Zander's Firecracker

by Ember Flint

  I sigh. “Worry… you worry. I know that too, but like I said: I’m okay.”

  I don’t work so much only because I like to be bossy and have things my way, though I’ll never tell my big brother otherwise, I do it because I want him to have time for his family, for his wife.

  I want my nephews and nieces to have a daddy they can play with at home, so that’s why I’m always trying to be in charge: so that he doesn’t have to be, so that he can have the normal, happy life he so desperately wants and deserves. I don’t want him to have regrets like our dad.

  He was always a loving father and husband, but he worked too much, missed a lot of stuff; it broke his heart, it broke our mom’s heart.

  Once, after Mom had been gone for a while, he told me he always thought he had more time, that he could postpone things and she would always be there.

  They had so many projects…

  Our parents meant to retire just before she passed away. Dad was supposed to only retain the presidential seat on the Board of Directors and remain, so to speak, on call for us in an advisory-capacity only.

  Anthony and I were both old enough to take over completely seven years ago: we had respectively been CFO and COO of the corporation for a couple of years already.

  My brother had been promoted VP and was meant to step into the role of CEO at that point.

  I, aside from being in control of all operations across the company, had just been handed over the management of our family’s law firm and the charity foundations —I’ve got a double major in business and law with a particular focus on environmental issues, and being the head of legal and overseeing our charitable efforts had always been my one true dream.

  Mom and Dad planned to sail around the world on their yacht while they not-so-patiently waited for more grandkids, but then Mom was gone, and all the dreams Dad had of spoiling her and spending time simply being ‘normal’ parents and dotting grandparents went up in smoke.

  Our mom’s passing was hard on all of us: she was a wonderful person, but for Dad it was like he stopped living altogether.

  Dad’s still President and CEO to this day, but Anthony never begrudged having to just stay on as CFO, if anything, we’re both grateful that Markos Inc helped us pull our father out from the fog of his grief.

  This corporation isn’t just a job for us, we all love it. This company is a part of us: we built it up from nothing to what is today a ubiquitous, all-powerful economical empire, and we aren’t simply the ones who benefit from owning it, we are its caretakers. Dad’s dedication to Markos Inc and his pride in what our family has accomplished over the course of four generations of hard work is the reason why he didn’t completely fade away under the pain of the loss, I think. That, and the love he has for us and his grandkids.

  In the last year or so, he’s been doing better, though; I can tell he still misses Mom dearly, but he smiles more and acts a bit more like his old self, despite being very melancholic on occasion. I credit most of his retrieved good humor to the time he spends with Rosie, Lea, Nicky and baby Hector Jr and to Violet’s constant efforts to draw him out of his shell.

  I don’t want for my brother to go through this type of pain, not if I can help it. Truth is, if this wasn’t so important for Dad and our family, I would have never dreamed of calling him here today, but he doesn’t need to know any of this: he worries enough about everything as it is.

  Anthony takes the tablet from my hand and looks over the still-open document: it’s a list of all the possible activities that would be available for the execs participating to the retreats.

  My brother shakes his head and laughs.

  “What?” I turn to look at him again.

  “Do they really need to have their stays chock-full of activities, bro? I mean, you have shit planned every hour on the hour.”

  I snatch my tablet back from him. “They aren’t all mandatory…”

  My brother looks at me long and hard. “Dude, most of these execs are scared shitless of all of us, and of you in particular, Mr. Lawyer Shark: they’re gonna do every single thing on that list until their bodies give out.”

  I take a seat at my desk again. He has a point; most people find us kind of intimidating because of our position, Anthony and our father have ways to work around the issue, but it doesn’t come as easy to me; Dad says it’s because I’m so solemn and intense all the time, but it’s not like I can help the way I look.

  I huff out a breath. “Fine, we’ll have Violet do the introductory speech then, so they’ll be sure to know they don’t have to participate in everything. But I’m positive many will choose to do lots of the activities I planned anyway, some of them are really fun.”

  My brother gives me a doubtful look. “Yeah, right. I’ve got my misgivings on how much fun those poor people are gonna have.”

  “Really? Wanna bet? Maybe I can get you to wear a pair of pants that go with that horrific shirt if you lose?”

  “Hardy har har, fucker.” He turns around, his back leaning against the dark, electrochromic glass, his arms crossed. “Can’t you at least try and delegate a little, instead of micromanaging everything to death?”

  I scowl. “I did delegate one thing, brother. And that’s why we are here on a Saturday.”

  He scoffs at me. “You are such an asshole!”

  “I’m an asshole?” I shake my head. “This thing is important, Tony! You know what this means to Dad, especially the firework display.”

  I don’t need to say more, we both know what I’m talking about here.

  Before she unexpectedly passed away, Mom used to be the one who took care of every aspect of this party.

  We’ve always been such a family of workaholics that the only way Dad would consider taking time off was if the party wasn’t just to celebrate July Fourth or his birthday, but a way for us to do something for the company too.

  Mom came up with the idea of turning what would have been a simple family vacation into a week-long company retreat for our upper-level management.

  So every year on the last week of June she managed to drag us away from work and to her favorite from amongst our family’s holdings, the estate on Lake Tahoe.

  She especially liked it because she could have a pyro display on the beach there and away from the air pollution and smog of Los Angeles, we could actually see the fireworks and the stars.

  She loved that part of the event the most.

  Once there, we would not only have a no-work-allowed holiday and an Independence Day celebration, but she would also hold a party for Dad’s birthday —he was born on the third— and the whole event would be fitted into a week of family-friendly activities and team-building exercises for our executives and their loved ones.

  We haven’t held one of this event in the last seven years. Every time we asked Dad if he wanted to, he would refuse. We understood it was too painful for him to even think about it, let alone do it, so the tradition died with our mom’s passing.

  Still we never forgot how much he used to love the retreat and this year Violet came up with the idea of just starting to do work on the celebration instead of asking him if he wanted one, do it as a surprise of sort.

  I wasn’t too keen of doing everything behind his back, but we agreed we would tell him in May and show him what we had planned and everything, and if he still didn’t want to do it, we would just call the whole thing off.

  Dad surprised the fuck out of us, though.

  Some jerk manager at the catering company placed a call directly to his office rather than my own as he should have, so Dad found out about everything in April.

  Rather than being put-off by the project, he grew very emotional and nostalgic.

  I was sure he was going to nix the idea, but despite still finding talking about it a bit disconcerting, he told me he felt like we were right in wanting to do it, like it would do all of us some good to remember Mom this way.

  I guess it was his way
to tell me that he finally understood Mom wouldn’t have wanted him to live in despair, that he knew it was time to move on.

  He said we needed to do it as a family and that our company needed it too, that we had to celebrate Mom’s life, not mourn her death forever, just like Violet had been telling him.

  In fact, Dad loved the plan so much, he asked me to extend the retreat to the management of all our main offices in the States: he thinks that doing it will really help us reinforce the leadership of the company at all levels of the chain of command.

  There’s a lot riding on this event, so I won’t have it be less than perfect in every way, no matter how much I have to plan and organize or how much larger my workload has gotten since Anthony asked me to oversee things.

  Since we started to work on reviving the tradition and Dad found out it seems like he is really starting to let go of the heaviest part of his grief.

  I still catch him with a pensive, sad look on his face when he thinks we aren’t looking, but he doesn’t appear to be as devastated as he used to be even only a few months back: he looks like he’s really beginning to heal, so we can’t screw this up, and above all things, the pyro display over Lake Tahoe must be perfect.

  Anthony sobers up for a moment and nods. “I know, I know. That he would even agree to let us do it in the first place it’s a miracle in itself, and I know what this display is going to mean to him, hell to all of us, buy yes: you’re still an asshole for making me come down here on a Saturday after the week I’ve had,” he grouses, looking as put-out as Nicky, his four-year-old boy, when he doesn’t get his way.

  “Tough luck, man. Like I said: you would still be in bed if you hadn’t decided to leave the most important part of the event in the hands of some damn kid who can’t even manage to sit through one lousy fucking meeting in person!” I retort.

  Fuck, this is so not going as planned!

  I can’t believe this.

  We’re little more than a week away from the party and only two days away from boarding our jet to get to the estate, and the most important part of this entire celebration is the one I managed to mess up. I feel like shit about this.

  In March, when I started working on the project, I dug up Mom’s old planner: she kept all her ideas for the party and the retreat in that journal and she had tons of useful stuff I could reference saved on her personal computer, including all of the go-to companies she had on standby to deal with the logistics of every aspect of the celebration, from catering to SPA days, yoga instructors, personal trainers —you name it— and of course, she had a list of display firms and pyrotechnic manufacturers that she had personally handpicked.

  Just before she passed, she had actually updated this list because I had concerns about using our usual contractors since they weren’t operating in an eco-friendly way.

  I love fireworks display just as much as our mother did, but not if the cost is polluting the planet.

  Mom was very keen on my cause and promised me she would no longer do business with them, and she actually managed to find three pyro firms that she not only deemed the absolute best —A Markos got to have the best—, but also the greenest out there.

  When I went over their portfolios and ended my examination of them, I was pleased to see they were indeed everything Mom had said they were.

  I picked the best of the three to handle the display for the main retreat on our estate in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and I split the management of six of the remaining displays amongst the other two companies and hired a fourth one to work on the four remaining venues.

  Everything was on schedule until three weeks ago when I realized that Fire Tech, the company that was working on our dad’s display wasn’t that environmental-friendly after all.

  The more I looked into them, the more crap I found, until the evidence started to pile up and the story it told me was that they weren’t simply a firm that pretended to be modern and green as a front while operating in a more traditional-we-don’t-give-two-fucks-about-the-environment way, but that they were actual criminals: their factory was involved in the pollution of a vast green area in Maine, including the contamination of a water basin and extensive damage to the wildlife.

  I could not stand for it, so I didn’t simply drop them, I got my family’s law firm to help the interested party —the people who live in the area— to file a lawsuit against those bastards, pro-bono of course.

  I’ve been handling the litigation myself —I always try to follow this type of cases personally— and that’s why I had to let Violet and Anthony pick a new firm in my stead. Taking on the lawsuit, on top of my regular work and having to organizing all the retreats and parties would have left me no time to properly look for a new display firm and a new firework manufacturer on my own.

  It took a few days, but they did manage to find a great alternative —or so they say— since money is no objection to us.

  My brother gives me a side-look and scoffs again. “She’s not a kid, Zander.”

  “How can she be the best they have if she’s 24-year-old?”

  I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but I need someone with experience to handle our account, not someone who’s looking to cut her teeth on something big to learn how to do her job.

  “She is, bro, they’re not stupid: they wouldn’t put some unexperienced snot-nosed brat in charge of something this big. I’ve been in touch with the five of them for almost three weeks straight: they are good people and smart too. I mean, they’d have to be to accomplish what they have…”

  “Yeah…”

  This at least I must acknowledge: when they were in their early twenties, the Tinley siblings took a single five-year-old firework factory opened by their late father and in only a couple of years they managed to turn it into a profitable million-dollar business.

  Now they are internationally renowned and worth a couple of billions despite having been on the map as a display firm only for about ten years.

  “I don’t have an issue with Tinley Pyrotechnics per se, Tony. The company is doing wonderful things. I like that they’re family-owned and that they follow their product from manufacturing to detonation and, of course, I love how green they are, but…”

  “But nothing, Zan. Dad’s gonna love the display, we all will. I mean, you can’t say a word against them, and you double-checked them inside and out, despite promising to stay out of it, don’t think I don’t know it. They’re established, they’ve even done a display for the White House, they’ve won prizes all over the world for their shit, and they aren’t simply eco-friendly in the sense they use clean stuff someone else made: they are developing and patenting their fireworks themselves. They’re even involved with military research programs. You don’t get any better than that, not even a Markos could insist on wanting more.”

  He has a point, but still, so many things could go wrong with a display of this magnitude.

  “The fireworks are gonna last for over 30 minutes and the job comes with a price tag of almost 10 mils and to think they’ll put someone basically fresh out of school on it, just fucking rubs me the wrong way.”

  Anthony comes to stand at the side of my desk, and I swivel my chair his way. “You’re the one who said you wanted them to have an unlimited budget, bro.”

  I grumble. “Yes, but that was before I realized the alleged best engineer they intended to put on our project is a kid.”

  “Zan, stop worrying so much! Like I said: her brothers told me Alexa’s a genius when it comes to synchronized music and fireworks displays. She’s been around explosives for twenty years. I read her résumé and so did you: she has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, she got her pyro certifications over two years ago, and she’s working on a degree in environmental science for fuck’s sake. She’s perfect: the absolute best we could hope to get on the job.”

  “She might very well be a genius, but I don’t care.”

  I stand up and start to count my grieva
nces against this Alexa Tinley chick on my fingers.

  “She failed to send a simulation like we required, she refused to talk on the phone or come to a meeting with us. We’re paying them a small fortune and she’s only available through email. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Whenever has someone who did business with us done something like this?”

  Anthony laughs. “You are such an arrogant fuck sometimes, dude. We gave them zero notice to take the job. Would you expect them to drop all their other engagements to be at our beck and call?”

  “That’s not what I meant…”

  “And like I told you, I had a chat with her older brother, Eli, and he said me she’s busy in Atlanta right now, she’s wrapping up a project for the Army with Eric, another one of her brothers.”

  I sharply look up from my tablet. Wait a fucking minute. “What?”

  My brother goes on. “He couldn’t explain much, he said it’s something about a low-smoke eco-friendly red flare that they’re developing for military training. Don’t you think that’s enough of a reason to not show up for a meeting?”

  I feel my eyebrows shoot up. This is news to me. “Tony, what are you talking about? This is the first I hear of it…”

  My brother hisses. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I might have forgotten to mention it to you. In my defense, I didn’t think there was any urgency to share the info since this is something you delegated to us.”