REALITY BITES
Jordan
“And the guy on the boat hands her the rod, thinking it’s going to be fun for her to reel it in.” My dad laughed at his own story, far before the punch line. I had to suffer through dinner with the Weitzman family, including Amy, until I could speak to Grandpa. It felt risky since she was sitting across from me, already looking like she was being served on a silver platter especially for me.
Smiling politely, though without much interest, Amy glanced my way. Her eyes narrowed in on a detail.
My tie was crooked. I’d seen it when I was getting ready for dinner but left it. Apparently it nagged at her.
We didn’t even know each other, having only met tonight, but she gave me a scowl, pointing at her neck, motioning for me to fix it.
I didn’t. I pretended to be confused, as if I were that dim, not that she would realize I wasn’t. She was that dim. It took me five whole minutes to realize it. We’d met, and she immediately took a selfie of us together. I’d asked her what courses she was taking in school, and she shrugged and said she didn’t know. Didn’t know?
It was a tragedy. Not as big of a tragedy as my being forced to pretend to date her while my dad worked on bringing her father’s money into our family’s investment firm. Her father had left his investment broker, taking all his money with him. He was fishing for brokers, and my dad was fishing for clients to impress my grandpa with. He said this was going to be his moment to shine, but I knew he was in trouble financially and he needed me to do this. Stephen had made a couple of comments about Mom’s inheritance keeping our family afloat. Grandpa wouldn’t ever let us starve, but he would let Dad make a fool of himself financially.
Something I didn’t doubt Dad had done.
My dad was the grasshopper who played all summer, only summer lasted forever.
“So, here’s poor Letty, holding this rod, and the fish jerks.” Dad wiped his eyes, dying of laughter and barely able to tell the story about my mother. “Letty goes flying into the air.” He wheezed, making everyone laugh. “I reach out as she flies by me, fully airborne, and I grab her feet, snatching her midair as she hangs over the edge of the boat. But she’s dropping the rod, and the fish is right there, I can see him.” He stood to hold his hands out, flexing his biceps like he was back in the moment. “So, I look at her, the rod, and her again, and I knew what I had to do.” He started laughing as Mom’s cheeks flared. “And that bastard right there is proof I love fishing more than my wife. Hey, Letty.” He and Amy’s dad, Mr. Weitzman, laughed, too hard.
Amy scowled, losing her pretty little smile for a second before regaining her composure and beaming at my dad, as if his story actually gave him bragging rights.
Mom drank a large gulp of wine, as did Amy’s mother. Neither of them seemed impressed by the conversation or the amount of booze both their husbands drank.
Stephen gave me a look, the one we often exchanged during dinners with Dad. It was a special blend of “I want to punch him in the dick” and “why us, dear God, why us.”
Mom didn’t meet our gaze; she rarely did. She didn’t want to endorse this life, but she knew no other way.
“So, have you done much marlin fishing?” Dad asked Mr. Weitzman.
Cynthia, my brother’s wife, leaned in, whispering to me as she pretended to pick up her napkin. “How’s it going?”
“Summer of my dreams.”
Amy sat there staring at me, blank in a lot of ways.
Pretty girl.
Nice smile.
Great body.
But dumb as a bag of hammers.
I counted the hours until she would be gone and I would be alone—me and my book. I was reading Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. My economics professor at Harvard was a huge fan of his and had recommended it to the class where I was his TA. I was enjoying the plot of the imbalanced world and the staging of the war between good and evil. And I loved postapocalyptic novels.
“So, Jordan, how much longer until you’re done with school?” Mrs. Weitzman asked as she lifted a bite of lamb.
“This year’s my last.”
“Then you have to join the real world like a big boy,” Stephen said with a grin.
“Don’t worry, big brother. I won’t show you up the way your wife does.” I winked at him, making Cynthia giggle. She was en route to being the youngest partner at a law firm.
“Oh, I have no doubts who the family success is going to be.” He lifted his drink to his wife. “May you have half the luck finding someone as amazing as her.”
Mom choked on her bite of lamb, almost exactly the same way as Mrs. Weitzman.
“I’m sure Amy will show us all how it’s done.” Cynthia recovered for her moronic husband, but he had no regrets. He never held his tongue. Not since he’d left home and became Grandpa’s favorite.
Cynthia smiled at Amy, who still appeared vacant. She was probably texting under the table and missed the insult. I didn’t want to pretend to date her for the rest of the summer; one whole day was enough. I just didn’t know how to broach the subject or ruin Dad’s scheme, not yet.
“She really will,” Amy’s mom chimed in. “Amy has been taking some fashion classes on top of her regular curriculum, and she’s quite good. She’s working with Vera Wang this summer.”
“Is Vera a friend of yours?” I asked her mother, sticking with my brother’s line of torture. I liked watching all our parents squirm while we politely misbehaved.
“She is.” Mrs. Weitzman’s cheeks reddened. “A dear friend to anyone in the fashion community.”
“Excellent.” Mom lifted her glass before I could say another word. “To our children.”
“Hear, hear,” Dad said, lifting his glass and clinking a bit too hard. He was boorish. There wasn’t another word for it. Rich, loud, rude, privileged, undereducated, and entitled. My dad’s family connections gave him a pass into the world where he could be a figurehead but never wield any actual power, married to the daughter of a billionaire real estate developer and investments mastermind.
Dad had old family money, which he had tied up in my grandfather’s investments. But he didn’t have enough income to balance his spending. He played too hard. He traveled and entertained and showed off his wealth. He didn’t work at making more money. He didn’t buy things that would turn around and earn. He wasted. He made bad investments.
Something my grandfather hated almost as much as he hated being saddled with my dad.
My grandfathers coerced my parents into dating while their families were entertaining a business arrangement, not unlike my current situation. While my mom’s father may have valued cash more than his own daughter, he still disliked my father. He never intended for them to marry. He dangled my mother at my father to convince Dad’s family to invest. Once they did, it was too late. My mom was pregnant, and my dad became Grandpa Jack’s new son-in-law. Grandpa made lemonade out of his lemons, seeing that my dad’s old blue blood was worth something—connections. Grandpa Jack knew what to do with those.
At the time, the old money was going stale with the way the markets were changing, but my mother’s father was the exception, a true businessman through and through. He changed with the times, making his fortunes based on new growth opportunities. He hadn’t been nearly as rich as my father’s family when he started out, but now he was ten times wealthier. Grandpa was ruthless in the pursuit of money. Dad thought of himself the same way.
But he wasn’t.
Which was also why I got saddled with the petite redhead who sat across from me, staring vacuously.
There wasn’t anything really wrong with Amy.
Her lips were shiny.
Her hair was suspended in place.
Her eyes had that cat-eye thing going on where her eyeliner winged out, like every other girl in the world. To say she followed trends was an understatement.
But she was all packaging.
Conversations with her would be one-sided, at best.
No, Dad wasn’t thinking clearly on this one. Not that he ever did. My brother and I were my Grandpa’s only hopes. I could get by in finances if I had to do it for a living; mostly it was common sense, so that wasn’t hard, and Stephen had the shrewd business savvy. Together we would be the next generation of success in the family, which definitely skipped a line.
After dinner, I excused myself to the kitchen and sat at the counter in silence.
“You look like you’re in a mood,” Lucia said gruffly as she reached into the freezer and grabbed the gelato she made just for me. She slid the pint across the counter with a silver spoon.
“Dad’s on schedule to having me work for Grandpa for the rest of my life with Amy as my little wife by the end of this summer.” I tried not to sound like a petulant child; that was not Lucia’s favorite.
“How was the roast?” She didn’t even miss a beat in ignoring my whining.
“Delicious. Can you start adding drugs to my plate? Not Monday through Thursday, but definitely Friday through Sunday. I’m not making it through that marlin story again without something narcotic.”
“Can I get in on that too?” Stephen sat next to me, took my spoon, and dished up a large bite and ate it all.
“The crack or the gelato?” Lucia asked.
“Boph.” He struggled to say both as he winced through the brain freeze of too much gelato in his mouth.
“You want your own pint?” She always spoke deadpan to us, something we appreciated. The absence of emotion meant no false expression.
“Yeah, please.” He nodded and swallowed the last of his bite. “Can I get a normal spoon, though?”
“No.” She slid a silver spoon at him too. Her idea of a joke.
“Thanks,” he grumbled, and took a bite. “So, Amy.” He nudged me. “How was your first impression?”
“Yup. It’s not gonna work.” I dragged my spoon, getting a smaller bite now that the mention of Amy was affecting my appetite. “I checked out her Instagram when I was in the bathroom. Cynthia told me to look. I lost some intelligence.”
“Yeah, it’s bad. And just think, if she weren’t here, you’d already have tracked down your soul mate from the boat.”
“Soul mate?” Lucia’s eyes widened.
“She wasn’t my soul mate, dick.” I nudged my brother back. “She was just kinda funny and real and not”—I pointed my silver spoon behind me toward the dining room we couldn’t see—“like that.”
“And sexy?”
“Maybe.” I didn’t want to answer that in front of Lucia. I already regretted getting drunk and telling him the fantasy bathroom story.
“I thought we agreed you were freeing yourself of this.”
“We did, but I haven’t had the chance to talk to Grandpa about it and come up with a backup plan.” I nodded at him. “And how the hell am I supposed to get out of this while our dads are dry humping each other? Mom said they hang out three nights a week at least. All the groundwork had been laid before I even entered the picture. This was sabotage.”
“It’s a conundrum. Amy’s dad is like a virgin who’s scared to commit to just doing it. And Dad’s so hard and ready to go, he’s overly eager. By the end of the night, Dad will be chasing him around the billiards table with Mr. Weitzman trying to protect his virtue.” Stephen held a fist in the air and slapped his forearm, earning a scowl from Lucia and me. He continued, “Why don’t you tell Dad that if he wants to make the deal stick, he needs to find another way? You’re out. It’s sad to watch this shit.”
“Sure, Steph.” I still laughed at the nickname he hated. “I’ll do that at the same time you tell Grandpa you agreed to be the stay-at-home daddy when you and Cynthia have kids. We can be disowned together.”
“I agreed to spend the first three months at home with her, dick. It’s not the same thing.”
“Okay, Steph.” I nudged him.
“You want some, little bro?” Stephen put his spoon down at the same moment Lucia lifted her large wooden spoon from the utensil holder.
“You boys wanna keep fighting in my kitchen?”
“No, ma’am,” we said simultaneously, and looked back down at our dessert.
“That’s what I thought you said.” She kept the spoon out, pacing the front of the counter, opposite where we sat. “Now, Stephen, staying home those first three months with your wife and baby is honorable. Don’t take shit off this spineless little sap over that.” She pointed the spoon at me, making me cringe as memories of it catching my ass as a kid flashed through my mind. “You tell your grandpa that real men want to bond with their babies so that they grow up influenced by their father as equally as their mother. No bratty kids to ruin the bloodline and destroy the family business. I didn’t raise whiners.”
“No, ma’am,” he agreed. It brought me a modicum of joy to witness our cook still beat him down, only now it was emotionally instead of physically. Though I didn’t doubt her ability to still swing that spoon like a bat.
“And you.” She pointed right at me again, making my entire body tense. “You need to stop searching for another girl until you get rid of this one. She might not be for you, but your mom says she likes you for whatever reason, and I didn’t raise a disloyal philanderer. Now you are gonna be a man and tell your daddy you’re not doing this. But I agree, first you tell your grandpa this girl is a simpleton. She has seven million selfies but no sense of herself. He’ll understand. She’s bad for business. You need a girlfriend who is on par with the expectations your grandpa has for you, so she can be your equal, or in his case”—she pointed the spoon at Stephen—“your superior, and help you grow. Stop being little punks. Learn to articulate so you can get what you want and make your grandpa think that’s what he wants too. You know where the power in this family really is. He’ll tell your dad this is a bad plan. Playing with people’s hearts is sick anyway.” She shook her head. “Damn.”
“Yes, ma’am,” we both agreed.
“Now eat your dessert and get back out there. Hiding in my kitchen all night like little babies.” She turned her back to us and used the big spoon to stir whatever was in the giant pot on the stove.
Stephen smiled as he ate his gelato, kicking me under the counter.
I kicked him back.
“I mean it—you wanna fight in here? I’m gonna beat some asses,” Lucia growled.
In typical childish brotherly love, I ate my last bite, jumped up, shoved Stephen, and ran from the kitchen, laughing as he shouted my name and Lucia turned on him.
I almost missed having him at home, living with us. Almost.