I know I shouldn’t even look or I’ll make myself angry, but I can never turn myself away from them – the industry publications, the lifestyle magazines, the gossip columns, everything that mentions the company and Calvin in the same breath. The two-page spread open in front of me gives me a headache just looking at it. It’s meant to be a positive piece in a southern beverage magazine, one we’ve done a lot of business with, calling him the face of the company. All through it, though, there are all the same obvious cracks in his persona as always. The “partying” reads as the heavy drinking it really is, the “mischief” and “troublemaking” less rich-boy hijinks and more the kind of run-ins with the law that our legal team has spent millions on, the “heartbreaker image” more his own self-destructive womanizing.
It’s more frustrating than it should be, every article glorifying Calvin and calling me reclusive – if bothering to mention me at all. There is something extra maddening about this one, though, and I don’t think it’s just the way that even through the photoshopping and airbrushing on his photo I can see how bloodshot my brother’s eyes are – how off his pupils look and how drunk or high he must have been at the photoshoot. I think it’s the infuriating way it talks about Maria and that damn music festival.
Maria is the woman who's been in my brother’s life the longest, although I don’t think Calvin is actually any more serious about her than he is about anyone or anything else in this world. The columns always refer to them as “on-again, off-again,” and it’s true enough, I suppose. She’s been swearing she hates him and then back on his arm at least a dozen times since they met. Maria is the lead singer of a pop country band, always primed to be the next big thing. During their latest – or latest that I know of, anyway – breakup, she’d been playing a late afternoon slot at a huge music festival in North Carolina, the kind with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. We’d been the official drink partner, with a huge tent and lots of merchandise being raffled off. It should have been a huge deal and really positive PR for us, but it turned into a nightmare.
Calvin had decided it would be the perfect time to win Maria back, convinced it was romantic. He’s always loved a dramatic gesture, and he’s always been terrible at them, fucking them up in the worst possible ways. So, he’d ended up in a drunken fistfight with her current boyfriend, shoving him right into a table in our sponsorship tent, sending glass and alcohol flying everywhere. It was a disaster that, of course, turned into my disaster to clean up Monday morning somehow. It was the last straw in a string of outlandish behavior that only seemed to be getting worse and worse as of late.
“It’s time for you to grow up,” I’d told him sternly the next afternoon when he’d gotten in from the festival. “You’re nearly thirty years old. This bullshit has got to stop.” Calvin had still been bleary-eyed from the night before but had had a drink in hand anyway.
“What bullshit?” he’d asked, glaring at me, defiant as always.
“You know what I mean, and I’m done with it,” I said, raising my voice at him. “I’m done cleaning up after you. The company can’t keep pouring out money to cover your tracks, and Dad can’t keep watching you do this. The man’s going to have a heart attack one of these days, and it’s going to be your fault.”
“Fuck you,” Calvin had spat at me, voice lower and sharper than usual in these fights we’d been having more and more lately. He took a long gulp and then threw his whiskey glass at my head. It shattered just behind my ear, streaking the wall with liquid. “Honestly, go to hell, Jacob. Dad’s fine, but you want to talk about dead parents? Do you really want to go there? Then we should talk about how maybe you should have died instead of Mom.”
He’d stormed out after that, leaving me stunned. It’s true that when she was alive, our mother had a soft spot for Calvin, had indulged him, but it was his own behavior that had driven a wedge between him and Dad. I always knew that Calvin resented how much of the company Dad had trusted me with. It had only grown when I’d revitalized our barrel-aging process, speeding up our time and allowing us to grow into a billion-dollar international player. I knew he resented that, being a few years older than him, I was set to inherit those billions of dollars and the whole company. I knew he resented not being allowed to get us deals with his partying. He used to say that I might have known how to make whiskey, but he knew how to drink it and how to speak the language of nightlife, which he thought was even more important. He always thought that should have counted more in Dad’s eyes.
I had no idea he resented me that deeply. I thought we were still a team, if often a dysfunctional one. He is my brother, and it is a family business after all. I had no idea he hated me so much – that he was angry with me all the time instead of only the times we were fighting.
And that was all before the attempts on my life started.
Frustrated, I toss the magazine into my fireplace. I stand up, pacing around my cabin, wanting to do something to alleviate the feeling. Wishing I could go somewhere or talk to someone, if only for the distraction.
Mia. I think I want to talk to Mia.
I don’t have an excuse to call her, no apologies or dry cleaning or chocolate concerns, but I want to talk to her. I think hearing her voice will calm me down from the way my thoughts of Calvin have my blood boiling. I don’t have a reason to call her, but I want to call her, and I decide that maybe that’s reason enough. Our talk yesterday had turned into something as mundane as how I had fixed up several things around the cabin to make them functional, so I don’t think she’ll mind hearing from me. I check the time and see she should surely be off work by now, so I decide to go for it.
She answers on the first ring, and the sound of her voice lifts my spirits instantly.
“Hey there. You change your mind about that chocolate?” she asks, laughing a little.
“I’m still deciding,” I say, grinning and sitting back down like her voice has defused me.
“We’re making some new varieties next week, flavors of the season, if you want to hold out,” Mia says.
“Tempting. Tell me all about them?” I ask, settling in.
Mia laughs again and then tells me each and every new combination of chocolate being made, and then about her day: getting her new house set up and a phone call she’d had from a city friend who still can’t believe she moved away. Before I know it, we’ve been on the phone for over an hour, and I just want to keep talking, to keep the conversation with Mia going.
Even though I know I shouldn’t take the risk, I want whatever this is what's happening with Mia to continue.