Hung had pulled the second chair right up to my desk, and he was on his third cold pizza crust of the night. That’s how I knew the load test was really bad.
It was a Thursday, twenty to eleven, fourteen hours after I’d badged into our Denver office. The graph on his screen looked like a ski slope. My phone lit up between his elbow and my coffee.
Darren. My older brother. Forty-four years old, and he still texts like he’s sending a telegram that costs by the word.
His fiancée’s friends, he wrote, were “serious journalists,” and they “might not respect a help-desk job.” So, dinner after the honeymoon.
I gripped the phone until the case bit a line into my palm. Hung asked what happened. I told him. He asked if Darren knew I was the CEO.
“He knows I started something,” I said.
I wrote two replies. One had the number $1.7 billion in it. The other listed the insurers and courts that use what we built. I deleted both and sent congratulations instead.
Because they did know, all of them. The doctorate. The room over the dry cleaner where six of us started. The 310 people we have now. The newspaper clipping Mom saved. And still I was “the IT girl” at every barbecue. At Darren’s fortieth I opened my laptop to show Mom our first big contract, and Darren told Uncle Merle that if the printer jammed, they knew who to call. I helped the waiter clear plates.
On Monday, Precious brought me a schedule. A national business profile, Wednesday at ten. The reporter was Jazmine Contreras.
I kept the interview.
On Wednesday Jazmine read my bio, knocked her recorder, and dropped her printed guest list at my feet. My name was crossed out. Beside it, in Darren’s handwriting: “declined — D.”
She switched the recorder off.
“That you’d asked him for eight thousand dollars,” she said. “And that he was scared you’d show up at the wedding anyway.”
Speakerphone
I have had people lie about me before. A competitor once told a hospital system that our software lost files. I sat across from their lawyers for three days.
This was worse, because it was in Darren’s handwriting.
“I’ve never asked Darren for a dollar,” I said. “I’ve never asked Darren for a ride to the airport.”
Jazmine looked at me the way I imagine she looks at a sheriff. Polite. Patient. Ready to wait as long as it takes.
“He told me you’d say that,” she said.
Of course he did.
I could have shown her my bank statements. I could have walked her down the hall to Hung, who would happily have told her about the night I slept under my desk to fix a court’s database before a Monday hearing. She’d have written it all down and still gone home to the man she loved.
So I picked up my phone and called our mother.
I put it on speaker and set it face up on top of the guest list.
Mom answered on the fourth ring. I could hear the television behind her, one of those shows where people buy houses on a beach.
“Kristine? Is something wrong?”
“Mom, I’ve got a quick question. Did I ever borrow money from Darren?”
There was a long pause. The beach-house people kept talking.
“Honey,” Mom said, “he asked me not to bring all that up with you.”
Jazmine’s pen stopped.
“Bring what up?”
“You know. The money.” Mom lowered her voice, as if the TV could hear her. “I’ve been doing his rent since June, after they let him go. He said you were having a hard time too, and he didn’t want you to feel bad about not helping.”
I didn’t look at Jazmine. I looked at the blue line through my name.
“They let him go,” I said.
“From the insurance place. In June. Kristine, he said he told you.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Well, he’s proud,” Mom said. “You know how he is. He’s got a lot of interviews lined up.”
Across the table, Jazmine put her pen down very slowly, the way you put down something you’re afraid you might throw.
“Mrs. Hobson,” she said. “This is Jazmine.”
The beach-house show went silent. Mom had hit mute.
“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh, sweetheart. I didn’t know you were there.”
“He goes to work every morning,” Jazmine said. “He puts on a tie. He kisses me goodbye at seven-fifteen.”
Nobody said anything. I don’t know where a man in a tie goes for five months at seven-fifteen. A library, maybe. A Starbucks. Somewhere with free parking.
“I have to go,” Mom said, and hung up.
Jazmine sat very still. Then she opened her folder, took out the paper with my bio on it, and turned it over so she couldn’t see it.
“He was the one between jobs,” she said.
“Looks like it.”
“And the eight thousand.”
“There was no eight thousand. Mom’s been paying his rent.”
She laughed once, short and ugly, the laugh you hear in hospital hallways. “I’ve spent six years getting county jailers to admit what’s in their own logbooks. And I didn’t check my own fiancé.”
“Nobody checks their own fiancé,” I said. “That’s the whole point of having one.”
That got a real breath out of her.
She picked up the recorder, looked at it, and dropped it into her bag.
“I can’t write your profile,” she said. “Somebody else at the network has to. I’ll call my editor today.”
“I figured.”
She stood. At the door she turned around with her hand on the frame.
“Sunday,” she said. “Your mom’s house. Two o’clock. I’m going to ask him in front of her, and I want you there.”
“Why me?”
“Because he crossed you out,” she said. “You should get to watch him read it.”
Glenda’s dining room
I’ll be honest. I thought about not going.
I had a load test that kept failing, a board call on Monday, and forty-two years of practice at being the one who leaves the table. Hung found me in the kitchen at work on Friday staring into the fridge.
“You’re going,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’ve been holding that yogurt for two minutes.”
So on Sunday I drove to Mom’s house in Lakewood with the laptop on the passenger seat. Same laptop as the birthday. I’d never upgraded it. It still had a sticker on the lid from the room over the dry cleaner, half peeled off, and the corner where I’d dropped it in that restaurant parking lot.
Merle’s truck was in the driveway. Of course it was. Merle smells free food and drama the way a shark smells blood in the water.
Jazmine opened the door before I knocked. She wasn’t wearing her ring.
Darren was in the dining room in a golf shirt, red, the color he wears when he wants to look relaxed. He had a beer. He was smiling at Mom like they were all there to talk about the seating chart.
Then he saw me.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Jaz. Seriously?”
“Sit down, Darren,” Jazmine said.
He didn’t. He stood at the head of Mom’s table, where Dad used to sit, and put his beer down on a coaster shaped like a fish.
“I don’t know what she told you,” he said, pointing at me without looking at me. “But Kristine’s been jealous of me since we were kids. She can’t stand that I’m getting married first. You know she showed up at my fortieth with a computer? At a restaurant?”
“I remember,” Merle said, and laughed.
Nobody else did. Merle stopped.
Jazmine took the guest list out of her bag and laid it on the table. She put it in front of Darren’s chair, the edges still neat because I’d lined them up on Wednesday.
“Whose handwriting is that?” she said.
Darren glanced down. “Mine. She declined. I wrote it down.”
“She never declined,” Jazmine said. “You texted her and told her not to come. I read the text. She showed me Thursday’s text on Wednesday.”
That part wasn’t true. I’d shown her Friday. But I wasn’t going to correct a reporter in the middle of her best work.
“Okay,” Darren said. “Okay. Fine. I asked her not to come. You want to know why? Because she’s a mess, Jaz. She’s been between things for years. She asked me for money. I didn’t want her cornering your friends at the reception for a loan.”
He talked for a long time after that. He’s good at it; it’s why he sold insurance for twenty years. He talked about how hard it was to be the dependable one. How Mom leaned on him. How he’d covered for me so many times, I’d never even know. His voice got thick in the right places. He touched his chest twice.
I’ll admit, for about ten seconds, I almost believed I owed him money.
Mom sat at the far end of the table with her hands flat on the wood, like it might float away.
“Darren,” she said. “Stop.”
“Mom—”
“I wrote the checks,” Mom said. “Your rent, every month since June. That money was mine. You told me you needed it after they let you go. You told me Kristine was struggling and that’s why she couldn’t help.”
Darren’s mouth stayed open, but nothing came out.
“In June,” Jazmine said. “You lost your job in June. Five months. Where have you been going at seven-fifteen?”
He looked at the fish coaster for a long time.
“The library on Wadsworth,” he said. “Sometimes the gym.”
Merle made a noise like a tire going flat.
That’s when I opened the laptop.
I hadn’t planned a speech. I’m bad at speeches; I make them for investors and then lie down in a dark room. I just turned the laptop around and slid it down the table to Mom, the way I’d wanted to four years ago, and let it sit next to her hand.
On the screen was the screen I’d wanted to show her at the restaurant. Our first big contract. Only now there were sixty-one county courts on it and nine insurers. Our team page, with 310 small faces. My face at the top, under a word I’ve always felt silly about.
Mom put on her reading glasses. She read every name of every county. Out loud, quietly, the way she used to read me street signs on long drives.
“Arapahoe,” she said. “Jefferson. That’s us, Kristine. That’s my county.”
“It is.”
“You do the court’s records? Here?”
“Since last year.”
She took her glasses off and looked at Darren.
“You told me she fixed printers,” she said.
“I was joking, Mom. It’s a joke. Everybody knows it’s a joke.”
“Then why,” Mom said, “did you write it down on the guest list?”
He had nothing for that. He picked up the list, folded it, unfolded it, put it down.
Then he did what Darren does when the sale is going badly. He went for the closer.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I lied. You want to know why? Because you all like her better. You always did, you just never said it. She’s got the doctorate and the company and the money, and I’ve got a commission check that stopped coming in June. I couldn’t walk into my own wedding with my sister standing there being worth a billion dollars while I’m borrowing rent from my seventy-year-old mother. I couldn’t do it. Okay? Are you happy?”
His voice cracked on happy. Nobody answered him.
Jazmine stood. She took a small velvet box out of her bag and set it on top of the guest list.
“I’m not calling it off,” she said. “I’m postponing it. Twenty days isn’t enough time to find out who I’m marrying.”
“Jaz. Please.”
“You told a stranger your sister begged you for money,” she said, “so I’d keep her away. Your sister is the person who called your mother in front of me and didn’t say one bad word about you. Think about that for a while.”
She walked out. The front door closed hard enough to rattle Mom’s china cabinet.
Darren sat down for the first time. He put his face in his hands.
Mom closed the laptop gently, the way you close a hymnal, and handed it back to me.
“Merle,” she said, “go home.”
Merle went home.
The caterer’s list
The profile ran three weeks later under Latasha Fong, a business reporter from the network’s Chicago desk who asked plain questions and wanted to know how we’d made payroll the winter we had nine customers. I told her about the peanut butter. She put the peanut butter in.
It ran on the Saturday the wedding was supposed to be.
I know what Darren spent that Saturday doing, because Mom told me. He sat at her kitchen table with the caterer’s list, the one with my name crossed out, and called every one of the 140 guests himself. Jazmine wouldn’t do it. Mom wouldn’t do it. He had to say it 140 times: postponed. He had to say why to the ones who asked, and his old boss’s wife asked, and Jazmine’s editor asked, and Jazmine’s college roommate asked, twice.
Mom stopped the rent checks in December. She told him over the phone, with me sitting beside her on her couch, and her hand did not shake.
“You’re a grown man,” she said. “Go to the library and look for a job instead of a place to sit.”
He found one in January. Selling copiers.
I’m not proud of how hard I laughed. I did it in the car.
He called me once, in February. He didn’t apologize, exactly. He said, “Jaz says I should call you.” Then he said, “I’m sorry I wrote it on the list.” Then he hung up before I could say anything, which is the most Darren way to apologize I can imagine.
Jazmine and I have lunch sometimes. She still has the ring in its box in her desk drawer. She says maybe. She says she makes him show her his pay stubs. I said that sounded romantic. She said she’d done less to sheriffs.
In March, Mom drove to Denver.
She’d never been to the office. Seven years, and she’d never once come up the stairs. She called from the lobby, sounding like she’d wandered into an airport.
I went down to get her. She was standing by the front desk in her good coat with her purse in both hands, looking at the wall where we’d hung the clipping. Her clipping. Precious had found it in a frame shop and blown it up.
“That’s mine,” Mom said. “I cut that out.”
“I know, Mom.”
I took her through all three floors. She shook Hung’s hand and told him he looked tired, and he said he was, and she told him to eat a vegetable. She asked Precious where she’d gotten her shoes. She asked a twenty-six-year-old engineer named Israel what he actually did all day, and he told her for eleven minutes, and she listened to every one.
Then we went into the conference room. Same table. Same corner where the recorder had sat.
I put the old laptop down in front of her, the one with the sticker half peeled off, and opened it.
“Show me,” she said. “All of it. Take as long as you want.”
I sat down next to her.
“Okay,” I said. “So this is Jefferson County.”
Family gatherings can bring out the worst surprises – see what happened at a cousin’s promotion party and during a tense trip to a mother’s 80th birthday. For another tangled family secret, read about a lunch plan that took a troubling turn.
