The Wife Arrangement

by Penny Wylder

  “Enjoying sleeping around too much to ever get serious about one woman or choose a wife? Yes, I’ve noticed.” Dad glares at me over the top of his glass of water. “This is a family business, son. My grandfather founded Quint Motors, and then he passed the company on to my father before me. I’d planned to pass it on to you, son, after I go, so that one day, in the future, you can pass it on to your son or daughter next. But it’s looking more and more like there won’t be anyone for you to hand this company down to when the time comes.”

  I groan and lean back in my seat. “Dad, you’re being ridiculous.”

  “What do I always tell you is the most important thing?”

  “Family, yes—”

  “Even more important than money. Even more important than a successful business, or making good cars, or finding the right buyers. Family is all you have at the end of the day, when everything else fades. You say you know that, you claim to understand it, and yet here you are, no grandchildren, not even a decent prospect of a future wife to show for it. How can I believe that you really value family?”

  “I put up with you every day, don’t I?” I mutter.

  Wrong direction to steer in. Dad’s face goes white, then red-hot. “I’ve made this too easy for you. I’ve let you waltz through business school and through the last ten years of working for us like you’re the heir apparent. But this company would never have existed without family, and it won’t exist without that support in the future.” Dad leans forward and jams his finger into my face. “Plenty of your cousins would kill to be in your shoes. Given the real respect and family-mindedness they show, I have a mind to name one of them as the heir at the reunion.”

  “What?” I nearly shout. Other faces swivel in our direction, other people in the restaurant lean closer to spy. I ignore them, though I do lower my voice a touch. “That’s insane, Dad. I’ve been involved in this business from the minute I was old enough to understand what a car was. I’ve devoted all my spare time to working for you, putting in the hours, understanding how every inch of this company operates.”

  “And yet you failed to understand the most important lesson—the most important thing—in the world.”

  “This is ridiculous. What does having a wife and kids have to do with owning a business?”

  “Everything, son,” Dad snaps. “That’s what you don’t see. That’s what I won’t wait around for you to wake up to.”

  “So, what? You’re just going to sign Quint Motors over to my cousins, and that’s it?”

  “You could change my mind.” Dad leans back in his seat. He eyes me now, cool once more, his expression composed.

  Beneath the table, out of sight, I clench my fists. “How?” I ask through gritted teeth. I know I won’t like whatever’s coming next. But whatever I expect, it isn’t this.

  “Find a woman.” He holds up a hand, forestalling my protest. Because it’s not like I can’t find women just about anywhere I go. “A marriageable woman,” Dad clarifies. “A wife. If you can find a wife by the time we all leave for Greece, then maybe I’ll believe you’re as serious about this company’s future—and more importantly, this family’s future—as you claim to be.”

  “You sound like a crazy person. I’m not listening to this.” I wave a hand to get the waiter’s attention. I need the check. I’m out.

  Dad lunges across the table and grabs my wrist. “All your mother and I ever dreamed about was having a big family.” His eyes bore into mine as he says it, as though he’s willing me to understand.

  But I don’t. I don’t get it. I’ve never felt the way about a woman like he felt about Mom. I’ve never looked at a girl and thought, I’d like to have dozens of kids with her. I’m just not like him. On some core level.

  “You’re our only shot at that now,” Dad is saying. “You’re our only hope at fulfilling our dream.”

  “Exactly.” I stand, giving up on the waiter. “Your dream, Dad. That’s what you wanted. I’m different, okay?”

  “Well.” Dad releases my wrist and turns his attention back to the table, unrolling his own silverware. Clearly he plans to stay and eat anyway. “If we’re so different, then you won’t care about my decision to hand the company over to one of your cousins instead. Maybe Alexander. He does always have good manufacturing suggestions…”

  My blood boils. Alexander is half the salesman I am, I think. Last time we let him run a European business conference himself, he walked away without a single new buyer. Not a single one. You have to be completely incompetent to do that—Quint cars practically sell themselves.

  “If you want to run this business into the ground, have at it,” I mutter as I turn to stride away.

  “One month,” Dad calls at my retreating spine. “You have one month to prove to me you’re not a lifelong bachelor after all, or I drop you from the company roster.”

  * * *

  “I need a wife,” I tell Greg.

  Once he finishes laughing, I scowl and snatch the stack of intern applications from his hands.

  “I’m serious,” I say, fanning the pages of the applications, but not really paying any attention to the ink on the paper, what any of the words say. “Dad’s talking about giving Alex the company if I don’t get serious. Find someone to settle down with.”

  “Alex?” Greg says in the same tone you’d use about a pile of manure you stepped in. “The same Alex whose accountant we had to fire because he was embezzling thousands of dollars that Alex didn’t even notice was missing?”

  “One and the same.” I drop the stack of intern applications once more with a groan. “Dad thinks Alex will be more serious about running the company because he’s family-oriented. Him or any one of my other married-with-children cousins. He’s holding it against me that I don’t have a million grandkids for him to spoil yet.” I run my hand through my hair, teeth gritted in frustration.

  Over and over, ever since lunch, I’ve replayed our lunchtime fight in my head. And over and over, I just hear his voice on repeat. If you can find a wife by the time we all leave for Greece…

  Crazy. He’s crazy. That’s a month away. And I’m not going to just marry some random woman to please him, to do what he says. It’s my life. I get some damned say in it, don’t I?

  “He told me I had to be married by the reunion,” I inform the ceiling. “Or he’s giving Quint Motors to someone else in the family.”

  Greg laughs. Then he catches a glimpse of my expression, and sobers immediately. “But that’s in a month. That’s insane.”

  “I know.” I roll my eyes once more.

  Greg, on the other hand, gets a new expression. A tight-lipped one that I recognize.

  His thinking face.

  “Uh oh.” I side-eye him. “You only ever look like that when you’re about to suggest something completely batshit, you know.”

  “Because I think I am.” Greg turns to face me. “You only need a wife for the reunion, right? Your father is stepping down, naming the new CEO at the retirement event they’re all planning on day, what, four of the weeklong reunion?”

  “Something like that,” I agree.

  “So you only need a wife for that long. Once he signs Quint Motors over to you, it doesn’t matter what he wants—the company becomes yours.”

  I tilt my chair forward and tear my eyes from the ceiling, sensing where this is going. “Good thought, but unfortunately, it’s not quite that cut-and-dry. Once he makes me CEO, Dad’s still going to retain the majority share in the company stocks. Not to mention our family holds the rest of the stocks. He can bully and strong-arm them into ousting me the minute I ditch any temporary wife I show up with.”

  “True. Unless your father approves of the divorce,” Greg says with a laugh, because my father, Mr. Family Man’s, favorite rant topic is about kids these days and how little they value lasting marriages.

  But… “Hang on.” Lightbulb. I look at Greg. “Say that again.”

  He frowns. “Unless your father approves of t
he divorce?” he repeats. “But, he never would, I mean, he doesn’t approve of that unless…”

  “Unless it’s someone like the crazy cheating woman Luke left before his second wife?” I say, mind racing. “The one trying to get her hands on his inheritance. Or like the one Chloe split up with, the one she married when she was a teenager, he was a real trip, utterly classless…”

  Greg sits forward in the chair, following my drift. “So if you do find a wife, but she’s absolutely completely awful…”

  “Then Dad would be begging me to divorce her. He’d be completely apologetic for forcing me into marrying so quickly in the first place too. And I can tell him I’ll only divorce her if he makes me CEO without any of his crazy conditions.”

  “That could work,” Greg agrees. “But where the hell are you going to find a woman like that? Just start scouring local bars for a pick-up?”

  He keeps talking, but I don’t hear the rest. My eyes have landed on a cast-aside stack of papers, and my brain is already ticking into overtime. I reach out and snatch up the pile of intern assignments once more. “It has to be someone desperate,” I hear myself saying. “Not an ounce of class in her. Someone who doesn’t fit in our world, someone who’ll take to rich like a fish out of water. The most untrustworthy gold-digger type you can find.”

  Greg slides the stack of intern files out of my hands then. “In that case,” he says, flipping through it with the practiced eye of a man who’s already read through this file at least a dozen times today. “I have the perfect candidate in mind…”

  With that, he withdraws a single slip of paper with my one last chance at freedom written on it.

  “Deeandra Smith,” I read aloud.

  2

  Dee

  “Holy shit, Melissa, you are not going to believe where I’m headed right now,” I shout into my car phone speaker.

  “Walmart,” my best friend guesses.

  Bless her heart. “I said you wouldn’t believe it, not that it’s the most believable place I could be at noon on a Tuesday.” I roll my eyes.

  “Just trying to be realistic, Dee.” In the background, I hear the fuzz of the TV, and the distant shouts of children. Melissa watches her neighbor’s brood of four kids on weekdays to earn extra cash because her husband Arnold can barely afford their rent, even working double overtime shifts down at the plant.

  “I told you, I don’t need the greeter job anymore. I’m moving up in the world.”

  “Yeah, moving up to where, exactly?” Then Melissa shouts something else, which sounds like a string of curse words followed by a yell at one of the kids.

  I wince in sympathy and wait for the havoc to die down on her end. “I got an internship!”

  “Oh awesome! Congratulations!” Melissa returns to the phone breathing harder than before, but I’ve learned by now not to ask for more details. It’ll likely involve an excess of diapers, puke stains, or worse. “I hope it’s not one of those unpaid ones where they work you to the bone for zero salary…” Her voice goes hesitant again.

  Melissa knows how hard I worked to get my degree in a correspondence course, so that I could start applying for real jobs. Tear myself away from the minimum wage retail industry that ate the rest of my family—what little remained, anyway—alive. “It’s paid,” I reassure her, my tone cheerful. “And better than I was making, too.”

  “Well praise for that. Then again, just about anything would be better paid than a package store greeter.” Melissa grunts, and I hear a toddler squeal somewhere near the receiver. “I keep telling you, you should get into the nannying gig, it’s decent money.”

  “I think it takes a real saint like you to put up with other people’s kids for so long.” I laugh.

  “What, don’t you want a whole passel of your own?” I hear more grunts, and then the toddler near the phone begins to yell something about a bottle.

  “Sure, eventually,” I shout back, over the sound of wails. “But with the right person, you know? Not just like… Stealing my neighbor’s kids.”

  Melissa bursts into laughter. “Hey, don’t knock it till you try it. And you, Ryan, knock it off.” She vanishes for a few moments, then returns once more, torn between laughter and an exhausted-sounding resignation. “So, where is this mystery gig, huh?”

  “That’s the best part…” I grin to myself and pause for dramatic effect. “Quint Motors.”

  “What?! No way!” Now Melissa sounds like the screechy one. “That’s amazing—you’ve been geeking out over their cars for, what, the past decade? Ever since Will took you to prom in his old vintage… what was it called?”

  “Andromeda.”

  “That’s right. The one that looks like it fell straight out of the sixties version of a sci-fi movie.”

  I roll my eyes, but also grin as I check my directions and make a right turn through a packed intersection. “It’s a classic. As are most of the models they’ve put out ever since. Not to mention word on the street is that their forthcoming model is going to blow the luxury car market wide open.”

  “God, can you imagine?” For a moment, I hear Melissa pause on the other end. “Having enough money to waste on cars like that?”

  “I can.” I sigh under my breath. I have been imagining it, for just about all my life. But for a girl like me, owning a car like the ones Quint Motors produces is a pipe dream. Still, working for them, and with those cars, could be the next best thing. Right?

  “Oh right, I forget that you like that kind of stuff. If you were rich, you’d be insufferable, wouldn’t you? Buying some new fancy car every other week, speeding them so fast down roads you flip them into telephone poles…”

  I gasp in faux offense. “When I own my private fleet of Quint Motors cars, I will never crash them into something so quaint as a telephone pole.”

  “Only the most expensive car crashes for you?” Melissa laughs. “But seriously though, congrats again. That’s, like, the perfect job for you. Miss Wannabe Mechanic. Do you get to wear jeans and greasy shirts to work too? If they try to make you dress up like an office girl, I think you might explode,” she warns.

  I snort. “I own dresses!” I protest.

  “One dress.”

  “Okay, one dress. It must have worked well in my preliminary interview because they gave me the internship, right?”

  “Uh huh. And what are you wearing today? Same dress?”

  Crap. I glance down at myself. The plain blue shift-dress seemed about right for my first day of interning. It’s office-y, boring. Everything I normally hate. But I scored this one on megasale for five bucks, and it’s served me well in situations like this. When I have to, on occasion, I clean up nice. “Do you think they’ll notice?” I ask.

  “Who interviewed you, the same people you’ll be working with?”

  “No, some assistant. Greg something?”

  “Hmm. If it’s a guy, he might not notice.” A pause. “Unless he’s gay.”

  “Hmm.” I think back to the interview. “Really couldn’t tell.”

  “Then you might get caught. But hey, who cares, it’s just one day. Pretend you’re doing laundry if someone asks about the same outfit thing. Or, ooh, do you have a scarf or something in the car? Toss that on, change up the look a little.”

  My head swims. Dammit. I didn’t even think about this stuff. I’m used to rolling into work in my only pair of non-completely-holy jeans and my assigned uniform polo top. Not having a whole closet full of appropriate clothing to choose from. “Thanks, Melissa.”

  “What are friends for?” She laughs. “In this case, whipping your tomboy butt into shape. Okay, I gotta run—oh God, Simon, no!” The other end of the phone dissolves into screams and distant peels of triumphant toddler laughter.

  I disconnect, just in time it seems, as I pull into the Quint Motors parking lot. Now my face really does flush, not from the idea of wearing the wrong dress, though. Because arriving to this parking lot in my junky, beat-up, twenty-year-old car—the one I’ve
just barely been able to keep wheezing along through life with a lot of TLC and a really good friend down at my local mechanic who slips me spare parts for wholesale price when nobody’s looking—is way more embarrassing than being caught in a cheap work outfit.

  I slide into a free spot between a 2018 Phoenix and a 2019 Aspen. I didn’t even know the new Aspen was out yet. Maybe that’s some big-wig’s car who got it on pre-sale. I eyeball it with interest as I open my car door, grab my purse, and square my shoulders. Right. Time to do this. Time to change my life from boring-minimum-wage-retail-worker to Girl With Real Job.

  All I need to do is ace this internship and land a permanent spot with the company. How hard could that be?

  This is what I’ve worked for.

  Growing up, Ma always told me that if you put your noses to the grindstone, you’d be rewarded in spades. Never stop working, she’d always say, and eventually you’ll make it. The tortoise and the hare was her favorite parable, you might say.

  This is for you, Ma, I think, a little pang in my heart at that. I wish she could be here to see it all finally pay off—all these years of hard work. But unfortunately, cancer claimed her far too young. It left me solo, considering my father had died just a few years before her, and my older brother ran off the minute he died. I was a wreck when she first passed, but now, with a few years’ space, the pain has gotten manageable. That, and I have Melissa, and our little tight-knit circle of friends to serve as my new family.

  But there’s still an ache. Still a little family-shaped hole in my chest where my old life used to be.

  I push that thought to the back of my mind and wipe the frown off my face. Today is a happy day. Not a day to cry over the past—a day to look to the future, to the bright new life I’m going to build. One that would make Ma proud. One that will make her proud, from wherever she is looking down on me now.

  My smile returns with a vengeance and I slam my car door and stride into the lobby of Quint Motors with my head held high, chin up. Whatever this new internship entails—which, from the job description on the application site sounded like a little bit of everything, with some hands-on experience with the cars, some office training, even the potential for a day on the test track with new models (I definitely geeked out over that last possibility)—I’m going to ace it.