“We are your family!” my overdramatic mother cries with that lilt in her voice, just at that crucial moment. If I hadn’t heard that same lilt every day growing up, I might just buy her indignation. “What could possibly take precedence over your own flesh and blood?”
“Mom, I really don’t have time or patience for you right now, so if there’s any way the two of you could just figure out your own mess and leave me out of it, that would be fantastic,” I tell her.
“There are some things we’re going to need to discuss over the coming days,” mom says. “If you had answered your phone when I called, we could have gotten it out of the way today, but John’s gone home for the night.”
“John” is Johnson B. Witherton VI, Esq., the Butcher/Weese family attorney. More exactly, he’s head of their legal team. All told, their cadre of lawyers now into the double digits. Dad got mom lawyer number ten for their twentieth anniversary.
This is my family.
“What did you do and how bad is it?” I ask. “Are we talking about quietly paying a fine and maybe donating a courthouse or are you in real trouble?”
“They think we were trying to swindle people!” mom exclaims. “Can you believe the impertinence?”
That’s bad. That’s very bad.
It may not sound like much, but she just detailed the exact position she and dad are in right now. “They” is the police. “They think” means they have mom and dad dead to rights. The swindling thing is self-explanatory, but the fact that she used the word “people” instead of “someone” means that there is more than one charge, possibly more than one complainant.
I’m a little rusty.
“How long do you think it’s going to be before they drop it?” I ask. Translation: “How many years in prison are you looking at?”
“They’re not going to drop it,” mom answers.
I stop walking and lean up against the nearest building, taking a moment to collect myself. If she’d said five months, they’d be looking at five months. If she’d said ten years, they’d be looking at ten years.
When she says they’re not going to drop it, what she means is that, if convicted, she and dad will likely be in prison for the rest of their lives.
“What did you do?” I repeat.
I know the codes. I know what she’s telling me. This is too big, though. Something must have happened to cause them to give up their much quieter, much safer M.O.
My parents aren’t smart or moral or ethical or, indeed, objectively good people, but they’ve always been careful enough, at least, to make sure they never got in over their heads.
This is different.
“We haven’t done anything,” mom answers.
It’s a non-answer. She doesn’t want to go into details over the phone. It makes sense. Chances are, if things really are as bad as she seems to think they are, I’ve got to imagine there’s at least one person on the line who isn’t me or my mom.
“Okay, well, it’s been good talking to you,” I say and hang up the phone.
This is bad. This is so bad.
As much trouble as my parents have caused me, I’m sure I could live with them doing a little time if it got them to straighten themselves around. That said, they’re still my parents.
The more immediate issue, though, is what am I supposed to tell Mason?
The only reason I’m hearing about this from my mom instead of the ten o’clock news is that the arrests haven’t happened yet. Dad paid off someone in the DA’s office about a decade ago, ensuring that the two of them would always have a heads up in case the hammer—or gavel as the case may be—was about to drop.
If I’m going to keep on dating Mason, I’m going to have to tell him. Maybe it would be different if I hadn’t already told him who my parents are, but the one thing you can count on with the media is that they’re going to squeeze every drop out of this sort of thing.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be tonight, though.
There’s time, though exactly how much. Right now, only the police, the DA, whoever filed the charges and the criminals they’re trying to nail to the floor know the wealthiest do-nothings in the state are going to be arrested.
As soon as the story breaks, it’s never going to unbreak.
I can’t deal with this tonight, though, and I don’t think Mason would thank me for piling on, so I slowly start making my way back to the bar.
The worst thing is that mom wouldn’t be calling me if they hadn’t found some way to involve me in it all somehow. They’ve never gone past a certain line, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had to talk in code over an unsecured line.
I get back in the bar and, if anything, it’s even more deserted than when I left only a few minutes ago.
Mason’s still sitting at the bar, though right now, hunching may be the more appropriate term.
I walk over to him and sit down with little more than a quiet, “Hey.”
He looks over at me, his eyes not quite open and not quite closed, either. “You’re back!” he says. “How’d it go? Everything all right with your m—”
“I think Neptune should be open by now,” I interrupt. “Did you still want to check it out or do you just want to call a cab and find a hotel for the night?”
“Let’s go to the club!” Mason says way too loudly as he gets up from his chair and immediately starts staggering his way toward the door.
I’ve never seen Mason drunk before. It’s actually pretty entertaining.
Right now, we’re the perfect pair: He’s drunk and wanting to drink more because his ne’er-do-well brother is in the slammer. I’m not drunk yet, but in an hour or less, I will be.
After all, it looks like I’ve got a couple of ne’er-do-wells of my own to try to drown with liquor tonight.
What makes me nervous is that neither one of us is talking about it.
I pay the tab and hurry after Mason. As I’ve never seen him drunk before, I don’t know how worried about him I should be.
“You know,” he says, “I never really got into the whole drinking thing, but if this is what I’ve been missing, I might just have to quit going to the gym and become an alcoholic instead.”
I laugh even though it doesn’t look like even he thinks what he’s saying is funny. Once I laugh, though, he laughs.
That’s where we are: We’re both in very obvious denial, just trying to make sure we’re not the first to forget the rules and start dealing with the reality. I just hope I’m good and blackout drunk when we do finally get there.
Mason takes a quick break from walking to vomit copiously into a nearby trash can.
“This is great,” I say as I look up at the sky. The lights of the city give the clouds a sickly orange tint. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a blast.”
When Mason finishes his purge, we just start walking again. I don’t really know what I’m feeling as I look up at those clouds, pretending there’s something inspiring or beautiful to see up there. It’s a kind of disconnect that I can’t quite put into words.
We don’t talk about anything real the rest of the night.