Hilariously Ever After

by Penny Reid

  “We agreed,” I say slowly, like I’m talking to a disobedient child, “that you wouldn’t do any more mystery shops. I played Santa for an entire suburban mall in exchange. I was hashtagged.” I unbutton my suit jacket and lean against the wall, ignoring the phone vibrating in my breast pocket.

  “#HotSanta was pretty cool,” she says with a tone of cheeriness that reminds me what a good elf she was.

  And then there was that costume. Ho, ho, holy smokes.

  “#HotSanta existed for an hour and a half, but the odor of pee on my legs from terrified kids is branded in my scarred psyche for a lifetime.”

  She pretends to punch my arm. “C’mon. This is a mystery shop at Le Portmanteau.”

  I pretend to be impressed. “Really?”

  “Full meal. We have to order a bottle of wine. And the shop fee is $300!”

  I multiply that by four. Greg’s sharper than I thought. Affording it is no problem, and I’d spend ten times that on flowers to fill her apartment with roses if I thought it would make an impression. Somewhere deep inside, though, I feel like I can hear Greg laughing at me.

  Laughing from the finest table at Le Portmanteau.

  Focus. I need to focus. Shannon’s looking at me with excitement. “This is exactly the kind of shop secret shoppers dream of landing.”

  “You’re an assistant director of marketing now. Those dreams should be dead.” My words echo in the room. Shannon’s right. I do have Resting Asshole Baritone.

  She raises her eyebrows at me, blinking those big, brown eyes. “Someone woke up on the grumpy side of the bed.”

  “Someone woke up at 4:30 a.m. with a screaming tech director from Singapore complaining about web issues, and then someone else got up later and came to work without having sex with someone.”

  She crinkles her nose and huddles with me. “Please don’t talk about sex with me in public at the office. You know we’ve talked about this.”

  Shannon’s so cute when she’s protecting her professionalism. Yes, I know that makes me sound like an asshole. No, I don’t care. She’s smart, funny, great with clients and she’s helped push marketing conversion rates through the roof for explorative online campaigns in emerging social media.

  I can admire all that and talk about her like she’s a piece of meat.

  “Okay. I won’t,” I concede. But not really. “How about we find a nice supply closet somewhere and talk about sex in private here at work?”

  Her deep sigh is tinged with frustration.

  So’s mine, but I think for different reasons.

  A commotion down the hall, at Dad’s office door, catches our attention. We both turn to look and hear a woman say, “No, I do not have an appointment, but this is important.”

  A flash of a blonde helmet of hair on top of a flowing lilac dress shoots into Dad’s office.

  Shannon and I turn to each other. “Was that—?” we ask in unison.

  “No,” we say at the same time, shaking our heads.

  “Can’t be,” Shannon insists, but she’s giving me a skeptical look that manages to have a strong pleading element to it. Like she’s begging me to say that is absolutely, positively not her mother making a scene in my father’s office.

  “She wouldn’t dare come here and crash Dad’s office,” I add.

  Shannon cocks one eyebrow.

  “Right?” I ask. Funny how now I’ve got a pleading tone, too.

  “I can’t believe you would—” shouts a woman’s voice.

  “You have some nerve coming in here—” bellows my dad.

  Slam! A door shuts and Dad’s administrative assistant, Becky, comes running out of the office. She sees me with Shannon and trots down the hallway as fast as one can trot in five inch heels.

  Dad picks his admins for their sex appeal. Not their practical qualities.

  “Some crazy woman just charged into the office claiming she’s an old friend of James’ and she needs to see him,” Becky says, breathless. Those baby blues are big and wide, with an impossible amount of white around them, framed by black eyelashes so long she could sweep floors with them. Becky’s got a nipped waist a man can span with his hands and boobs so fake and big they might as well be airline neck pillows.

  “Call security, then,” I say casually, trying to decide the best approach. Why would Marie, of all people, storm my dad’s office? It’s not as if she knows about the proposal.

  And even if she did, what does Dad have to do with it?

  “Old friend?” Shannon asks, grabbing Becky’s forearm. “Did she say anything else?”

  “It was really weird. Something about how she picked the right guy and how dare he treat Declan like—”

  I am not wearing five inch heels. I sprint into Dad’s outer office and fling open the inner sanctum, Shannon right behind me.

  “MOM?” Shannon shouts.

  Marie is leaning across Dad’s enormous desk, hands planted on stacks of papers, her face inches from his. She is saying something in a low voice and Dad is paying angry attention to every word. I can’t hear her because of the shuffling sounds Shannon and Becky are making behind me, but as Becky recedes back to her desk and Shannon starts hyperventilating, I can parse most of it out.

  “...and I can’t believe you would blame Declan for Elena’s death like that.”

  Oh, fuck. I knew yesterday was one big, big oversharing mistake. Marie just proved it. Shannon looks at me as I rub my mouth with my hand, calculating how to salvage this giant mess. Dad doesn’t do feelings, and Marie is one big walking heart covered in perfume and new-agey clothing.

  This is not going to end well.

  “What is she talking about, Dec?” Shannon whispers in my ear, her hand between my shoulder blades on my back. The solidity of that palm grounds me, helps me to react from a place of logic and centeredness, rather than grabbing Marie around the waist and flinging her down an empty elevator shaft.

  Shannon and I have been so busy with our respective schedules that I haven’t even had the chance to tell her about my run-in with Marie at the cemetery yesterday. Even if we had time, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it.

  Guess I’d better get ready now.

  “Your mom followed me to my mom’s gravesite yesterday.”

  Shannon’s eyes bug out. “What?” Dad and Marie are arguing in tight, gritted-teeth sentences, their heated discussion a backdrop for my emotional evisceration.

  Dad is going to kill me.

  “I went there to visit my mom, and Marie happened to see me at a stoplight. Waved. I went to the cemetery and was talking to my mom and Marie appeared.”

  “She stalked you?”

  I’m not going to throw Marie under the emotional bus, no matter how tempting. “No, nothing like that. She was worried about me.”

  Dad starts pounding the top of a stack of papers with his middle knuckle. Shannon casts a nervous glance at them. So far, Marie seems to be holding her own and no one’s ordered us out.

  “And storming James’ office today has something to do with that?”

  A sick sort of snicker I can’t control comes out. “I don’t know. It’s Marie, after all. She’s kind of crazy.”

  “You know I hate when you say that.”

  My palm out, I make a grand, sweeping gesture toward our arguing parents. “Case in point.”

  Her lips purse but Shannon says nothing.

  I win.

  “...how I handle my relationship with my sons is absolutely none of your business! I haven’t seen you in—thirty years?—and you think you can tell me how to parent?” Dad’s shouting now. It’s the sound of my childhood, the scary, terrifying voice of someone who is supposed to be authoritative and wise losing it.

  “You clearly need lessons on basic human decency if you’ve spent a decade alienating your son and shaming him for something no mortal human could ever fix! He couldn’t save them both, for God’s sake. Get over it before you lose Declan as well as your wife!” Marie shouts back, chest heavi
ng and face livid.

  Shannon’s mouth drops open with shock.

  Mine, too.

  My soon-to-be fiancée leans over to me and hisses, “What did you and Mom talk about yesterday?”

  That sound you hear next is me, being catapulted emotionally back in time, the thump of my body. I’m eighteen now, suddenly. Eighteen and wearing a suit, running an international division of a Fortune 500 company. Eighteen and watching my dad get a righteous comeuppance from a woman who told me yesterday that while she can’t replace my mom—and would never want to—she thinks of me as one of her own right now.

  “Declan?” Shannon pulls me aside and we’re hidden behind a large bookcase, the kind that’s filled with burgundy leather-covered classics and law books, statutes and other Very Important Writings in tomes meant to convey seriousness. Power. Privilege.

  “Honey?” Shannon asks, stoking my cheek. I’m frozen, back to that day as I watch Marie take my dad down verbally.

  Without warning I grab Shannon and kiss her, hard and furious, the blood rushing through my ears and crescendoing, like a set of stringed instruments all warming up at the same time, in harmony. The low rumbling invades my mind and now my arms pull Shannon against me, hands in her hair, my tongue tasting her.

  She pulls away, lipstick smeared, eyes blazing. “We are at work!” she rasps. “Whatever’s going on inside you,” she adds, softening but still furious, “I understand you’re—“”

  I kiss her again.

  The door opens and in storms Jason.

  “Oh, my God, is that my father?” she hisses, wiggling out of my arms. I can’t think. Can’t strategize. Can’t calculate or plan for whatever contingencies keep coming. Her family is like a giant game of human Whack-a-Mole. No matter how many times you think you’ve made them disappear, they just keep popping up.

  It’s easier to just kiss her.

  “I knew it,” Jason says. Shannon’s kissing me back now. We’re completely hidden behind the bookcase, and if Marie and Dad realize we’re still in the room, they don’t give any sign of it.

  I pull away and look on the shelves.

  “What are you doing?” Shannon asks, mouth red and boobs bouncing with heavy panting.

  “Looking for whisky. We’re going to need it.” No decanters. No flasks. Just a very dusty set of first edition Harvard Classics. Not getting inebriated on that any time soon.

  “Now, this is just ridiculous,” Dad announces, walking around the front of his desk in a confrontational manner. “Who in the hell are you?” he asks Jason.

  “They’ve never met?” I whisper to Shannon, who really looks like she could use that whisky.

  “My mom...my dad...yelling at the owner of the company where I work...” she mutters in short phrases.

  And your future father-in-law, I think.

  “Jason Jacoby.” Jason glares at Marie, who is combing over him from head to toe. Jason’s dressed in a suit and tie, clean-shaven and has a nice, new haircut. He looks like any other businessman in his fifties.

  Except I’ve never seen Jason dressed in anything other than jeans.

  “I’m the husband of the woman you’re fucking,” Jason declares, eyes right on my dad.

  And Shannon’s eyes roll back. She falls against me in a dead faint, slumping to the ground, her skirt riding up her thighs and her hair mashing into the Persian carpet next to the bookcase. Great. I’m about to propose to Scarlett O’Hara. Fiddle-dee-dee.

  I’m pinned to a small table next to us and gaping at her. I’d faint, too, if my father accused my boss of fucking my mother.

  This is one of those moments where you decide which kind of man you are.

  One who cowers behind a bookcase in your father’s office while your future father-in-law accuses him of fucking your future mother-in-law?

  Or a grown-up who goes out there and tries to mediate.

  That’s right. I grab a pillow off the leather chair nearby and place it on my lap, gently moving Shannon’s head onto it and settle in.

  This could be a while.

  “I had no idea Becky was married!” Dad roars.

  Oh.

  “Becky? Who the hell is Becky? I’m talking about Marie!” Jason shouts, matching Dad’s volume.

  Shannon’s eyelids flutter, her soft eyebrows bending down in consternation as she comes to. I’ve never seen her faint before, and while I know stress can do that to a person, having her drop like a sack of potatoes in the middle of this fiasco just feels like a giant joke.

  Let’s take inventory for a second here:

  1. Marie has invaded our workplace.

  2. She’s lecturing my dad for being a jerk after my mom died.

  3. Dad just revealed he’s porking his admin, which is against company policy (Shut up. I am not a hypocrite. Shannon is not my direct report.).

  4. Jason has barged in and accused my dad of schtupping his wife. The wife who dated my dad long before my oldest brother, Terry, was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes.

  5. Shannon fainted, with her face in my lap and not in the fun kind of way.

  6. Everyone’s screaming at each other and all I want to do is put my mother’s ring on Shannon’s lovely finger and make sweet love to my fiancée.

  There’s the recap.

  Not one bit of that makes sense except for the last part, and as Shannon sits up and looks wildly around the room, her hands cold and shaking, we hear:

  “Out! Both of you! Before I call security!”

  That’s Marie shouting. Shannon and I jump to our feet and race around the bookcase to find Jason and my dad on the ground in their suits, wrestling.

  “Jesus Christ,” I mutter.

  “She’s mine!” Jason grunts as he gets Dad into a messy wrestling move. I take it Jason learned how to fight in the streets in South Boston. While we three McCormick boys learned fencing and boxing at Milton Academy from instructors who competed in the Olympics, Dad was a street kid, too. A Southie street kid.

  Two Southie guys on a thirty-year hiatus from a brawl? This could get interesting. If nothing else, they both have middle-age paunches to work around, and while I know Dad has gym-toned arms, Jason’s been doing his own yard work for the last three decades.

  And they seem to have checked their civility in the same place where their common sense is hiding.

  “You—” The rest of the filth that comes out of Dad -- a stream of invective aimed solely at Jason, Jason’s mother, Jason’s genitals, and stretches back about six generations -- is a product of Dad’s Irish-Scottish heritage. Mostly his Scottish heritage, because Scots don’t forget anything when it comes to insults.

  It’s in the DNA.

  Marie starts screaming, “I don’t know what’s gotten into Jason!” while Shannon looks at me in horror.

  “Do something!” Shannon shouts at me.

  What the hell am I supposed to do? I’m not exactly trained in techniques for breaking up a fight between your future father-in-law and your dad. Besides, there’s more to this fight than meets the eye. I could stop them. I have the power (and could probably take them both in a fist fight. Scratch probably. Definitely.)

  Letting people show themselves to the world, though, gives me more power than shouting and making them stop. There are many ways to take charge. To dominate. To be a leader.

  Sometimes stepping back and observing is more effective than taking action.

  Shaking her head and muttering something about useless billionaires, Shannon grabs a water spritzer that Becky uses to spray the spider plants in Dad’s office, marches over to the four hundred pounds of aged meat wriggling and grunting on the floor, and sprays them.

  Over and over, like dogs.

  “My suit!” Dad shouts, holding up his palms. “Don’t ruin this suit! It costs more than your annual bonus.”

  Shannon keeps spraying, over and over, and shouts, “I don’t care. You quit hurting my daddy!”

  The door bursts open (again), and in comes Becky, flanked by two gu
ys who look like mafia hitmen genetically bred with sumo wrestlers.

  “Security’s here! Who’s the—oh, my God, Jamie! Jamie, what happened to your face, sweetie?”

  Jamie?

  Becky kneels down and the security guys, me, Jason and Dad all crane our necks to get a view of the massive expanse of thigh and purple garters we’re invited to enjoy.

  Shannon whaps me. Marie gives Jason a little kick and he grunts but doesn’t say a word.

  “What’s that for?” he and I ask in unison.

  Marie and Shannon give twin snorts while Becky fusses over Dad and helps him to stand.

  Jason reaches up toward Marie for assistance in standing. She pretends he doesn’t exist, crossing her arms and giving Shannon an unreadable look.

  Bad dogs always know when they’ve been bad and don’t whimper. Jason stands on his own and brushes himself off, trying to maintain a thin veil of normalcy, as if he didn’t just get into a physical fight with the richest man in Boston, and Dad didn’t just insult four generations of Jacobys.

  “I assure you,” Dad growls, “I am not fucking your wife.”

  “That’s right,” Shannon says defiantly. “You’re much too old for Jamie to sleep with, Mom.” Her glare at Dad as she repeats the nickname could double as a chemical peel in the finest spa in one of our luxury hotels.

  “Shannon, what do you think you’re doing?” Dad says to her, whirling on one heel and ignoring Becky’s aid. “I’m your boss and—”

  Spritz.

  Shannon sprays Dad in the face.

  I burst into laughter.

  “You’re a dog. A dog who only sleeps with women who are four or younger in dog years,” Shannon announces.

  Becky gasps and says, “I’m not four! I’m nineteen.”

  “I rest my case,” Shannon announces.

  Dad moves aggressively toward Shannon, who holds up the water sprayer in defense.

  “I will not be insulted like this on my own company property!” Dad thunders.

  “And you won’t yell at my daughter like that!” Jason roars back.

  “And I’m not sleeping with Jamie!” Becky adds.

  “One of these things is not like the other,” Marie sings under her breath.

  Marie appears to do math in her head, then turns a shade of angry pink. “Not only are you a cruel parent, but you’re an ageist misogynist with little penis syndrome!” she says to Dad, who is trying to decide which of us he’s most pissed off at. It’s a rare moment when I am not in the running, so I’m basking in the glory.