Page 42 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
“How long have you been working for Hemi?”
“Seven years in September.”
“Wow,” Karen said. “Either you really like driving, or you’re, like, really patient.” When he didn’t answer, Karen asked, “What did you do before?”
“I drove a cab.” When Karen kept looking at him expectantly, he added, “I drove Hemi quite a bit.”
“Huh,” Karen said. “That’s pretty cool that he hired you.”
“I thought so.”
“How come?” she asked. “I mean, why you?”
“Because I didn’t talk.” He pulled a black marker from his pocket and handed it to me. “So you can mark the boxes. Call me when you’re finishing up, so I’ll be waiting.” Then he left.
Hemi’s man.
Karen turned in a slow circle, looking at the precious five hundred square feet of rent control handed down from our mother, a tiny island of safety in the shark-infested waters of the New York City real estate market.
“It seems smaller,” she said. “Doesn’t it? Why is that?”
“It’s the contrast, that’s all.” I tried my best for brisk.You’ve made your decision. Get it done.“Obviously, the main thing we need to take is our clothes, so let’s start there. We’ll fill up the wardrobe boxes first.” I opened our single closet, in the living room, and said, “Only take what you really like. We’ll look at it as spring cleaning.”
We’d make a pile for donation, I decided. Hemi wasn’t going to be happy about my wearing anything old or out of style, but that didn’t mean somebody else couldn’t use them.
As I began to hang garments over the metal bar in the first of the wardrobe boxes, Karen said, “Betcha anything Hemi doesn’t allow wire hangers in his closets. That’s probably as big a crime as putting your knife in the jam. He’ll probably tell you which outfits you can keep, too.”
The same thought I’d just had, and my hand stilled on the dresses I was shoving into the box. “Well, that’s no big deal,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Real hangers would be good.Spacefor real hangers would be good. And I told you, he was right about the jam. It’ll be our version of Buddhism. Let it go.”
“I think that’sFrozen.”
“Whatever.”
The clothes took about half an hour, and then the closet and dresser were empty. Except for the box pushed all the way to the back.
When I bent over to pull it out, I got lightheaded, and I staggered some on my way to the coffee table.
“We’d better…” I said, then had to swallow. “We’ll go through this. It’s the only other thing, I guess, besides my laptop and some financial stuff and your medical records, and the winter things under the bed.”
“And our afghan,” Karen said, pulling it from the arm of the couch, folding it, and setting it on the coffee table.
I said, “I have a feeling that’s not going to look too good on Hemi’s couch.” The eyeball-assaulting mishmash of colors crocheted into old-fashioned granny squares wasn’t a thing of beauty, but…it had been there all my life.
“Then I’ll put it in my room,” Karen said. “And bring it out on Women’s Wednesday. We’d better still get to have that.”
“We’re going to have it,” I said. “Anyway, Hemi likes it himself, I think.”
“I’m betting we can’t eat popcorn in his living room, though.” Karen poked her fingers through the holes in the granny squares the way she’d always done. “He’s super cool, but he’s not exactly Mr. Laid Back, you know?”
“You think?” I tried to smile. “Hey. He loves me, and he loves you. And if I want to eat popcorn in the living room under the afghan, that’s what’s going to happen.”
Karen snorted. “Yeah, right. What are you going to do, arm-wrestle him into submission?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to tell him it’s important to me, and he’s going to understand, because he wants me to be happy, and he wants you to be happy, too.”
“If you say so. I mean, I get that he loves you, but…”
This wasn’t exactly helping, so I moved on. “We’ll take Mom’s special vase, too.” A white Belleek piece from Ireland, the heavy ceramic formed into a basketweave pattern and decorated with painted shamrocks. Another treasure given to her by her grandmother, and of no great value. Karen had knocked it over once, in fact, when she’d been a gawky nine-year-old, all spidery arms and legs. It had split in two down the middle, but Mom had glued it painstakingly back together. The brown line was still there to see, though, a thin, wavy crack right between the shamrocks.
