Tom Hubbard Is Dead

by Robert Price

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jon Goldberg hardly ever drank alcohol. However, the gray, raw November day, accented by the dancing flames in the fireplaces of the Hubbard farmhouse and the multitude of smartly dressed folks conversing around them, created a romantic New England atmosphere that called for a glass. Or maybe it was just the way the big black man in the living room comfortably held his glass of red wine that made the idea of having one seem so appealing. Either way, Jon abandoned his post as official greeter, a position his commanding wife, Elizabeth, had assigned him, and went to join the crowd at the makeshift bar in the dining room.

  Arnaldo the caterer looked up from the serving line and waved to Jon entering the room. Jon replied with a close-mouthed smile that turned his full red lips into thin pink lines. He raised his thick, black eyebrows into an expression he thought coy and cool—understated, but clearly issuing a friendly hello. Unfortunately, Jon’s signature greeting had the same effect on Arnaldo as it did on the paralegals at the office, his law partners and all who visited the firm: It hid any warmth and left others feeling as though he were snobby, disinterested, or, worse, dissatisfied with them. Arnaldo, now convinced Jon was unhappy with his work, turned his attention back to the serving line, feeling a little more disgruntled with his employers for underestimating the size of the party. Jon felt satisfied though, and, thinking of Arnaldo as a friend, turned away and proceeded to the bar.

  Once there, Jon was surprised to find that some guests must have brought their own beverages. The selection he and Elizabeth had approved with Arnaldo, a case each of red and white wine, two cases of imported beer and some of the harder liquors—whisky, scotch, vodka and gin—was dwarfed by what now looked like an abundantly stocked bar. There were eight open bottles of different red wines.

  Jon didn’t know one from the other. He pursed his lips and pushed up his cheeks as if a connoisseur scrutinizing the possibilities that hid behind the labels. Wondering if he and Elizabeth even owned a bottle of wine, Jon determined that in fact they did; they had had a party last year and after it ended he had moved a box with several leftover bottles out to the garage.

  But the last time he had actually had a glass of wine, he recalled, was on the Jewish New Year, when he, Elizabeth and the children had been invited to their friends the Levine’s for dinner. Jon’s mother, on the other hand, was known to take the occasional drink and even become a little tipsy. Not Jon. As an undergraduate he got drunk several times, but by senior year he was finished with that.

  Jon was lost in thought when the man next to him spoke: “You gonna have to pick one of ’em.” Two scrawny, dirty-looking, older men had sneaked up next to him; Elizabeth’s two uncles, Peter and Ally Hubbard, were picking up bottles by their necks and placing them back down in their search for the whiskey.

  “The way you looking at that bottle there, you must be an aficionado,” said the other brother, his speech lagging from the drinking he had begun hours earlier.

  “Me?” Jon smiled his signature thin smile and raised his eyebrows. He noticed pieces of chicken in Alley Hubbard’s bushy, gray mustache. “Actually, I don’t know one from the other.”

  “Let me introduce myself then,” Peter Hubbard said. “I’m Julio Gallo and this here’s my brother, Ernest Gallo.” The two men started laughing.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Jon said, trying to hide the fact that their sarcasm had insulted him. He remembered their proper names from when Elizabeth had briefly recapped their contentious history with the family. So choosing not to carry the exchange any further and he turned back to the drawing of a vineyard on the label of the bottle in his hand.

  “Found it!” said Alley Hubbard, twisting the brown screw top off a liter of whisky.

  “Top ’em off!” ordered Peter Hubbard, pushing a plastic cup to the space on the table between the two of them.

  Alley wiped his mustache, poured whisky into the plastic cups and leaned forward over the bar to see around his brother.

  “We seen you come in with Lizzy. You her husband?” He pointed at Jon with the neck of the bottle he held.

  “He’d best be,” laughed Peter Hubbard as he picked up a plastic cup and turned to face Jon.

  “Yes, I am. We’ve been married seven years now.” Jon adopted what he thought was a pleasant tone.

  “We’re Lizzy’s uncles, her father’s brothers,” said Alley Hubbard.

  “Well, nice to meet you.”

  “Is that so? You hear that, Alley?” Peter Hubbard put a boney hand on Alley’s fragile looking shoulder. “The man here says it’s nice to meet you. I bet it is.”

  “He marries our niece,” Alley Hubbard ran his fingers through his mustache again and chicken crumpled out, “our brother’s only daughter, and he don’t even invite us to the Goddamn wedding.” Alley Hubbard cocked his head to the side. “Nice to meet you, you say?”

  “This one here,” Peter Hubbard spoke loudly with a drunken slur and turning to the other guests in the dining room, “this one here, he drags our family off to California, marries our brother’s daughter, then comes back and says, ‘Nice to meet you.’” Extending an arm toward the center of the room, Peter Hubbard scrunched up his face and spit out, “We hears you have kids and don’t go so far … won’t even lift a finger or nothin’ … as to tell us nothin’ about ’em.”

  “Well, I …”

  “Well, nothin’,” Alley Hubbard pointed directly at Jon. “You come back here, now that Tom’s dead, acting like you own the Goddamn place. Trying to step into our nephew’s rightful shoes.”

  “What? Wait—” Jon tried to remain calm.

  Alley Hubbard’s accusation was absurd. If the choice had been his, Jon would have stayed in Los Angles. He had hardly known his brother-in-law Tom, never mind harboring a desire to step into his shoes, whatever that meant. As far as he knew, Tom had washed his hands of this family a long time ago. If, as Jon assumed, these two old men’s anger was about Tom’s piece of land at the end of the street, then they should pick a fight with someone else, because he had nothing to do with it and wanted nothing to do with it.

  “‘Wait!’” Peter Hubbard snarled. “‘Wait,’ he says! We been waitin’ fah years! Tells us to wait, and he’s back here from California to capitalize on Tom’s death! Just ‘cause Tom don’t got no kids to leave it to, don’t mean it’s yours, hotshot. Just like that mother-in-law of yours who capitalized on our brother’s death. That last piece of land is rightfully ours!”

  The mourners in the dining room stood frozen. Arnaldo the caterer stopped serving and came out from behind the row of silver pans; judging by the brothers’ snarling expressions and the look of bewilderment on his employer’s face, he prepared to break up a fistfight. A little blonde-haired boy who had been playing nearby buried his head in his mother’s skirt and began to cry. The concerned mother rushed him into the kitchen access hallway.

  “Hold on,” Jon said, shaken. As a lawyer he had argued with the most unreasonable of people and won, but senseless, boiling anger intimidated him.

  “Hold on, nothing. I’ll show you hold on!” Peter Hubbard slammed a cup full of whiskey onto the makeshift bar. The plastic cup’s bottom cracked open and in the stillness that followed the only sound heard was the steady drip of whisky forming a puddle on the wide, Pumpkin-Pine floor board.

  Jon stepped back. A bead of sweat formed above his brow. Returning the bottle of red wine to the bar, he prepared for—he didn’t know what.

  Then Elizabeth’s cousin, Tony, a man more muscular than both Jon and the Hubbard brothers put together, barged in. Tony pushed his way from the front hallway through the crowd of tense mourners in the dining room, stepping between the three men.

  “Easy does it, cowboys,” he said in a calm, humorous voice.

  Peter and Alley Hubbard were his Aunt Casey’s in-laws, related to him through marriage. Like bored dogs that barked, he knew they were harmless; he had dealt with them throughout his life.

  Peter Hubbard
snidely responded, “Don’t you ‘boy’ us, you little—”

  The brothers took off their jackets and rolled up their shirtsleeves, fast shifting their attention from Jon to Tony. They adopted fighting stances that in their youth had probably appeared rather dangerous, but as older men they looked more like worn out farmers who had misplaced their shotguns, refugees from the dust bowl.

  “This isn’t a barroom, you yahoos. Back off!” Tony had intended to be respectful of the men, but the sight of the two old Hubbard brothers, jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up, faces ruddy, was too much and he laughed out loud.

  “Tell him to watch it,” Peter Hubbard addressed Tony, pointing to Jon. Then, as fast as it had started, the brothers abandoned their stances, picked up their jackets and cocked their shoulders back like roosters that had battled over a hen and won. Peter Hubbard took a new plastic cup, poured whisky into it and reiterated his threat to Jon: “You best watch your step, city boy.”

  The two men drunkenly sauntered as best they could across the dining room and into the entrance hallway.

  Arnaldo the caterer, happy to have gotten out of playing the role of peacemaker, asked, “Who’s next?”

  The buffet line re-formed and he began to serve again.

  Tony turned to Jon and, adopting a playful tone, asked, “You don’t seem like the fighting sort. Why are you picking a fight with those two?”

  “I was just—”

  “They’re harmless pains-in-the-ass anyway. You okay?” Tony asked.

  Just then Tony’s sister, Melanie, came up behind and, sliding an index finger through his back belt loop, tugged to get his attention.

  “Hey, you made it. About time,” he said.

  “Hi Jon,” Melanie said. The thought of hugging flashed through Jon and Melanie’s minds, but they had only met once before, at Jon and Elizabeth’s wedding, and so they were practically strangers. Neither made a move.

  “You two the ones scaring the little kids? It’s like a crying fest in the kitchen,” Melanie joked.

  “I don’t think I could scare a child,” Jon replied and offered Melanie his signature smile, relieved the drama had passed. Picking up a bottle of red wine, he pushed out a deep breath and placed the bottle back down. Having a glass of red wine had lost its appeal.