by Claire Adams
“That’s not it,” I interrupt. “I don’t talk to my parents very much, and I really have to prepare for it when I do.”
“Hey, do you want to go out tonight?” Mason asks. “I heard there’s a new club that opened a while ago in Milwaukee called Uranus or something.”
“Neptune, actually,” I chuckle. “And I’m pretty sure I’m the one that told you about it. In fact,” I say, poking him in the arm, trying to nurture any levity we can possibly conjure, “I’m pretty sure I told you about that the night we met.”
“How is it?” he asks.
“It’s uncomfortably loud, people are drunk enough that personal space is the sort of thing you fantasize about rather than expect, and the drinks cost enough to syphon away rent money,” I answer.
“So, basically just a regular club?” he asks.
“Pretty much,” I answer. “They do a great Irish car bomb, though.”
Mason chuckles. “I always pictured you as more the sex on the beach, fuzzy navel type,” he says and the stifling tension is finally starting to ease up.
“Actually, it’s a very smooth, attractive navel as you well know,” I tease. “I’m usually the red wine with dinner type,” I explain, “but I do make exceptions for special occasions.”
“Hey, I just visited my brother in jail,” Mason says. “That’s a special occasion—well, for now anyway. I’ve got a feeling there are going to be a lot of days like today from here on out.”
“I’m up for a good night of hard drinking and bad decisions,” I tell him, but pause a moment before continuing. “I really can’t pull off a phrase like that, can I?” I ask.
Mason smiles. “You’re a terrible frat guy,” he says. “That’s actually a good thing in my opinion.”
“What a wonderfully polite way of saying ‘No, you can’t even remotely pull it off,’” I laugh. “When did you want to go?”
“Now’s good,” he says. “What time do they open?”
“Not until later,” I tell him. “If you want to go somewhere now, we can always hit a dive bar or two while we’re waiting.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Mason says. “I’d rather just not go home right now.”
Yeah. I can understand that.
* * *
We’ve been sitting in this dive for about three hours now and, apart from catching and maintaining a decent buzz, we’ve accomplished nothing else.
It feels pretty good.
The problem is that I need to call my mom, but I don’t know what to tell Mason when I get off the phone. There’s always the chance it’s something else, maybe dad’s finally topped $100,000,000. That has been his white whale ever since he found he and mom could make all sorts of money if they were ethically flexible.
Still, Mason just got done telling his brother to take responsibility for his own crimes. If I tell him this same day that my parents are in trouble, but not to worry because they already own the judge and the prosecutor… I don’t think Mason would blame me, but I don’t think it would do any favors for our relationship.
Finally, I have an idea.
“I want you to get prepared for something,” I tell him.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Earlier you asked me about Neptune, and I gave you a positive review of their Irish car bombs,” I start.
“Yeah,” he answers.
He’s swaying a little. Maybe he’s already drunk enough that I don’t have to do this.
“Have you ever had one?” I ask.
Better to be on the safe side.
“No,” he says. “I can’t drink that often, doing what I do. Getting sloshed isn’t exactly the path toward staying cut.”
“I think you should try one at Neptune,” I tell him. “It’s one of those things like a beer bong that everyone’s got to try at least once.”
“Oh, I plan on getting blotto tonight,” he says.
“I’ll have to ask you what that means later,” I tell him as I start growing impatient. “I think it might be a good idea to do a test run with you and that particular drink before we get to the club.”
“Is it one of those things that involves like twenty steps and doesn’t end up being any different than just pouring two drinks together?” he asks.
That’s almost exactly what an Irish car bomb is, but I don’t think that’s going to help me sell this.
“It has a few steps,” I tell him, “but the process is actually pretty necessary for what you’re getting. Are you up for giving it the old college try?”
“You talk funny,” he says with a sloppy laugh. “Yeah, I’ll give it a try.”
He really doesn’t hold his liquor as well as I’d expected, but if there’s any chance I’m going to end up telling him the family secret, I don’t want him buzzed. I want him drunk.
I motion for the bartender and, when she’s arrived, I place the order. Every time I’ve ever gotten one of these, even when I’m just ordering for someone else, I always expect the bartender and everyone in the immediate proximity to stop and marvel at my bravery.
It’s not the harshest drink you can order in a bar, and it’s not the one with the highest alcohol content, but this is by no means a casual drink. Still, it seems I’m going to just go on waiting for the reverence and high regard I still think should accompany an order like this.
“’kay,” the bartender says and sets about the preparations.
While we’re waiting, I glance around the bar. It won’t be a whole lot longer before Neptune’s open and we can start throwing our money away there instead of here, but even as we cruise through prime drinking time, the bar sits mostly empty.
There are a couple of older guys playing pool and a few people scattered around in booths, but Mason and I are the only ones sitting at the bar itself.
“Here you go,” the bartender says, setting the shot glass and the beer glass in front of me.
I slide both in front of Mason and give him the simple instructions. “What you want to do is drop the shot into the beer and then chug until it’s all gone,” I tell him.
“Why not just take the shot and drink the beer afterward?” he asks.
“It gives it a better flavor,” I answer, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily accurate.
“What’s goes into all of this?” he asks.
I sigh, getting impatient at him for not just letting me get him drunker so I can sneak out, call my mom and then come back in here to break whatever humiliating news she has to share.
“In the shot glass is mostly Irish whiskey,” I tell him, “but Irish cream is mixed in for flavor. The beer is Irish beer. Which one changes depending on what you ask for and what a particular place has, but they call it an Irish car bomb because—”
“All the stuff in it’s Irish,” Mason says, finishing the thought. “Okay,” he says. “I just drop the shot in the beer and drink it all?”
“Yep,” I tell him. “You’ll want to do it fast, though. You don’t want that cream mixing with the beer too much before you drink it or it’s not going to be the most pleasant experience in the world for you.”
It sounds believable. It may even be true.
“Okay,” he says. “Here goes.”
He gingerly places the shot glass above his beer and takes a few long, deep breaths before dropping it in. The shot hasn’t even hit the bottom of the beer glass before he’s drinking the mix down.
Mason takes a breath about halfway through, but he manages to finish it all in a respectable amount of time.
He sets the empty glass down on the bar a little too hard, causing the shot glass inside to clink loudly, attracting the attention of the bartender. Mason wipes his mouth, saying, “Wow.”
“Right?” I respond. “How’d you like it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a bit hardcore for me, I think, but I’m glad I tried it at least.”
“Great,” I tell him, “order up another one. I’ve got to pop over to the ladies’ room.�
� Almost as an afterthought, I add, “I should probably see what my mom wanted, too.”
He apparently doesn’t think this is nearly as big a deal as I know it is, so he just says, “Okay,” and leaves it at that. As I’m walking away, I’m a little relieved when I hear him ordering another drink.
The ladies’ room thing was a total front, so while Mason’s back is turned, I slip out the front door of the bar and make sure I’m a decent ways down the block before I pull out my phone. I enter my mom’s number and make the call.
“There are some things we need to discuss,” mom answers.
“Hi, mom, haven’t talked to you in a while,” I scoff. “Things are all right, thanks for asking.”
“I’m sure you’re attempting to make some sort of point, but we don’t have time for that now,” she says.
“What did you do?” I ask.
She gasps like all upper-class criminals gasp when they’re accused of something they’re guilty of doing. “I am shocked that after not speaking with one another over such an expanse of time, you would just assume that—” she starts.
I interrupt. “Could you skip ahead to the part where you tell me what you and dad are in trouble for this time?” I ask. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
“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 o
range 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.
Chapter Fifteen
Dragging
Mason
“Come on, man,” Logan says, standing over me. “You’re twenty-two percent off your max and you’re acting like I’m telling you to lift a semi-truck, now put something into it!”
Logan’s never been good at any kind of math that can’t be applied in a gym. When it comes to lifting, though, the guy’s a savant.
It’s also possible he’s just making up numbers that sound plausible.
I heave through the final three reps of my set and Logan helps me get the barbell into its cradle.
“What’s with you?” he asks. “Usually, you’re cruising right through, at least until the last few reps. You haven’t done a solid set all day.”
“I’ve done everything,” I tell him. “It just wasn’t pretty.”
“You’re right about that,” Logan says. “So, are you still thinking about going forward with the tournament?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “You gotta get that last match out of your head. You still in, or did that last set make you piss your panties?”
He’s not much for nuance.
“I’m still here,” I tell him.
“You up for some light sparring?” he asks.
I smile, saying, “You know I’m always ready to kick your ass.”
He bellows laughter. He knows at least as well as I do that it’s a good thing we’re a couple weight classes apart.
Logan is just one of those guys you know is going to end up in the octagon someday. To him, there is literally nothing but fighting. Eating is fueling up for the next training session. Casually talking to people is exercising the mind, making sure he can not only relate to, but spot facial cues. It helps more than you’d think.