Money. Relationships. Broke the news to me that his mom had died. Called me into the room when the September 11 attacks took place.
And we were meeting in there for some undisclosed topic that made my mother pour two fingers of Scotch, neat, and quick shoot them back like a party girl in Cancun on Spring Break.
As we entered the office, I saw three sets of manila folders sitting on his conference table. Dad motioned for me to sit in the nearest chair while he took the spot at the head of the table, Mom to his left. I grabbed my folder and opened it, scanning rapidly, expecting lab results or a doctor’s report or a certificate of adoption.
Not what I actually saw.
“Trust?” I saw an ancestor’s name on the paperwork. “The Herman Johannes Rossini Trust?” My eyes scrambled to scan and take in the legalese. I knew more than the average person but hadn’t studied trusts in depth.
Money, though, I understood.
Mom glanced at Dad, who gave her a half shrug, as if encouraging her to soften up. “This is a family trust,” he explained. “One that unlocked when you turned twenty-five.”
My throat went dry. Suddenly Mom’s drink looked damn good.
I kept reading, ignoring my body. I could deal with it later.
Mom’s hand appeared in my field of vision, flattening against the paper, obstructing, her diamond engagement ring so big, the recessed lighting above turned it into a blinding magnifying lens. “Can you wait, sweetie? Let us explain, then you can read all you want.”
Sweetie?
“A family trust? This seems to say I am getting money.” Excitement bubbled up in me, making me readjust my hips in the seat. It took everything in me not to start bobbing my leg and twitching like a little kid.
“You are,” Dad said in an amiable voice. “Quite a bit.”
“How much?”
“It’s not that simple, Joey,” Mom said.
“Money’s pretty damn simple, Mom. You either have it or you don’t.”
“And you do.” The way Dad emphasized the word you made me sit up straight.
“How much?”
He named a figure over one hundred thousand.
“Nice,” I said, immediately imagining the new car I could buy, or how much I could spend on an instrument.
“That’s the rough income of your portion.”
Hold on.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re saying that’s how much I’ll receive from this family trust per year?”
“Yes!” Mom wailed, bursting into tears.
I do not understand women.
I doubt I ever will.
Dad rubbed her shoulder absentmindedly, as if her strange grief were normal, and went right back to talking with me.
“For how long?” I asked, mind turned into a thousand pieces.
“For the rest of your life, Joe,” Dad said with a clarity that sounded like restrained joy, but my Dad doesn’t sound like that – ever – so I must have invented it.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not, son.”
“Did someone feed me some ‘shrooms? E? Did I just get roofied? This is a prank, right?”
Mom just sobbed.
“No,” Dad replied, moving Mom’s hand off my document. “Go ahead and read now.”
Legal documents are already boring, a snoozefest if you’re not in the right mood, so concentration was hard enough. Add in the serious burst of adrenaline in me and the words suddenly blurred.
“Why,” I asked Dad, “is Mom crying?”
“Ask her.”
“Mom, why are you crying?”
“Because this means you’ll never finish law schoooooooooollllll,” she moaned like a professional mourner, giving any female highlander a run for her money.
“Everything is about control to you, isn’t it?” I growled, letting loose. “You’re crying because I’m about to receive an inheritance I didn’t know I had, and all you’re doing is moaning about losing control over me? Jesus, Mom!” By the end I was flat out yelling, and I didn’t care. The numbers were tumbling around in my head like wet clothes at the laundromat, tossed inside a windowed dryer, going around and around.
Cotton candy set on fir
e filled my head, along with the image of piles of money stretched out in a line by the side of the road, endlessly proceeding into the horizon, mixing with Darla’s face. Now I really was the ‘rich’ man she called me.
“It’s not about control, Joey. It’s about raising you right.”
“Raising me right means telling me the truth! You both kept this from me.” I stared Dad down, hard. He didn’t back down, but he didn’t push back, either. A calm, steady gaze met mine.
“We made a choice based on what we thought was best,” he finally answered.
“Forever. I get the income forever,” I said again, dazed.
“Yes, Joe.” Dad smiled. “You do. The trust doesn’t break until your grandchildren’s generation.”
Mom sat up, wiping her eyes in that careful way women who wear eye makeup do, using the pads of her fingers and wiping in, toward the bridge of her nose. “You know, you could use the money to finish law school!” she said in a bright, fake voice.
“I could also buy a hell of a lot of hookers and blow with a hundred grand!”
She paled.
“Unrestricted funds, right?” I asked them, flipping through the paperwork.
“Yes,” Dad said. “I trust you to use the money wisely.”
“But Mom doesn’t.”
“Your mother really, really wishes you would finish law school.”
“You think? Because I wasn’t clear on that point. Mom can be so vague.”
Mom picked up her drink, pink tongue poking out to slurp up the last drops of alcohol.
“You’re never going to finish, are you?” she asked. “We just wanted to get you to a safe place.”
“A ‘safe’ place?” I asked, humoring her.
“A point in adulthood where you had the minimal accomplishments to feel a sense of pride in your work.”
“I get that from being in the band, Mom. Not from reading contracts or preparing cross examination questions.”
She looked like I slapped her, her throat making a wet gasp, the sound so authentic I wasn’t sure it came from her.
“I told you, Joanne,” Dad said softly.
Eyes like mine in a bigger face turned to me, evaluating me as if reconsidering as Dad gave me a long look. And then he said to me, “Joe’s proven he’s most certainly at a point in adulthood where he is both accomplished and knows the value of hard work.”
“But –”
Dad stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “No. No buts. He just is.”
“That’s right,” I said calmly, picking up the folder. “And now I have an independent income, too.”
“It’s not enough to live on,” Dad said with skepticism, “but it’ll help.”
Jesus. Darla was right. My parents were really, really out of touch with how most people lived if Dad thought making a hundred grand plus a year was “not enough to live on.”
Then again, until I met Darla, I might have said the same thing.
“It’ll be a struggle,” I said dryly, “but I’ll make do.”
“You’ll never go back, will you? My son, the lawyer, isn’t happening,” Mom whispered.
She didn’t deserve it, but I bent down and gave her a light hug. “No, but your son the rock star is happening.”
“I guess that’s something.”
“It’s more than something, Joanne,” Dad said as he pulled me in for a hug. “It’s not the rock star part I don’t understand,” he announced, the scratch of his beard against my ear making me feel like a little kid.
“Then what?” I mumbled as he clapped my back again.
“How you don’t sleep around when women throw themselves at you at concerts,” he hissed in my ear. “All that pussy and you say no.”
“Dad!”
“I’m telling you the truth.” He shrugged, then let me go.
“I can’t wait to get back home and tell Darla about the trust.”
Mom moaned. “What do you think her reaction will be?”
I decided to dig in the knife. The final hold they had over me was gone. Just like that. My great-grandfather gave me a freedom he could never have imagined when he set up the trust.
I grinned. “Mom, do you have any idea how much Spam I can buy her with this kind of money?”
And with that, I walked out the door, requesting an Uber on my app, whistling softly to myself.
TREVOR
I’ve been to Vegas a few times, mostly for stupid college reasons, the cheap flight and lure of pure carnal activity a serious draw when I turned twenty-one. As we waited to get off the plane, Darla stretched across my lap from her middle seat, eyes big and excited, her face glowing.
Joe, on the other hand, sat in his aisle seat, annoyed by humanity.
All of it. Every last drop.
For whatever reason, he was even more tightly wound that day. If I didn’t know him better, I’d have asked why. But Joe was like an angry toddler in the middle of a tantrum on the inside when he got like that. He could hold onto his emotions and keep the outside in check.
But not if you provoked him.
Asking out of compassion about his feelings was a form of provocation, I’d learned. Everyone’s different, right? If you don’t ask Darla what she’s feeling, she takes the absence of the ask to be an affront. When I was younger, I always imagined I’d find the love of my life out there somewhere. I knew it would involve emotions and give and take, but I never expected to be in a long term emotional relationship with two people.
And having two doesn’t make the intensity double. It goes up by a factor of more. I used to think it was a factor of four, but as time passes, I’ve given up trying to quantify it.
All I can do is experience it.
Darla made that raspy little sighing sound I loved. It was the sound of contentment, a casual noise you make when you can just be your real self with someone. I shifted in my seat and looked at her phone. She was wearing earbuds, so I couldn’t hear it, but she was watching more gambling videos.
Joe thought she was being childish and had no problem saying so, but I understood. The first time I went to Vegas it was like someone shot adrenaline straight into my heart, over and over, until I became nothing but a flesh balloon filled with excitement.
When you’re that high on nothing but eagerness, you need alcohol to mellow you out.
Which is why Vegas is the perfect party town.
“Hey,” I said, nudging her. “Planning on gambling?”
“A little. Why not? It’s like sweeping.”
Sweeping is Darla’s lingo for entering sweepstakes, which is what her mom does all the time. You go online and find contests and enter to see if you can win prizes. I couldn’t understand how someone could do that for a living, but Cathy does it seven days a week for a few hours. I guess if you’re disabled, it’s a way to get something extra.
The steady flow of ‘winnings’ that Cathy sends to Darla are bizarre, though. We know the UPS and Fedex delivery people so well, they come to all our parties, and Darla finally had to tell her mom we didn’t need more mugs, can coozies, or water bottles, because we were just donating them to Goodwill.
The year’s supply of condoms, however, came in handy.
“Gambling is nothing like sweeping,” Joe grumbled.
“Yes it is! You’re hoping for something you have no control over.”
“You most certainly have control in both cases.”
“If that were true, everyone would win.”
“You don’t have control over the outcome,” he groused. “You do have control over whether to play the odds.”
“You mean, like, the only way to win is to play?”
“Exactly.”
“But once you play, all you can do is hope,” she added, extending her logic. I agreed with her and wondered why Joe was digging in.
“No.”
“Make up your mind, Joe,” she chided. I watched him bristle. It was like a cat slowly discovering its owner wanted the cat to follow its human
agenda.
Good luck with that.
“No, Darla, it’s not about hope. It’s about strategy.”
“And trusting that you have just as much chance at a positive outcome as you do of a negative outcome,” I said.
He gave me a withering look. It didn’t work.
“You sound like one of those Law of Attraction people. Did you read The Secret this morning while praying over your crystals?”
“Only after your mom gave them to me over breakfast,” I shot back.
Darla gasped, pulled out her remaining earbud, and sat up.
Joe didn’t even take the bait. “You can’t focus on positive vs. negative. You focus on strategy. Life isn’t about rolling the dice and getting lucky.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “We were lucky being born into well-off homes.”
Joe paled, the change in color so swift I thought my vision was impaired.
“And I was lucky meeting Trevor when he was hitchhiking naked, high as a kite,” Darla added as color slowly returned to Joe’s increasingly angry face. I hit some kind of nerve, but what?
“I’m talking about strategy for what you can control. For instance, you can choose whether to continue gambling or not. Choose to spend money or not. Choose to stay in a relationship or not.” Joe closed his eyes and pretended he was napping, but his body was taut, like a thick wire suspended between two immobile items.
“Is that relationship comment a hint?” Darla asked, eyebrow cocked.
“A hint at what?” he muttered.
“You thinking about leaving?”
“I’m giving an example, Darla. Not a hint.” Joe burrowed into his aisle seat, stuck his feet under the seat before him, and tried to brush Darla off.
Like that would ever work.
I sat up, on guard. What was Joe’s deal? He would always get tense before performances, but ever since he came home from visiting his Mom and Dad, he’d been off. Abrupt. More of a dick than his typical self, and I was getting sick of it.
“Joe, you okay?” Darla asked.
“What? Fine. Just let me sleep.”
She turned and looked at me, her shrug already half done. I gave it right back to her.
“See the roulette table, Trev? I think that’s where people who are inexperienced have the best chance.”
