The Run Around

by Bernadette Franklin

  “There’s no reason we can’t make off with a bottle of wine after the reception and smuggle it to our cabins and share it. I’m avoiding alcohol for the same reason. And I’m foolishly waiting for after the first round rush so I won’t be tempted to toss some of my more annoying relatives overboard.”

  “I see your patience with the reception is shot already. Elizabeth put us in the corner so we wouldn’t be as tempted to leave early.”

  Rick set his fidget toy on the table. “My family has mastered the art of senseless small talk, and they’re usually more concerned about talking about each other than anything interesting. And they can’t even be funny about the senseless small talk.”

  “Florida Man headlines are rather amusing. I bet the gift card is for a ridiculous amount, and we’ll be forced to spend hours in the bookstore trying to decide what we want to get. That’s the real tragedy here. We’re being forced to wait to go to the bookstore. Had I known I was attending a torture session, I would have contracted some sort of plague the night before the wedding and made someone else do the work.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, not knowing how hard Juliette worked on your clothes.”

  Damn. He had me dead to rights. “I can think about it, right?”

  “Absolutely. I considered it, too. Alas, we’re stuck here.” Rick straightened, his attention focusing on something behind me. “The bride and groom are headed our way, they have red-wrapped presents, and my mother is with them. Ah, my father is, too. It seems he’s being used as a mule. They are being excessive again.”

  “Which they? The bride, the groom, or your parents?”

  “All of the above.”

  “Aren’t people going to be upset there are so many gifts?” I turned in my seat to confirm the size of the disaster approaching our table, and everybody had at least a few presents in hand, which would make it difficult to get everything back to the cabin without help. “That’s an absurd number of gifts.”

  Elizabeth grinned at me, and she deposited her armload of gifts beside my seat. “It is an absurd number of gifts, but Aunt Carolina made a bet we couldn’t get you to accept them all, and it has become a wedding-wide event. We come bearing gifts, and if you accept them, Aunt Carolina owes me a week in the Bahamas.”

  “I am accepting your gifts only because it serves her right to owe you a week in the Bahamas,” I replied. “I will likely regret this decision when I see what’s inside, but I couldn’t possibly sacrifice your week in the Bahamas at her expense. The number of times I had to tell her no completely justifies this.”

  Rick snickered, and he got up, kissing his mother on the cheek before exchanging hugs with his father. The pair, who barely seemed old enough to have a son Rick’s age, stood at ease and regarded me with interest. “Mom, Dad, this is Hope, our most esteemed wedding planner and the owner of Edgar Allan Paw and Lenore.”

  As I had gifts practically on my shoes, I offered a strained smile. “I’d get up, but I’m trapped. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” Rick’s mother replied. “Thank you for accepting the gifts. It will be amusing notifying Carolina she has lost yet another bet today. She was convinced the wedding would be a disaster because all of her precious recommendations were ignored, and she was certain the reception would be a disaster when it’s everything but. Also, thank you for including the deviled eggs. She screamed when she saw them.”

  “She screamed? But why? They’re just deviled eggs.” I would spend at least an hour wondering about the woman and her problem with food. “They’re fancy deviled eggs, though. I thought the caterer would cry when I asked for them to be included until I mentioned who disliked them. For some reason, they became a favorite dish after that. I can only presume she kept annoying the staff.”

  “Of course. That’s how she operates. She just isn’t satisfied unless she tests every limit possible. As for the eggs, I have no idea what goes on in her head. She’s got a problem with eggplant, too. I swear, every time she checks out one of the buffet tables, she finds something to start screaming about.”

  I covered my mouth so I wouldn’t be caught giggling over my payback for being a pain in the ass. “How interesting.”

  “It’s like someone gave the wedding planner a list of Carolina’s least favorite foods.” Rick’s mother raised a brow and stared at him.

  Rick grinned, and he held up his hands while he shrugged. “We were allowed to make one request each, which would be considered for inclusion. I just happened to use my request to make certain the wedding planner knew what Aunt Carolina loved and hated. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do. If she hadn’t bothered the wedding planner so much, I’m sure more of her loved dishes would have made an appearance.”

  “You are a terrible boy. Who raised you to be so bad?” Rick’s mother scowled.

  With his grin still in place, he pointed at his mother.

  “Where did I go wrong with you?” Rick’s mother transferred the packages she carried to her son, who had to put them on the floor because they wouldn’t fit on his lap or on the table. “There are a few in there for you, Rick, but the rest are for her. She has earned them. All you’ve earned is coal, and I’m very disappointed Elizabeth insisted on proper gifts for you.”

  “What did I do now?”

  “First, you moved to Japan. Since Japan wasn’t bad enough, you moved to America. You don’t write, you don’t come home for visits. No, you do whatever it is you want to do.”

  “I don’t write because I call you at least three times a week. I do come home for visits, I just don’t come home every weekend like you want me to.”

  “It would be nice if you would.”

  “The jet lag would kill me.”

  “Don’t be such a baby. It’s just a little jet lag.”

  Edward laughed and added to the pile of presents surrounding my chair. “Thank you for your hard work on the wedding, Hope. You’ve done a spectacular job. You’re officially off duty, and I told the staff to come to me with any problems—and that I wouldn’t be happy if anyone came to me with any problems, and that I’d be taking my unhappiness out on the requester. That should let you enjoy the rest of the evening. The staff has everything under control, and when I inquired, they reported that everything was minor hiccups that nobody really cares about, in that they didn’t want to have to explain their problem to you and thought it wise just to accept they weren’t getting their way. One of my cousins apparently doesn’t handle being at sea well, but I was told you’d reserved a cabin in the best place in the ship for that sort of thing, so he’s been moved there.”

  I grimaced. “The captain told me there’s usually a few, and I can probably make arrangements for another cabin if there’s more issues.”

  “I already spoke to the captain, and he’ll take care of it if it is an issue. Also, avoid the deck two levels below us unless you want Mrs. Carter cuddling with you. She’s our first victim of overindulgence, supervised by Mr. Carter, who just shrugged and said she only gets to let loose once a year. He’ll keep her contained. In good news, she’s a very happy drunk.”

  “Most people on the ship are going to be drunk within the next two hours,” I warned. “We literally have a plan for how the staff should deal with the overly intoxicated and do cabin checks with various hangover remedies in the morning. Anyone who gets too drunk will have a staff member keeping an eye on them and be cut off.”

  Edward sighed. “I wish I could say it won’t be a problem, but it really will be. I don’t think anyone on my side of the family will be able to move before noon, and even then, they’ll believe they’re dying.”

  I decided I would be passing on the alcohol, as there was little more amusing than being the only person not hungover following a party. “Try not to join them, you two. Thank you for the presents.”

  Elizabeth leaned over my gifts and gave me a hug. “Thank you for being such a good sport about all of this. Rick, keep a close eye on he
r. My brothers have been drinking.”

  “Your brothers are not nearly as talented at flirting the skirts off ladies as they like to believe,” Rick grumbled. “That said, I’ll keep a close eye on her. Please note that we are protesting the throwing of the bouquet and garter, and we may toss ourselves overboard should we be forced to attend that portion of the reception.”

  The bride giggled and waved her hand. “It’s happening on the same deck with Juliette in thirty minutes, and I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you claim you’d miss it—and I’ll even act like I thought I saw you there. You can just assume you caught it. You’re next.”

  Without waiting for his reply, Elizabeth turned and left, and her groom followed, leaving us with Rick’s parents. They waited for the pair to turn the corner before Rick’s mother rested her hands on her hips. “And why are you skipping the traditional toss, Fredrick?”

  “The last time anything was tossed or hit at a wedding, it collided with Hope’s head. I am preventing that from happening by barring our attendance. That, plus I want to eat when everyone else is crowding a different deck and I have the entire buffet to myself.” Rick pointed to the buffet tables, which were being refreshed by the caterers. “Speaking of which, the first wave is over, and that is my cue to get dinner. Would you mind guarding Hope’s hoard of presents while we partake of the offerings? Aunt Carolina might try to add something wicked to them while we’re gone.”

  “Well played, Fredrick. Well played. We’ll watch your gifts. When you’re ready to retire for the night, flag somebody down to help carry everything to your cabins. Elizabeth warned the staff this morning you’d have a lot to handle and would need the help.”

  When opportunity knocked and fresh food was waiting, a smart woman took advantage. I rose from my seat, stepping carefully around the gifts so I wouldn’t trip, fall, and break my neck—or fall overboard. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “No, thank you. This has been the most entertaining family wedding we’ve been to yet, and hardly anybody is drunk yet. The fun’s just starting.”

  Twenty-Three

  Is your aunt someone you’d toss overboard?

  Rick and I stayed at the reception long enough to eat dinner and make off with several glass bottles of water before staging a retreat to our cabins. Three members of the crew helped us carry everything over, and we used my cabin to determine which gifts were mine and which were his. As warned, I got the lion’s share of the presents, leaving him with a gift bag and a single box.

  “Do they like you?” I asked, frowning at the ridiculous number of boxes, bags, and baskets taking over my cabin. “They don’t know me well enough to like me this much, Rick.”

  “They adore you. You gave them their dream wedding without any of the headache we normally go through. You even have contingencies if anyone else wants to get married during the cruise. Really, I’m considering trying to figure out how to hire you away from your company. Your project management skills borders on the insane. Are you sure you’re an accountant? You handled the planning like it’s your main job. Honestly, I’ve seen professional planners be less thorough.”

  “Professional planners probably have a set method they use to plan a wedding, and they stick to their method, where I made it up as I went to keep things from being taken over by the various friends and family determined to have the wedding suitable for them rather than the bride and groom. Absurd, really. If they want to attend the wedding perfect for them, they should go get married.”

  “Well, a lot of them tried to do that, but they kept driving the wedding planners away.”

  “That’s their own dumb fault, then.”

  “It really is. I expect my gifts are either pranks or taunts, as both have taken up annoying me as a hobby. I think Elizabeth has sided with my mother, indulging in a vendetta for moving abroad. I mean, she was already on my back for having moved to Japan, but moving to the United States? I have brought shame to the family name.”

  I snorted at that. “But didn’t you move to work on your little empire?”

  “It’s not quite little, but it still has growing pains from time to time. The new branch in the United States is already doing better than I initially thought it would, but it helped I was able to get a good core employee base. Good employees make or break a company. That’s one thing I learned while in Japan. They work exceptionally hard, often at high personal cost to themselves, so I got a lot of first-hand experience managing and preventing burnout. I am hoping to top employee satisfaction in the area while also building a good profit margin. I’ve been doing a lot of investing while the market is low, and I’ll be reinvesting my profits into growing my business efforts. I’m branching into new fields, including banking, so it’s going to be a challenge. Starting a new bank is particularly difficult, although I have enough global infrastructure to pull it off. The banking effort started because I had too many employees in the United States struggling with their banking situation, so I got the banking insurance sorted, and I eliminated the elements making it difficult for my employees to maintain an account.”

  “But how?”

  “No overdrafts are permitted through my banking institution as a starter. If the person doesn’t have the money in the account, the transaction is declined. That prevents the overdraft fees, which is a huge financial barrier. I don’t require good credit for them to have an account, either—nor do I charge monthly fees. I make the money back by not offering interest on the checking accounts, and the interest rates on the savings accounts are tolerable but lower than competitors. It’s been working so far, especially as a lot of the banking clients couldn’t otherwise get accounts at all. Bank security is a beast, though—but that was one of my first business ventures. One of my companies is specialized in software that monitors for fraud, and we’ve come up with an app that lets banking users manually authorize each transaction using the app and their phone’s camera. It adds an extra step when paying for something, but people like the security, and it prevents card readers from skimming the credit or debit cards and being able to withdraw or use them. If you don’t have the physical card, the phone, and your special code generated at the time of purchase, you can’t process any transactions. Keeping call center staff available to help is expensive, but we save a great deal of money preventing the fraud from happening in the first place. Users can also call in, verify their identity, and have their cards unlocked that way.”

  “And when you don’t have much money, losing any money to fraud is a big deal.”

  “Exactly. I figure my real fortune will be made from that security system, if I can make it secure enough hackers can’t readily bypass it. So far, my fraud numbers are exceptionally low, especially for such a new institution. Frauds piss me off. If I could tie thieves and con artists to the cruise ship and drag them through the wake while chumming the water for sharks, I really would. And I’d discourage the sharks from eating them for at least an hour to make sure they got in adequate suffering time. Those assholes steal from people who usually don’t have enough money to cover the basics as it is—and then the big bankers finish the job off charging them overdraft fees instead of just preventing them from paying for something they can’t afford in the first place. Maybe I should drag the big bankers behind the ship.”

  I giggled at the thought of Rick tying a bunch of bankers to the cruise ship and feeding them to the sharks. “Is your aunt someone you’d toss overboard?”

  “Sometimes, I consider it. She’s not that bad, but she definitely lacks a general connection with the rest of the world. Elizabeth forgets the value of things, too, but she’s sweet enough to make up for it. Hell, I forget, too—that’s why I invite my lowest-earning employees for a chit-chat and discuss their financials with them. Things change year after year, and what worked one year might not work the next. I do a handful of such meetings every month, and I usually target the employees that the managers tell me seem to be stressed. Money usually stresses people, so I evaluate the situation a
nd figure out how to provide for my employees. It’s been a challenge.”

  I bet. “I see you have a deeply ingrained need to be as busy as possible. Do you hate sleep, Rick? Because all of those challenges you’re making for yourself make it sound like you hate sleep.”

  “What is sleep?”

  “It usually happens in a bed, and in my case, there’s usually two furry beasts who join me and try to serve as blankets. There was one incident where I became a bed for three furry beasts, and I didn’t mind at all. Sleeping isn’t easy when the dogs decide to sleep on you.”

  “It seems you were plenty content to sleep with the dogs on you. You didn’t budge the first time someone tried to wake you up. You can’t trick me. You’re a sound sleeper. Would you even notice if I stole away your dog in the middle of the night? He’d warm my bed nicely.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, grabbed one of the baskets off the floor, and picked at the ribbon securing the wrapping paper. “Did I give you the key, or are you breaking and entering to get to my dog?”

  “You would be offering me the key, of course.”

  I laughed. “The only way you’re getting to my dog is if I have equal and easy access to your dog. If you’re going to try to steal my dog, I’m going to try to steal your dog. I have no intentions of losing. Both dogs will be mine. And you can’t have my cat, either.”

  “If you steal my dog, I will be forced to visit her daily, as she’s my dog. I have to go where she goes. That’s a universal rule of dog ownership, except when I’m going places she can’t go.”

  According to the contents of the basket, Elizabeth and Edward believed I needed to spend more time reading, as there were more gift cards to various bookstores around New York City, a throw blanket, several book-themed mugs, and a book light if I decided to try to read printed books in the dark. I showed Rick one of the mugs and the collection of gift cards. “I think they just gave me a hermit’s starter kit. Do I need to leave my apartment ever again after I finish buying more books?”